LED Lamps in Hydroponics
The rumor of the LED light
There has been a lot of press and buzz lately about the new LED grow lights available from a number of manufacturers all over the world and Internet dealers. They have been marketed as the next generation of lighting for indoor hydroponics application. And maybe one day they will be, but today is not that day. NASA is currently developing LED lights to be used on the space station. Because they use very little electricity they can be run off of batteries for long periods of time, so that food can be grown in space. Disney is using hydroponics with traditional lighting to grow fresh produce for use in their Florida theme parks. So development of hydroponic systems and LED applications is definitely on the way, however they just don’t have the penetration power of a traditional lighting system. We’ll explore and contrast the differences between traditional HID lights and LED lights throughout this article.
There are many advantages and disadvantages of using a LED grow lights. First we’ll talk about the advantages of using LED grow lights. To begin with LED grow lights can last on average from 8 to 10 years. A traditional high pressure sodium or metal halide lamp will need to be replaced about once every year to once every year and a half. However in contrast LED lights can often last for up to 8 to 10 years with heavy use. LED lights use of very little electricity and generate very little heat.
The problem with traditional high pressure sodium and metal halides lamps is that they admit a lot of spectrums that your plants simply don’t need. For instance your plants really just need the red and the blue spectrum for the respective vegetative and flowering stage. You really don’t need lights in the other spectrums as it does little to enhance your plants rate of grow. One of the great things about LED lights is that you can give your plants only the colors they need and not ones they don’t. That’s why you’ll see most led lighting systems consisting primarily of red and blue lights. They’re able to save on electricity by only putting out high amounts of the bandwidth or proper spectrum plants need for that stage of growth.
However the advantages really stop there. Every plant that I’ve ever seen grown under a LED light has never been comparable to traditional high pressure sodium grow lamps and the plants often look small and overall and stretchy to say the least. The size of the fruits developed on the top plants were nothing compared to that growth under high pressure sodium lighting system. The yield from the LED lights are much smaller than that of the traditional lighting systems.
To find out more about LED lights in detail as well as other types of lights or fluorescent lights, and also traditional high pressure sodium or metal halide lights check out the homegrown hydroponics website videos tutorial section, which consists of over 100 free tutorial videos for you to watch and learn quite a bit about hydroponics.
Hydroponics http://www.homegrown-hydroponics.com
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