The Benefits of LED Grow Lights

Running Costs
The main benefit of using LED grow lights is the lower running costs. The better ones on the market use up to 90% less electricity than comparable Sodium/HID bulbs. LED grow lights can be used as either a primary light source or a supplemental light and they will pay for themselves in around 6 months of heavy use. The expected life of a LED grow lamp is on average 50,000 hours. This is 10 to 50 times longer than a typical Sodium/HID grow light bulb.

Purchase Costs
Although initial purchase costs may be higher than comparable Sodium bulbs, the real costs are often lower because you don't need a ballast. Unlike fluorescent tubes and Sodium/HID bulbs that need a ballast to operate, LED grow lamps don't need a ballast. This eliminates a recurring cost from your grow room set-up. You also don't have the extra costs of purchasing a reflector as LEDs have the reflectors built right into themselves.

Grow Season
Since the Chlorophyll does not have to battle with unwanted light-waves, LED's can also be left on 24 hours a day without stressing your plants. You can also use LED grow lamps to simply extend the day period of your light cycle by 4/6 hours during the Winter months. This extends your grow season to 365 days per year.

Benefits To The Environment
Switching to low energy, solid state lighting benefits the environment. The low power requirements of LED light sources makes them ideal for self-contained, solar or wind powered installations, particularly in remote locations. LEDs consume far less energy than standard light bulbs, leading to greatly reduced energy costs. LEDs also require far less energy to manufacture than other light sources, reducing their environmental impact even further. Less Environmental Hazard - Metallic vapour and fluorescent lamps all contain mercury, a heavy metal identified as hazardous to the environment and our landfills. Our LED Lights do not contain mercury.

Targeted Light Output
Broad spectrum grow lights produce a lot of light waves that plants can't use efficiently. LED Grow Lights only deliver the colours of light used by plants for efficient and healthy growth.

Minimum Heat
LED grow lights are warm to touch and won't scorch young or tender plants as HID lighting can. The high heat generated by a typical metal halide or high pressure sodium lamps can reach several hundred degrees to over 14 hundred degrees Fahrenheit at the bulb's surface. This excess radiated heat output adds to the grow room temperature greatly.

Most LED grow lights operate at just a few degrees above room temperature, thus reducing your grow room cooling costs.

Watering
You don’t need to water as often if you use LEDs as your plants will transpire less. If for some reason, you need to leave your grow room unattended for a few days your plants will have a better chance of surviving if the grow lights are not producing lots of heat that dries them out.

Humidity
LED grow lights are ideal for plants like Salvia Divinorum and Ferns that have high humidity requirements. Cuttings will also root easily as they don't suffer as much from the stress of water loss while new roots are forming.

As we know, the HPS, Incandescent Lamps and Fluorescent Lamps emit all the spectrum of visible light & some sightless light, but LED Grow Lights only deliver the colours of light used by plants for efficient and healthy growth!

What do you need?
Red and Blue light is essential for plant growth. It is well known that chlorophyll, which is contained in the green leaves of plants performs photosynthesis. Red and Blue are the wavelengths most essential for photosynthesis. The blue absorption region is 430-450 nm and that of red is 650-670 nm.

When choosing your lamp you want both colours with the same frequency and relative intensity per LED.

These days most LED Grow Lights only deliver the colours of light used by plants for efficient and healthy growth.

By leaving out the wavelengths plants don’t need, LEDs provide better energy efficiency than conventional grow lights.

Red Light
Red Light is in the vicinity of the first peak of a plants light absorption spectrum (660nm) and it contributes to the plant photosynthesis. Red light, when combined with blue light, encourages flowering. It can also be used in higher doses to stimulate flowering, seeding and fruiting.

Blue Light
Blue light is responsible primarily for vegetative growth (leaf). It is known that chlorophyll has the second distinct absorption peak in the vicinity of blue light wavelengths (450nm). The blue light is also indispensable to the morphologically healthy growth plant. There is also more sunlight energy in the blue-green wavelengths.

Lumen and Lux
These are measurements of how bright a light source appears to the human eye only. If a grow light manufacturer rates their grow light output in Lumen then they are only telling you how bright the grow light will appear to your eyes and has NOTHING to do with plant growth since plants only use a tiny percentage of the FULL light spectrum that old fashioned grow lights emit. In fact Chlorophyll is green for a good reason, plants use this colour as a type of "Sun-block" to remove 95% of the unwanted and damaging light wavelengths. LED Red / Blue lighting have such narrow bandwidths that plants without green Chlorophyll would actually survive and never be damaged by the LED's perfect and tailor made light wavelengths. Nearly 100% of the light an LED grow light emits is completely absorbed by the plant! LED's can also be left on 24 hours and day without stressing plants since the Chlorophyll does not have to do battle with unwanted light-waves.

The most accurate unit of measurement for grow lights is in microEinstein's, which measures how many photons of light strike an area per second. But it is still not correct to use it for comparing grow lights because of the tiny bandwidths of light plants actually absorb. The irradiance power factor or amount of light that actually gets used in plant growth or Chlorophyll production can be factored at a rate of 400µ mol/mª/sec per every 150 LED's on average since they have an extra high MCD output. Now remember this rating is 95% growth efficient light! All other grow lights except LED grow lights emit mainly wasted light energy that does not help the plant produce Chlorophyll. In fact 95% is wasted since plants only use very narrow bandwidths of the total light energy. Rating light output in simple terms like Lumen or Lux is EXTREMELY misleading especially when rating a GROW LIGHT which has a very specific job, like creating Chlorophyll 'a' and 'b' !

It is our responsibility to save energy for future generations, and we are going to work hard and endeavor to exploit the potential of saving electricity by using semiconductors such as Light Emitting Diodes (LED) for applications such as plant growth, traffic and other lighting requirements. Meanwhile, we will be taking advantage of combining semiconductor information and traditional illumination technology to produce the next generation of lighting.