Grow Lights are often used to cultivate plants by creating a grow room. This is often referred to as indoor gardening, where all aspects of production can be controlled scientifically by “man” to attain the maximum return per square metre.Crops can be accurately targeted to meet peak demand, such as red roses for Valentines Day and strawberries for Wimbledon week.
Grow lights can be categorized into two main groups.
High pressure sodium and metal haylide lamps which belong to the HID family (High Intensity Discharge Lamps) and Envirolites CFL’s (Compact Fluorescents).
High pressure sodium lamps are also called Son – T’s and can be used for the whole growing cycle and emit a yellow to orange spectrum of light. As a general rule of thumb 18 hours for vegative stage and 12 hours for flowering. However if the metal haylide is used for the veggie period, they emit a more blue light and then the Sont for flowering then a better result will occur, claims of 30% higher yield are not uncommon.
Envirolites are becoming more popular as they have a self contained ballast, are cool to touch and save 77% on energy consumption. They work well on cuttings and seedlings with the blue spectrum of light, but there is debate about their flowering capabilities, and most experienced growers will switch to a Sont for flowering as most indoor gardeners strive for heavy yields, high performance and reliability from their grow rooms.
How to make your grow lights work harder for you and save running costs
The above picture demonstrated how much artificial light diminishes and this can be addressed by using a light rail, they move across the subject either in a linear or circular motion. Running cost of a light rail is about £5 /$10 per month.
They allow the grow light to be placed a lot closer and this avoids excessive heat build up so the crop grows much more uniformly and although not completely research will allow a 600 watt bulb to perform to nearly the same level as 1000 watt and yields will increase by about 30% again.
This type of equipment is associated with the term “sea of green”.
The rule of thumb is that you place your hand on top of your plant and if the heat given off is to hot for you then the grow light needs to be raised a little, sometimes an inch or so a day until harvest time, expect fantastic results per square area.
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