How to Use LED Grow Lights

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If you’ve ever tried to grow plants indoors you know it can be a challenge, especially if you’re interested in more than just a smattering of easy-to-grow houseplants. People grow everything from flowers to fruits and vegetables indoors, so if you associate LED grow lights with cannabis, you’re not entirely wrong. Cannabis is grown indoors beneath these lights, and then the leaves are dried to produce marijuana, an illegal drug. But this is far from the only thing an LED grow light is good for.

LED Grow Light Review

A common question among indoor gardeners, especially those just starting out in hydroponics and serious gardening, is: “Should I purchase standard grow lights, LED indoor garden lights or some other type of light?” Many people even claim that the LED varieties don’t work. The truth is that many lights marketed as grow lights don’t work, and that has led to many people claiming that all LED lights are useless.

The problem is that they’re judging all such lights based on a number of poor quality ones. It’s not that easy to go and buy a cheap grow light from a discount store, put it above your plants and watch them grow like crazy. Each plant has its own special light needs. And cheap lights are often designed poorly and sold on the basis of their brightness rather than their color spectrum—a huge mistake when using light to grow plants.

How an LED Grow Light Works

If you’ve ever purchased one or considered it, you might have noticed that the box talked about how many lumens the light produces. This is interesting, but it doesn’t speak to the quality of the product at all. If you need to be able to see to read or do a task, you’d be interested in a higher lumen light rather than one with a lower number, because the more lumens there are, the brighter the light will appear to a human. Plants aren’t affected by lumens. They’re affected by the color spectrum the light produces.

The brightest green light wouldn’t help a plant grow at all. In fact, the plant would die from lack of light fairly quickly. But a very dim red or blue light may give the plant all the light energy it needs. That’s why brightness is a useless measure of a grow light. The spectrum of the light and your plant’s different needs are the most important factors. Blue spectrum is best for vegetative plants while a spectrum of red, orange and blue is best for flowering plants. You can invest in a UFO LED grow light, which is a circular low-wattage light designed for the best quality, or you can have your lights custom-made depending on the types of plants you want to grow.

Benefits of LED Grow Lights

Now that you know why the spectrum is important, you might wonder why else LED growing lights are so beneficial. They have many other advantages over traditional lights. They use much less power than standard lights and produce almost no heat. They’re long-lasting and easy to use, as well as far less noisy that other types of electric lights. Be aware that if you’re changing from standard lights to LED lights, because of the different quality of light and the lack of heat, you may not need to water your plants or fertilize as often. You can find the best quality LED grow lights for sale at home and garden lighting centers and online at stores that specialize in indoor and hydroponic gardening.