Spider Farmer SE5000 480W Full Spectrum LED Grow Light VS Viparspectra KS5000 500W LED Grow Light
Indoor grow lights are an essential part of an indoor garden, especially if you live in an area that doesn’t have much natural sunlight. Grow lights allow your plants to photosynthesize so they can grow larger. But choosing the right light can be challenging, especially when there is so much conflicting information.
Full-spectrum LED grow lights are all the rage among indoor gardeners. But some qualities are better than others. We’ve reviewed some of the top market recommendations and compiled a quick guide on how to understand full spectrum LED recommendations.
Grow Light Uses
Keeping plants alive and helping them flourish can be hard as is, but growing things indoors is even trickier, especially during winter when light levels are reduced even further.
When there is insufficient light, the grow light can supplement light to plants and promote the progress of plant photosynthesis. The grow light is very important for the seeding, growing, flowering and fruiting of plants.
There are 4 main uses for grow light: seedlings, propagation, growing food, and limited light.
Seedlings: Grow lights can be used to assist with the propagation of indoor plants from seedlings since seedlings need enough light and warm temperature to grow healthy.
Propagation: If you love propagating plants to give as gifts or as a side hustle, you must have grow lights to properly propagate your indoor plants.
Growing Food: Of course, if you have an indoor garden of greens and herbs, you definitely need grow lights for them to grow correctly.
Limited Light: Grow light can help indoor plants to grow healthy and strong, especially during the colder months. Grow lights can also be used as artificial lighting for rooms with limited light or no sunlight.
By providing the specific color spectrum needs for the plants, grow lights can not only promote the plants’ growth, prolong the flowering period, intensify flower color, but also can increase crop production efficiency, yield in advance, and enhance quality and taste.
Spider Farmer SE5000 480W Full Spectrum LED Grow Light
Features:
This Spider Farmer LED grow light features a uniquely designed 6 extended LED strips that provide more even canopy coverage, especially on the outer edges of the growing area. With 1680 SAMSUNG LM301B diodes, the SE5000 Led Grow Light consumes 480 watts at 1333 umol/s, achieving an impressive PPE of 2.75 umol/J, covering a high yield full-cycle growth of 4'x4'. The full spectrum (380–410nm, 660–665nm, 730nm, 3200–4200K, 4800–5000K) is ideal for vegetable flowering to suit every stage of the plant cycle. The dimmer knob is ideal for growers to adjust the light intensity for different growth stages. The daisy chain feature allows you to connect up to 30 spider farm grow lights — dimming multiple lights at the same time.
Viparspectra KS5000 500W LED Grow Light
Features:
VIPARSPECTRA LED Grow Light uses market-leading Samsung LM301H diodes (3.10 μmol/J) and Osram 660nm diodes, more energy-efficient LEDs that increase crop yields and save operating costs. High-end components give the KS5000 incredible performance. The KS series is designed for individual or commercial growers who want to optimize their growing space for maximum crop yield while producing the highest quality crops. A built-in dimmer allows you to dial in the perfect PPFD for your plants at all growth stages. The KS5000 features a detachable power supply that can be remotely mounted on the side of a rack or on an adjacent wall to dissipate heat from your grow space.
The main factors of choosing the best grow light
Now you may have a basic knowledge of the grow light, then we will go ahead to our main topic — How to choose the right LED grow light for indoor growing?
There are many different types of LED grow lights and LED grow light bulbs on the market. Different factors will affect which grow light bulb is best for you. These factors you should consider:
1. Light Spectrum
A color spectrum is a graphical display of each of the colors in the light. Scientists use wavelength numbers to refer to the colors instead of color names, which is a much more accurate way to measure the color.
The various light colors effect plants growth differently. This is not all visible to the naked eye. Typically, what humans refer to as “light” is actually only the visible area of the light spectrum (~400–750 nanometers).
This visible light spectrum range covers most of the range of wavelengths needed to grow plants, known as the PAR or photosynthetically active radiation.
light spectrum range
Different wavelengths of light have different effects on plant photosynthesis. The light required for plant photosynthesis has a wavelength of about 400–700nm. 400–500nm (blue) light and 610–720nm (red) contribute the most to photosynthesis.
Blue (470nm) and red (630nm) LEDs can just provide the light needed by plants. Therefore, the ideal choice for LED plant lights is to use a combination of these two colors. In terms of visual effects, the red and blue plant lights are pink.
Blue light can promote the growth of green leaves
Red light is helpful for flowering and fruiting and prolonging the flowering period.
There’s a variety of plants and each of them has different habits, and also different growth stages have different light needs. For the healthiest plants you really need to include light from right across the color spectrum. While it’s true that certain types of light may be more effective at different stages of the growth cycle, your plants still need light from across the spectrum at any stage of their growth. If you concentrate your light too much on one end of the spectrum you probably won’t like the results. The spectrum required for plant growth should be a continuous spectrum with a certain distribution width. It is obviously inappropriate to use a light source made of two specific wavelength chips of red and blue with a very narrow spectrum.
Full spectrum means all colors (but means much more than just color named Electromagnetic spectrum) produced from natural light and a term used for grow lights.
Full-spectrum grow lights are the closest to real sunlight and will help your plants grow the best. Natural sunlight emits all spectrums of light, even ultraviolet and infrared, which aren’t visible to the naked eye.
Conclusion: Blue is used to encourage bushy growth in plants, the vegetation and the germination of seeds ‘stage of growth’. Red colored light is for encouraging budding, flowering and fruiting. Too much red light can cause serious problems, namely lanky and spindly plants. Too much blue light, however, will result in stunted plants.
Grow lights should provide the proper spectrum of light for photosynthesis, which key to plant growth. Lights that provide a full spectrum are the ideal choice for your growing space. Here we’d like to recommend you the 24W grow light with 3 spectrum modes and the right SANSI full-spectrum grow lights, so that you can manipulate the type of light your plants are exposed to in order to optimize their growth at different growth stages.
2. Light intensity — PPFD (photosynthesis flux density, PPFD)
Both PPFD and Lux are units used to measure the intensity of light. Lux is universally used to measure and compare the brightness of visible light that reaches a surface, also referred to as illuminance. PPFD is referring to the amount of light suitable for active photosynthesis of plants.
Whenever dealing with lighting conditions of plants, Lux might not accurately represent the real light intensity suitable for photosynthesis. If you’re seeking the optimum PAR range, switch to PPFD. If you want to determine the overall light intensity in your grow room, choose the unit of your liking — PPFD or the lux option, here we will explain the PPFD in details.
For grow light, wattage is not as important as you think, but the light intensity (PPFD) is the very most important factor when choosing grow light.
The amount of light is actually measured as PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density), sometimes abbreviated to PPF (Photosynthetic Photon Flux, umol/s). PPFD is a better way to measure the quantity of light for LED grow lights, than lumens.
PPFD is a ‘spot’ measurement that tells you how many photons from the PAR range hit a specific area of your canopy over time. It is expressed as micro moles per square meter per second (μmol/m2/s).
Note that the PPFD value is heavily dependent on two factors that can vary widely: the distance between the LEDs and the plant, and the loss of PPF from vegetation canopy.
The more light reaches the plants (μmol/m2/s, aka PPFD), the greater the rate of photosynthesis. But light can only do so much: after approximately 350 μmol/m2/s, light stops having as much of an effect on photosynthesis, since the plant’s chloroplasts can only process so much light at a time.
Generally, positive plant PPFD> 50 μmol·m-2·s-1 can start the photosynthesis mechanism; while shade plant PPFD only needs 20 μmol·m-2·s-1. Therefore, when installing LED plant lights, you can install and set according to this reference value, select the appropriate installation height, and achieve the ideal PPFD value and uniformity on the leaf surface.
Conclusion
Plant lights are an important part of a healthy hydroponic garden.
When choosing grow lights, it is crucial to consider the specific needs of your plants. Some factors you may want to consider are the type of plant, what stage of growth the plant is in, the amount of light the plant needs, and the amount of space available for growing it.
Sometimes, with so many different types and sizes of grow lights to choose from, it can be challenging to know which one is right for you. If you’re not sure which Grow light is best for your needs, ask an expert.
