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3R Lighting Tutorial: What kind of Grow Light should I use to grow an Indoor Vegetable Garden?




Q: What kind of Grow Light should I use to grow an Indoor Vegetable Garden?
A: There are a lot of choices.

Both Metal Halide (MH) and High Pressure Sodium (HPS) Growlights are called High Intensity Discharge lights (HID).

It may all be very confusing at first.
There is some overlap in what each light can do. It is also made more complicated because when many people are buying Grow Lights, they do not have a lot of experience using plant lights for growing. Even though someone may have a whole lot of experience with gardening and plants, when it comes to growing with lights, they simply lack personal experience.

It takes time to learn.

What this means is that it is common when buying your first Grow Light to depend on the opinions of other people.

Well, opinions vary.

Often the confusion is not made any clearer by the people who sell Grow Lighting. There is a common tendency among the people who sell grow lights to advise growers to buy the particular models that the store has in stock:
"Amazingly enough, the very light you need is the very light I have in stock."
Many stores that sell growlights push the particular growlights the store has rather than the growlight that is best for the customer.

Webstores are significantly less prone to allowing inventory to pressure opinions in unhelpful ways.
The 3R Lighting Company is firmly convinced that educated customers will buy from us.

However, as you will probably notice, web forums are filled with spammers masquerading as regular posters pushing one "amazing" growlight after another.

Doing research is important. The 3R Lighting Tutorial has a lot of good information. Different lights make your plants grow in different ways. The grow light you want depends on how you will use it. A Grow Light used for growing lettuce or spinach may not be the light you want to use to grow blooming flowers.

Q: What light do I want to bloom flowers?
A: Generally, you want a High Pressure Sodium Light to bloom flowers. The bulb (usually called the "lamp") of a HPS shines with a yellow-orange light color.

On the other hand, a Metal Halide Light shines with a blue color and is better for growing vegetation like lettuce, spinach, or herbs.

There is some overlap because the Blue Metal Halide encourages compact plant growth. This is important when you are growing plants indoors and trying to keep it under a growlight corona.

A Yellow-Orange High Pressure Sodium growlight is more similar to Autumn light and can encourage your plants to grow smaller leaves with wider spaces between the leaves. But the HPS encourages more blooming.

Q: How do Watts relate to the lights? What size should I get?
A: There is a Rule-of-Thumb about Wattage and the area the light covers. So a 1000 Watt light covers an area about 8 feet by 8 feet. A 400 Watt light covers about 4 feet by 4 feet. A 250 Watt light covers about 2 and a half feet by 2 and a half feet. A 100 Watt light covers about a foot by a foot or one large plant.

Now, this is just a Rule-of-Thumb. There are a lot of factors that have some effect on these guide numbers.

Q: Like what?
A: How old the lamp is, how high the lamp is above the plants, how tall the plants are, how much the plant leaves overlap and shade each other, etc.
A huge factor is whether or not your plants are growing near windows or sliding glass doors. Figuring out the natural sunlight is very important. Which direction the windows face and how far North you live and what Season it is have impact. The amount of natural sunlight that shines on the plants and for how long has a significant effect. Natural light is always the best quality light--and it's free. Often, it is not enough to grow vegetables.

Now, if you have enough natural light to trigger blooming, you may want to use a Metal Halide Grow Light to keep your plants compact. As well, plants make sugars in the leaves--not in the fruit.
It is just not as simple as tomatoes: HPS, lettuce: MH.
There are a lot of good and different strategies that work well.

The 3R Lighting Tutorial on this Website has a lot more information in the LIGHTS Section. Just click on the NEXT button.


Q: So what is the slant from Webstores that sell Grow Lights?
A: Well, compact fluorescent growlights are OK. They will keep houseplants alive in a dark house through the winter and they can start seedlings, etc. There is new stuff going on with T5 and T8 fluorescent tubes (not the ones sold as "full spectrum"). The problem Webstores have is that fluorescent tubes are simply a nightmare to ship.

Even if you can ship 90% of the tubes without breaking, that means one out of every ten customers is very unhappy. The delivery services won't even insure fluorescent tubes anymore. It's a nightmare. It is illegal to ship fluorescent tubes by US Postal Service.
It is also difficult to make plants thrive under 40 watt fluorescent tubes. You can sprout and keep plants from dying, but growing and thriving is different.

The 3R Lighting company sells primarily HID Grow Lights.
When you are spending your own money, it makes sense to buy a grow light with a good warranty, that is built well and will give you years of service. These are the kinds of grow lights that The 3R Lighting Company sells. Whether you buy a Metal Halide for lettuce, spinach, herbs, or for building strong plants in the early stages of fruiting or a High Pressure Sodium growlight for blooming and fruiting you want to spend your money on quality.

Grow Lights are not inexpensive. They are investments that pay back over time. You need to buy grow lights from a Company that has been around for years and will continue to be around for years, like the 3R Lighting Company. When you consider a 5 year warranty and a possible usable life of ten or twenty years for a good growlight, the cost becomes a lot more reasonable.

Q: Do LED Growlights work?
Sure.

They still need a little more development, though.

An LED growlight array is very labor intensive to build. If you have the technical qualifications to build your own, you can probably beat the cost of buying an equivalent HID growlight by $20.
If you buy a factory built LED growlight, you are looking at paying significantly more money.

Now, one caution if you build your own LED Array: Growrooms are damp environments. Make absolutely sure that you shield the solder joints from humidity and splashes.

That said, the best use of LED arrays that you build yourself at the moment is for side lighting with an HID growlight set overhead.

HID growlights have one source of high power light. LED's have many sources of low-power light. LED's are significantly cooler.

REMEMBER: Artificial Light Fades Fast.

You can put the LED array very close to the side of your plants. The helps in underlight of the plant canopy. You still want a good HID growlight shining above your plants.







Please click Organic Tutorial Button to learn about Organic Fertilizers and Organic Gardening.














WARNING!

Do NOT operate any HID lamp that is cracked or broken.
Replace any cracked or broken HID Lamp immediately.

The glass shield filters out harmful UV which can kill your plants and serious injure humans and pets.

Replace any cracked or broken grow light bulbs right away.









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