The LED Grow Light: The Ultimate Tool For Growing Your Plants Indoors
If you want to set up a hydroponic garden or grow plants indoors, one of the very first things you should consider is getting an LED grow light. Growing vegetables, fruit, and herbs throughout the year can be very difficult to do with the natural inconsistency of outdoor lighting, and these lights offer a controllable alternative that is both energy efficient and cost-effective.
Why LED lights?
While LED lighting’s benefit over natural outdoor lighting is its consistency, its advantage over traditional indoor lighting (HID’s) is its efficiency. While a 400 watt HID light may score higher in measures of lumen output than a 300 watt LED grow light, the fact of the matter is, lumens only really measure the brightness that can be perceived by the human eye. In general however, plants respond the most to ranges of light that are beyond our perception. Studies have shown that as much as 80% of an HID light’s brightness (and consequently heat given off and electricity used) is not even used in photosynthesis and is nothing more than ‘waste light’. Furthermore, as a function of the heat given off, these systems also require the purchase of cooling fans, and can even cause excessive evaporation or burning of the plant.
As such, even if it may have a lower measure of lumens or may not seem as bright, a full spectrum LED grow light will do much more for facilitating faster growth, fuller blooms, and greater yields than an HID grow light of equal cost.
While getting a full spectrum LED grow light may mean a slightly higher initial investment than natural lighting or HID lights, they are well worth it over the long run. Not only because they are better for your plants themselves, but also because you can conserve as much as 20 or 30% of your electricity use in the process.
New Lighting Tech: Is It Worth It?
When you need to replace your lighting, getting the most for your money has become a lot more complicated in the past few years because of the rise of LEDs. This is also true of specialist lighting, such as plant growth lighting. But are they worthwhile? Here’s how you can get the best value on lighting and lighting accessories.
Light Switch Covers
Even cheap light switch covers should last indefinitely. Most of them have two grades of durability–standard and heavy-duty–unless you buy more expensive custom covers. Though standard durability should be fine even if you have obvious hazards in your house such as heavy, moving objects, the sturdier variety is only a few cents more, so why not spend the money and avoid future trips to the hardware store?
Light Bulbs
LEDs, for run-of-the-mill household lighting, have a huge advantage, so much so that many goverments, including the United States and the European Union, are phasing out some of their competitors, including incandescents. A 60-watt incandescent bulb lasts only 750 hours. LEDs have a wide variety of lifespans, but many can reach 50,000 hours, and with coming advances in technology this number could reach 100,000 hours. That’s more than 11 years of continuous use. When you see the significantly higher prices of LEDs on the shelves, you have to keep this in mind. They’re worth it.
Brightness and energy efficiency are other areas in which LEDs hold an advantage. Other types of lights waste much of their energy as heat. That 60-watt incandescent is only as bright as a 7-watt LED, primarily because of the heat issue, so they also save you money on your electric bill. Understandably, most LEDs include this information on the packages for easy comparison.
Plant Growth And Outdoor Lights
As with all LEDs, prices in these two areas are significantly higher than the competition. Outdoor solar lights are roughly double the price of other bulbs, and LED grow lights can be $400 for 120 watts. But, the energy efficiency and durability advantages also apply here–solar lights, in particular, last 25 years–and the heat problem is especially bad in plant growth, and LEDs enable you to do away with fans and heat vents. If you still decide to wait, prices for relatively new technologies are always falling.
Ways To Decrease Your Carbon Footprint Through your Garden
We all know that having a garden is a great way to decrease the impact that you are having on the earth and its natural resources. What most of us do not know is how we can further reduce our carbon footprint of our indoor or outdoor garden. Today we are going to be talking about some of the various things that you can do to make your garden more self sufficient and less of an environmental pothole.
The very first and probably the biggest way that your garden is hurting the environment is through fertilizers and pesticides. People often do not think of this as hurting but all of the manmade chemicals and by products produced in the creation of these applications contribute to polluting both our streams and the ground, and our landfills. To remedy this problem try switching to organic or green fertilizers such as manure or compost and for pesticides try natural options such as a garlic spray or nicotine to keep critters at bay.
If you have an indoor garden try switching from your costly high intensity discharge grow lights, to more cost effective and less energy drawing LED grow lights. LED grow lights can save over half the cost that you would otherwise be spending on other types of conventional grow lights; they also produce less heat which reduces the need to cool the area which further reduces the cost involved.
Crop rotation is another thing that a person can do that will over time greatly helps both himself and his environment. To properly rotate your crops just simply grow one crop one growing season and do not grow that same crop on that same piece of land until you have cycled all of your other crops through it first. The reason that crop rotation helps out your land so much is that it gives your land the nutrients back that it needs to produce full crops and it does not such the land baron leaving it un-farmable.