LED Grow Lights

If you do not have a garden or farm where you can tend your plant, using grow lights in your own home is the way to go.

Using this guide, you can easily begin growing your own plants within hours.

First, you need to understand how these lights work.

These lights are produced almost exclusively for those who grow plants indoors. Because the plants won't be receiving the sunlight that they get in a garden or yard, artificial lighting will reproduce a plant's natural environment and provide all of the light that it needs for photosynthesis (the procedure on which plants get their energy).

Remember that each plants, based on their own individual environments, vary in the levels of light needed. Before you run out to buy a light, study on where the plant you want is typically grown and the amount of light it needs to live.

BC Northern Lights is America's premiere hydroponics resource for the professional grower. Their line of grow lights including the newly developed LED grow lights are perfect for the hobbyist or the professional.
Next, you'll have to understand all types of lights on the market.

Incandescent light bulbs are the least effective and consumes a lot of energy. While they may provide some light, they are basically used as a "heating light" and eat up more electricity than the other lights available.

Fluorescent lights are the most efficient and most widely used grow lights on the market. These lights last up to 20,000 hours and give a perfect atmosphere to take care of all sorts of plants. Lights with a lower emission of light are great to grow vegetables while the much better lights are perfect for larger crops.

LED lights are relatively new but have proven to be more efficient in raising vegetation as the fluorescent lights. They are cheap, energy-savers and only emanates colors that the plants need.

When you have gotten the light, it is time to start setting up your own indoor garden.

Do not forget, the bigger the plant, the more light it has to have. Since there are plants that need both light and darkness, a lot of these lights are installed with timed mechanisms.

For you to get the best out of your lights, add reflectors. They are perfect in increasing the amount of light from one bulb.

These grow lights are best if you want to grow your own organic vegetables, practice your green thumb or grow beautiful plants.

Enjoy gardening!

This is kind of nerdy, but also sort of cool... What is an LED? An electronic light source presented as a functional electronic component in 1962 is a light-emitting diode (LED). Earlier, the usage of the foremost LEDs were largely on pricey equipment such as laboratory and electronics test equipment, then later on in TVs, radios, telephones, calculators, and even watches.

Now, LED's have all forms of practical, not the least of which is indoor gardening. In hydroponics, the most well-known form of indoor gardening, LED grow lights are used. When plants are cultivated outdoors, they require the nutrient giving sunlight to provide them with a full light spectrum range.

Hydroponic lights are applied to emulate what the sun's light spectrum can offer plants since sunlight is not plentiful indoors. If you refresh your knowledge of physics and chemistry, you'd recognize that sunlight is producedwhen photons, contained by the atoms, move around or change electron positions. This continuous process produces sunlight. LED grow lights work with the assistance of electricity, recreating this procedure. There are particular spectrum's that are useless to plants, like green light spectrums, so man-made indoor light with that spectrum are wasted on plants, even though the sun itself produces light in all spectrums.

With hydroponic lighting, however, this is not always the instance. Many indoor grow lights are full-spectrum grown lamps well-suited for all stages of plant growth while others are designed with one certain spectrum, ordinarily either red or blue. What this means is that if you are growing seedlings on to adulthood, it may be necessary to have various hydroponic lights ready to be able to give them the right light spectrum they demand when they require it. Be conscious of what you are cultivating and what light spectrum your plant needs before purchasing LED grow lights.

While natural light is essential for plant growth in hydroponic gardening, it may well be substituted by artificial lighting. The use of grow lights, as they're referred to, efficiently extends daylight for the plants (or substitutes for daylight altogether). Since plants need a certain amount of intensity of light and draw from the full light spectrum for different phases of growth, standard incandescent lights don't work well as grow lights. (Consider that you need to mimic sunlight as much as possible.) Typically, hydroponic plants do well with High Intensity Discharge (HID) bulbs, two of which are discussed below. In addition to the two HID bulbs, here are the types of bulbs most regularly used for hydroponic growth.

Grow Lights are essential to good hydroponic results.
Arguably the most popular HID-type bulb, metal halide bulbs produce the closest emulation of summer sunlight available, and yield the spectral colors plants thrive on most especially the blues, which encourage vegetative growth. MH bulbs are likely to die out gradually and need to be replaced before they actually burn out, because they eventually do not yield enough lumens to help the plants anymore. However, MH bulbs are long-lasting, and can normally function for a year or more (typically 10,000 hours) before having to be replaced.

The other HID-type bulb, the high pressure sodium bulb, is most appropriate for supplementary lighting, used together with natural sunlight. HPS bulbs are more on the orange-red band of the spectrum, which is great for flowering plants. These grow lights are less costly than metal halide, and longer-lasting (typically 18,000 hours). However, because they are deficient in blue light, HPS bulbs are not usually suggested as a replacement for natural light, nor as an alternative to metal halide. Rather, they'd do well in a greenhouse environment.

Learn what grow lights are best for you.Where in earlier days fluorescent light bulbs were not intense enough, at present fluorescents are made that have enough lumens to supply light for hydroponics. Notwithstanding if the bulb is high-output or low-output, it can do this job just fine. Fluorescents produce much smaller amounts of heat than HID bulbs, which means they can be placed closer to the plants and when they're placed closer (but not too close), they emit enough of the spectral colors to promote growth.

The newest version of grow light, the biggest benefit of LED bulbs is that they are comparable to the output of a high pressure sodium bulb while being extremely energy efficient, and emitting almost no heat. The only downside is that they are expensive and promote slower growth. In fact, fluorescent grow lights can achieve the same results as LED bulbs, without the issue on money. So while they are the newest thing, the jury is basically still out on whether LED bulbs shall be the wave of the future for grow lights.

Hydroponic gardens usually supplement or replace natural sunlight with specialized "grow lights" designed according to the parts of the light spectrum plants require the most. What type of grow light (or combination of grow lights) you need shall depend largely on what plants you are growing, and what plant behavior you're trying to elicit.

First, it's essential to have a background about color temperature in order to fully understand the concept of grow lights. When speaking of "temperature" with plant lighting, we aren't talking about heat, but about color. The color spectrum is measured in degrees Kelvin, in the same way as some applications of heat and cold are except higher temperatures are considered "cooler", and lower ones are "warmer." The temperatures ranging above 5000K most resemble the intensity and color of sunlight, and are blue on the color spectrum. Fascinatingly, the reds, oranges and yellows are lower temperature, ranging from 2700K and below. The importance of this spectrum is that flowering and fruiting plants tend to do better with slightly cooler color temperatures typically around 4800K, which is still considered in the "blue" zone but leafy vegetation does better in the 6000K range (essentially full sunlight). Plants are also drawing more from the orange-red color temperatures, which are around 2700K, when they're flowering and reproducing. So you can see why the appropriate grow light setting can be so critical.

The grow light is essential to the success of hydroponic gardening. Here's how to choose the proper light for your needs.
The 3 most common classifications of grow light used in hydroponic gardens are designed toward the color temperatures most needed by plant life. The Metal Halide bulb is one of the most popular. If you like a grow light that resembles natural sunlight the closest, then you should go for High-Intensity Discharge (HID) bulb, Metal Halide bulbs. As previously mentioned, this type of grow light is very good for leafy plants. A second alternative (also a HID bulb) is the High Pressure Sodium bulb. Producing the orange-red part of the light spectrum (about 2200K), these bulbs are good for flowering plants but don't encourage full foliage. They are not generally used by themselves, but in combination with other bulbs and/or natural light. The 3rd most popular bulb is the fluorescent either high-output or low-output. Even if they are not as intense as the HID bulbs, they remain useful particularly due to the fact that since they emit so little heat, they can be placed close to the plants.

At present, there are already available LED bulbs that promise to cover the full range o the color spectrum, without the issue on heat. The only major fallback is, they're usually very costly - and many cheaper bulbs are available that can do the job just as perfectly.

For most hydroponic gardens, different bulbs are used to cover the full spectrum of blues and orange-reds that plants require for various stages of growth although leafy plants will lean more heavily toward the blues. Your retailer shall be able to advise you on what grow light combination will be best for you.