Grow Lights

Grow lights are a great device for starting your spring garden indoors, or for keeping a greenhouse garden going all year long. The grow lights that are available can be high tech LED, high intensity, traditional incandescent, or fluorescent lights. More people are using grow lights today because they are interested in doing more indoor gardening.       

Twenty-five watts of light for each square foot is the best way to calculate what you need if grow lights are going to be your only light source. If you will also be using sunlight you can get by with less wattage unless you want to have more growth for your plants.  

The standard fluorescent grow light will produce little heat and are inexpensive. For this reason many indoor gardeners are now using them. The incandescent light will put out more heat and is normally for spot lighting. Fluorescent lights are double the efficiency of the incandescent lights and they last about 25 times longer. If more light is needed, a high output fluorescent is better but they will not last as long and they will also burn cool.

If you are getting into indoor hydroponic gardening, grow lights are very important. They will supply the light that is needed for the proper photosynthesis of your plants. Fluorescent grow lights, sorry to say, do not produce enough light for a hydroponic garden. One thousand watts of lighting is enouch to penetrate up to 25 square feet of growing. Most of the time reflectors or light movers can be used for effective hydroponic gardening.

A simple compact fluorescent light fixture that has a bulb with a wattage of 20 or below will do the job for a single plant. The compact fluorescent light bulb use as grow lights is a much larger wattage.

High pressure sodium grow light, or HPS bulbs, last a long time and are very efficient. These grow lights will produce a brighter light and are high in the yellow and red range of the spectrum. They are best when used for the flowering stages of plants because they are very much like the sun during the fall season. The high heat caused by these bulbs could cause a problem but can be neutralized if you have the correct ventilation in your indoor garden.

Metal halide grow lights are great for producing full spectrum lights. The blue light that is emitted imitates the summer sun and that makes them wonderful for vegetable growing. Some of these light bulbs are designed to emit only certain colors of the light. Metal halide grow lights are the best lights for green leaf vegetables.

Using growing lights on the whole helps arouse the growth of seedlings that are being planned for planting outdoors in the spring. In the greenhouse, the use of grow lights will help the gardener continue to garden throughout the year.