Posts Tagged ‘Indoor growing’

LED advantages

LED lights have been used in greenhouses for some time already as an addition to the white light used in greenhouses. For this purpose they used red and blue LEDs. By just using the red and blue light you will not get the required results so a little white is added in the form of white LEDs.

Let’s go through the pros of LED growing lamps and in the meanwhile try to clarify why the LED is so suited for growing plants.

Energy efficiency

What we want to accomplish is to supply as many useful light to the plant with as less energy as possible. We already know that plants use mainly blue and red light. If we would use a sodium lamp we would be supplying the plant with white light which is actually all colors mixed together. Using LEDs we can use all energy to produce a specific wavelength (color) that’s useful for a plant. Conventional lamps need a filter to achieve a similar effect. Using conventional lamps for producing light, a lot of energy is wasted by heat production. You might even end up wasting more energy on getting rid of the excess heat and cooling down the growing compartment.

Durability

An LED can easily make for over 50,000 hours of light. Conventional light sources like the sodium lamp typically have life span of anything between 10,000 and 30,000 hours. These lamps tend to lose a significant part of their power the older they get. The LED’s power reduction over time is substantially less. If an LED is exposed to heat, it’s life span can be seriously shortened though. So when you buy your LED growing light, be sure that the manufacturer has taken correct measures in order to dissipate produced heat.

An LED is in fact a transistor device and does not rely on a heated filament in order to produce light. We all know filaments are a weak link!

LEDs are encased in epoxy and this makes it practically unbreakable. Because of it’s complete and massive encasing there are no loose parts that are prone to be damaged by shocks for example. This encasing also allows for focusing of the produced light and cancels out the need for a reflector to bundle and aim the light like conventional grow lights do.

A tube lamp is subject to wear with frequent on and off switching. LEDs do not have this problem.

Other advantages

When the power to an LED is reduced, it doesn’t influence its wavelength and thus its color. This particularly comes in handy for photoperiodic lighting.

LEDs are environment friendly. They do not contain any hazardous substances like mercury for example that easily might end up in the environment.