When it comes to choosing grow lights, your choice can make or break your gardening season. If you invest a good amount of money into grow lights they can cost a lot but if you use them the wrong way they don’t work any better than a starter grow light kit for $50 US. It all depends on how you use it that dictates your success.
How much should you spend on a grow light? Well, you should spend as much as you have in your budget. However, you have to know its limitations. You can’t expect one single grow light to get the job done for a bunch of plants. Like when you are doing your seedlings, have enough light coverage for all the plants.
Compact Fluorescents vs. LEDs
It’s also important to know the difference between compact fluorescents, like T5s, and LED. How do you know which one to get? There are a couple things you need to consider.
The first one is the cost. How much money should you shell out to buy grow lights? T5s are very reliable and they come in high output bulbs which is great for growing plants. They’re also fairly inexpensive compared to LEDs. For an LED you can expect to shell out maybe $250 US to $300 US for four foot by four foot coverage compared to about $100 US for a T5 setup with the same coverage.
Now LEDs last a long time and can emit a lot of light covering a wide area, but they might not be in everyone’s budget. LEDs are solid state light emitting diodes rather than a tube that then is filled with a gas that illuminates. Which leads to the next thing.
You have to consider safety. How safe are compact fluorescents? Compact fluorescents are very safe, but they do break. If you do happen to drop them from a decent height they can shatter. When compact fluorescents shatter they do release gas that can be harmful. So you need to treat them with care and maybe a bit of patience when setting up.
How to Evaluate Different Grow Lights
Not all compact fluorescents are the same so you have to know how to evaluate them. There are 3 things to look at. One is how much wattage they use because that can gauge how expensive those lights are to run. Two is the color temperature of the lights and three is lumens.
Wattage
For every square foot in your indoor grow space, you are going to need about 30 watts of power. That means during your planning stage, be sure to measure your grow room.
Then you want to estimate your cost of running the lights. To do that, look at your electric bill to see how many cents it costs for kilowatts per hour and multiply that by the number of watts you’re going to need. Divide that by 1000 and then multiply by the number of hours you run your lights each day. The resulting number is your cost per day.
Kelvin Rating
The color temperature is rated in Kelvin and Kelvin is what color the light is in reference to a temperature. If you look at what you need in a grow light for seedlings it will be around 6400 Kelvin and that’s 6400K. You can see the Kelvin rating on every single light.
The Kelvin corresponds to a color and 6400 Kelvin corresponds to more of a blue light, a kind of daylight white. You want to simulate daylight as much as possible because the seedlings are needing to create energy to grow. You don’t want them to be stretching for light and often that’s what happens when you go with a light that is like a warm light in the red or yellow spectrum.
A lot of your daylight white bulbs are grow-light specific. They’re very bright and they’re very blue, which is why most people don’t put them in their house. It would be better if you replace any household kind of lights with some good quality grow light tubes. You’re far better off when you hook up a grow light.
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Lumens
The other thing mentioned earlier is lumens – you want to produce a lot of lumens. Lumens are how much light the light will give off. The more lumens it gives off, the more growable energy it has. The amount of lumens corresponds to the amount of global energy the plants can take up. And also the amount of lumens a plant receives is directly proportional to how far away your lights are from your plant.
So make sure to put your lights close enough to your plants without burning them. Remember that leaves need light to make food energy. If your lights are too far away, the light spreads throughout the room and then the light is being wasted bouncing off surfaces and going elsewhere. You want it focused directly on the plants. Meaning you have to understand that if you have a weaker light like a fluorescent it needs to be closer to the plants. The closer it is means the less light is going to be spread throughout the room.
Also when your lumens are low because the lights are too far away, your plants are going to stretch really high to try to get closer to the light and this will affect your yield. Different light sources provide different lumens, like LEDs put out a lot more lumens in general than a fluorescent. An LED with a 40,000 lumen output can be 20 times farther away than a fluorescent putting out 2,000 lumens.
Best Types of Grow Lights for Beginner
Two types of plant lights not yet covered are ceramic metal halide and high-pressure sodium grow lights. These are high intensity discharge lights that put out a lot of heat energy and are trickier to manage for new growers. So they’re not necessarily recommended when just starting out.
The typical choice for a new grower on a budget are compact fluorescent T5 grow lights which offer low initial cost and reasonable operating expenses, meaning they use electricity efficiently. The 6,400K T5s are good for the veg stage of your grow, but when you get to the flowering stage, your plants will like the T5s with a 2,700 or 3,000 Kelvin output which is a warmer light.
LEDS are a fine choice as well if you have the initial budget to spring for them. The benefit here is more lumen output and you don’t need to change out bulbs that may burn out from time to time like the T5s.
It’s suggested you test a new grow light out first. Don’t just immediately start your entire garden for the first time if you’re trying a light out for the first time. Try it on one seedling and make sure that seedling grows stress-free and is not stretching up to the sky looking for the light. If it’s growing nice and stocky then you have a recipe that you can build off of.
Conclusion
Remember wattage correlates to cost of the light, nothing else. When it comes to the color of the light, make sure it’s a cool color.
The lumens is how bright the light is and how far away the light can be from your plants. And with that being said, it doesn’t matter if you go with LED or compact fluorescent or metal halide or high pressure sodium. Whatever it is, just get growing.
