Top 4 Reasons to Use LED Grow Lights

LED grow lights are rapidly taking the growing world by storm, and it would be amazing if they weren’t. They completely outclass high-pressure sodium or metal halide in every way. So if you have a grow tent or just a place to grow here is something to think about.

• Purchase and Operating Costs

Yes, LEDs used to be feeble and expensive, but the technology is maturing quickly. It’s not difficult to find an LED grow light fixture suitable for a 3’sq grow tent for under $400. There’s no reflector or ballast to buy, and cooling is considerably simplified.

The LED unit is likely to last for much longer, too. Some manufacturers claim only 50,000 hours of use, but the industry-wide standard expectation for LED lighting is 100,000 hours. At 18 hours per day, 50,000 hours will last for over 7-1/2 years. Try getting that much use out of a HPS bulb. Good luck with that.

LEDs are energy-efficient, too. That unit to supply light for a 3’x3′ grow tent draws a measly 84 watts of power. People who use LED grow lights don’t have huge electric bills because of them.

• Keep It Cool

With HPS or ME lights, you’ve got to duct the heat away, or you’ll cook your plants. LEDs themselves don’t produce heat, though the fixtures do get warm to the touch. Not ‘burn your hand’ warm, like HPS and ME bulbs get. Some people can just run vent fans and pump that heat outside, but others have to pay for air conditioning to counter that heat. With LED grow lights, this is pretty much a non-issue, unless the climate where you’re growing calls for cooling anyway.

• What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

The thing about grow lights is that there are some frequencies of light that do plants a lot of good, and other frequencies that are useless to a plant. With HPS, ME, and lights intended to provide people with white light, there’s a lot of light that the plants can’t use. Grow lights are tuned to give plants the wavelengths that they want, and nothing but.

Marijuana plants use light to decide when to grow, and when to flower. If they’re getting their light from the sun, the sun being lower in the sky lets more red light through the atmosphere, so the plants develop their buds. With some lights designed for MJ cultivation, you can switch modes between ‘grow’ and ‘flower’ to trigger this with the flip of a switch. No other lights can be properly tuned for results like this so easily.

• Let There Be Light (in a bulb over your head)

  

Go check for yourself and see. There are plenty of LED grow light reviews out there, and they can’t all be bullshit. Growers report improved harvests and lower electric bills, pretty consistently. Before your current bulbs burn out, check out a bunch of LED grow light reviews, do some math that plugs in the rate you pay for electricity, and research the options that Led lighting has for your grow tent (or whatever indoor grow setup you have). Good luck to you, selling that used MH setup on Ebay. Sincerely, good luck with that.