December 26, 2022
Do you want to grow organic vegetables and flowers at home? Or, do you want to brighten up a dull interior with some greenery? If so, then you need to invest in quality grown bulbs to create a peaceful atmosphere in your home.
These grow lights are an essential tool for successful indoor gardening. Unfortunately, buying plant growth bulbs can be challenging, as you may come across confusing jargon. But don’t let that scare you, because this list of the best grow lights 2023 will help you grow plants at home with ease.
Along with soil and nutrients, light is key to plants’ growth and development. Like all other plants, rely on light for photosynthesis– converting light into food and energy. With enough light, plant not only grows strong and healthy; it also fuels bud production once it’s reached the flowering phase.
Grown outdoors, plant follows the environment’s changing seasons. Plant germination, growth, flowering, and reproduction are reactions to environmental changes, and light cycles ignite these reactions.
Environmental changes to consider:
Light exposure
Temperature
Humidity
All these factors affect how your plant grows and develops.
When growing plants, it’s important that they get 18 hours of light to vegetate and 12 hours to flower. You control the lighting. Outdoors, your timing for when you plant, as well as the weather, affect how much light your plant gets.
Growing indoors allows you to change and maneuver plant’s natural light cycles. Indoors, you don’t have to rely on mother nature to produce high-quality plant.
ECO Farm Z6–600 Samsung LM301B LED Grow Light
Features:
This ECO Farm LED grow light uses a high-quality and durable driver and top trash can LED generation and 6 passive cooling light bars to provide full spectrum and wide coverage light for vegetable and flowering growth stages. It covers 5'x5' Veg footprint and 4'x4' flower footprint. The high energy efficiency of 2.7umol/J produces a total PPF output of 1501 umol/J, which produces uniform light spread very close to the crop canopy, and provides excellent effects for indoor planting, greenhouses and planting tents. Compared with conventional similar wattage HPS solutions, LED lights can achieve 30–40% HVAC capacity and up to 30–60% increase in output. IP65 wet environment protection grade, waterproof and dustproof. The LED plant growth lamp adopts high-quality aluminum heat sink design to efficiently dissipate heat. It has no additional fans, and the quiet planting environment has zero noise.
OCL SKWID 1900 Pro LED 680W Grow Light
Features:
The OCL SKWID 1900 PRO LED is the next level in professional fixtures with the ability for central control with the OCL Lightning Touchscreen controller. With OCL lighting systems you are in control of the light! The OCL SKWID 1900 PRO LED grow light offers an absolute market-leading PPFup to 2070 μmol/s! The OCL SKWID 1900 PRO LED is a high-performance energy-efficient alternative to the traditional commercial 1000W DE HID fixtures. OCL SKWID 1900 PRO LED is developed for growers by growers whose cultivation is in low rooms, on vertical racks, over rolling benches, and intents. For maximum uniformity, hang the fixture 12–24 inches from the crop. The efficacy of this fixture is very impressive at 3.04 μmol per watt. At 680 watts this will lead to 2070 μmol s-1 The eight bars are passively cooled in an extra-wide shape to enhance spread and coverage. The absence of moving cooling parts reduces the possibility of mechanical failure.
Grower’s Choice ROI-E680 LED Grow Light
Features:
This fixture provides you with total control over everything. With onboard dimming function, growers can et the ideal intensity at any stage of plant growth for optimal photosynthesis activation. Also, it is compatible with most lighting controllers including Growers Choice Master Lighting Controller. The ROI E680 produces a PPF output of 1700 umol/s and a PAR efficacy of 2.5 umol/J making this fixture incredibly efficient compared to other commercial fixtures. The Growers Choice ROI E680 provides its users with an average 40% reduction on energy and HVAC costs. This is the ultimate combination of increasing the amount of light energy reaching your plants while also shrinking costs. The Growers Choice ROI-680 LED grow light allows for even light distribution and is precisely designed to deliver uniform levels of photosynthesis flux density, or PPFD. The specially deployed full spectrum fills the negligence of the main photoreceptors and pigments outside the 660nm and 450nm range, and it is suitable for reproduction to aging in indoor environments.
Whether you’re looking for grow lights to supplement natural light for your houseplants in winter, or you’re looking to start seeds indoors to transplant into your garden in spring, grow lights can help.
Grow lights are marked with numbers such as 2,500K or 6,500K, which tell you the temperature of the lights based on the Kelvin measurement scale. The higher the number, the cooler the light. So a bulb with a Kelvin rating of 6,000K will appear white or blue, while a bulb rated at 3,000K will appear more yellow. Each type of light — warm or cool — stimulates specific plant behaviors.
If your goal is to improve foliage growth on houseplants or to grow leafy greens or seedlings, choose a cool-spectrum bulb around 6,500K. Warm light has a lower Kelvin rating, making it ideal for houseplants and flower production for fruit trees like citrus. When in doubt, full-spectrum lights take the guesswork out and offer a combination of warm and cool light for the best of both worlds.
The electromagnetic spectrum is the extended range of wavelengths or frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic spectrum is made up of the visible spectrum (the type of light we can see) and the infrared spectrum (the type we can’t see). The light time of the four seasons is different, which will affect photosynthesis. Certain colors of light are more important for photosynthesis than others. Plants are adapted to absorb and utilize the right amount of light to grow naturally outdoors.
When growing plants indoors, we must reproduce the light produced by the sun, keeping in mind two important factors: color temperature and duration. The temperature of colors on the electromagnetic spectrum is measured in Kelvin.
Unlike the bulbs in chandeliers or wall sconces, grow lights emit a spectrum similar to the sun.
Grow lights emit less heat than traditional light sources, so they are less likely to burn your plants
You can use grow lights to start seeds indoors before spring, care for outdoor plants that have been moved indoors for the winter, or grow plants indoors year-round. They also serve as replacement windows for those who live in darker homes and need some help keeping sun-loving houseplants alive.
Plants grow best in light as close to natural sunlight as possible, at temperatures between 2,700 and 7,000 Kelvin. In the past, growers used red and blue LEDs to provide plants with the full-spectrum light they needed to grow. The only reason to use red and blue LEDs is that white LEDs that provide the necessary spectrum and brightness do not yet exist. However, with new technology, it is entirely possible to get the full spectrum and brightness that plants need, 2,700 to 6,500 Kelvin and white LED lights. White LEDs use the least amount of power, last the longest, and can grow plants like all other types of lights available today.
These days, we generally recommend LED grow lights for just about everyone. Fluorescent lights make a lot of sense for growing smaller plants that don’t flower or for dedicated seeding, cloning, or vegetable growing spaces.
HID lights no longer have any real advantage over LEDs. One exception is CMH. These bulbs are comparable to premium LED fixtures in terms of efficiency and light spectrum, but LEDs (of course premium fixtures) are still better. However, CMHs are usually less expensive.