What is the difference between Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium Growlights?
www.3rlighting.com/tutorial
Q: What is the difference between Metal Halide Lights and High Pressure
Sodium Lights?
A: Lighting technology is still changing and evolving. The two best ways
to provide supplemental lighting to plants that anyone has come up with
so far is to use growlights that burn bulbs made with either Metal Halide or Sodium inside the
tubes. These types of lights are called High Intensity Discharge Lighting (HID).
Metal Halide shines with a blue tint, while High Pressure Sodium casts
a more orange light. While both lights are very bright, Natural Sunlight
is still the best quality light, and it is free. Growlights are especially handy because the sun does not always shine where, when, and how long you might
want. A good example is in the winter months, where increasing the length of the light cycle usually makes the plants grow faster and fuller.
With a growlight, you can burn a 16 or 18 hour day while there may only be 4 to 5 hours of full sun. This means the plants can grow two to three times faster.
The growlights can always be used in combination with sunlight.
Q: Why use one kind of light instead of the other?
A: Plants can be put into two categories:
Greening and Blooming.
Greening plants such as lettuce, basil, parseley, oregano, mesclun mix, chives, dill, sage, mint, thyme, etc. are grown for the green leaves themselves.
Metal Halide Light encourages larger leaves, more tightly spaced leaves, and is the preferred light for this type of plants.
Blooming plants such as ornamental flowers, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, pea pods, squash, watermellons, etc. are grown for the fruit of the blooms. High Pressure Sodium Lights encourage plants to bloom.
A typical technique is to use a Metal Halide Light on the young blooming plants to build a strong base for blooming, then to switch to a High Pressure Sodium Light at the Bloom stage. The light coloration of the High Pressure Sodium Light causes most plants to bloom faster and with more blooms.
Some folks then switch back to the Metal Halide, some don't. Fruit, like tomatoes, gets sweeter from the sugars that the leaves make. The ratio of leaf space to fruit set makes some growers get really particular. Some growers will pinch some flowers off to let the others ripen the way they want. Some switch back to the Metal Halide to get the plant to put out less blooms in the first place.
Now on a tomato vine, the tomato will produce a bloom and then a tomato in the same spot only once. Any new blooms can only come from the new growth on the vine. So some folks run Metal Halide on the old growth and High Pressure Sodium over the new growth. These growers want to mature the fruit that has already set while at the same time making new blooms.
Some folks just leave a High Pressure Sodium Light on from start to go.
You should have the idea that there are plenty of ways to use these growlights and there's plenty more to come up with. Each person has to figure out the best growing techniques to make himself or herself happy.
Q: Where is my money best spent?
A: Whether you grow in soil or by hydroponics or some mixture, you money is always--always best spent on a good quality growlight first.
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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 seriously injure humans and pets.
