LED Lights

As I mentioned in my first post, I decided not to go with the standard for indoor growing lights. There are a couple of reasons for this. They are an expensive investment. They create a lot of unneeded heat. They are expensive to run. They are expensive to maintain. An alternative to HID lighting is compact fluorescent bulbs, or CFL. The downside to CFL is that they aren't nearly bright enough or have the correct light spectrum for the plants. A relatively new type of lighting that is just now being used is LED.

Light Emitting Diodes, or LED's for short are small diode's that emit directional light. The advantages of LED's are the size, cost, and maintenance. There is no need for a reflector because all the light from an LED is emitted in a single direction. The next advantage of LED's over conventional lights are the amount of energy they use. LED's use 85-90% less power than a conventional light. This is because LED's do not use heat to create light. When compared with metal halide (MH) lighting, LED's consume only the fraction of the power that MH lights need and do not need a ballast. And in terms of intensity LED's produce the same spectrum as MH lights at 1/4 the wattage. Therefore a MH light at 100 watts can be replaced by a LED light of 25 watts to produce the same intensity of light.

The size of LED's makes them practical for use in places where space is confined. I am using a small walk in closet as a grow room. It has no ventilation, but that isn't a problem because the LED's create next to no heat. It is actually cooler in the closet then the rest of the house. Years ago the argument about LED's Lighting was such that they are expensive, but they have come down so much in price that they are cheaper now. My grow takes place with only LED light. You will be able to see the progress.

The main reason LED's are superior to other forms of lighting are because of the way the plants create energy. This is through photosynthesis. The plants are green, and thus they reflect green light. So any light in that spectrum is essentially useless to the plant. The plants absorb red and blue light. Since the LED's only make red and blue light of the appropriate wavelength, all of it can go to creating energy, which means less is wasted. In an HPS or MH setup, much of the light created is going to be in the green and yellow spectrum, and thus no use to the plant.