Now let us now install a grow light for our indoor plants. Grow lights are not expensive now a days. You get simple grow light bulbs for smaller plants, full spectrum grow light panels which even support flowering and fruiting. I have shown them all in my earlier episodes on indoor gardening.
Now, coming to this led grow light strip. This is a good option for certain areas in your home and add to the beauty of your home interiors. These led strips come in various lengths like in meters. Depending on the requirement you can order these grow light strips from amazon or any other reliable shopping website. These are waterproof strips and come with a sticker at the back surface. You can see this partition panel and I have created these two compartments for indoor plants. I have done wiring from inside for power supply. The most elegant way to install these led strips is to use these aluminum profile light channels which again come in various sizes. Here I am using 17mm channels. You need to cut a groove for this 17 mm channel.
Now let us first assemble these led light strips. You can measure the length of the strip needed and how many strips you require and make a cut at this point marked on the strip. This not rocket science. Its simple DIY thing. If you want to join two strips together, you can use these connectors of proper sizes to hook in the ends of the strips. Or you can just solder wires to the ends. Make sure you have a color coding for positive and negative terminal and not to reverse the polarity. It’s clearly marked on the strip.
Depending on the specifications of your strip, you need to provide proper power supply, like in this case its 5 volts power needed for this strip for which you can connect it to any mobile charger or a socket with USB charging facility which has 5 volts supply. You can solder or join the wires from any USB cable to this led strip. Then you can stick the strip to the aluminum channel and fix the channel to your plant compartment area. That’s it. You can power these on for 10 to 12 hours a day depending on the plant you are growing under it. Make sure the distance of plant is not too much from light source.
There are so many plant grow lights available in the market and choosing the best one can be a really tough job! So, Then How do you choose the right LED grow light to grow plants indoors?
There are many important factors to consider while choosing led lights, let’s split this into 5 sections. And please follow this video till the end. Will try to keep it as concise and simple without bothering you with too much physics.
- The Purpose of Buying a Plant Grow Light?
A grow light or plant light is an artificial light source to stimulate plant growth by emitting a light appropriate for photosynthesis. This light spectrum is similar to that of the sun. Grow lights are used for horticulture, indoor gardening, plant propagation from cuttings, seed germinations, Indoor food production – specially for those zones which do not receive adequate sunlight, indoor hydroponic gardening and to grow aquatic plants.
These are some of the cheaper options you can find online on amazon. Most of these are some cheap products without any warranty or proper specifications. If you want to grow indoor plants that need very less amount of light, then you can use these options. But at your own risk as there is no warranty and you won’t know how long they will last. The cost of these ranges anywhere from 5 dollar for a 5 watt bulb to 30 dollar for this type of model. But the light intensity and quality of photons they emit is too low and you may require multiple number of lights kept too close to the plants which is practically difficult.
The best option is to invest on a good quality reliable grow light like atleast a TS-1000 grow light from Mar-Hydro Company. It’s a very reliable company and into this LED grow light business since 9 years. They have a lot of products and models of LED grow lights and even grow tents for different uses. You can check their website mars-hydro.com. I have linked that in description below.
This TS-1000 set up costs around 200 USD for this powerful 150 Watt light including this beautifully designed large grow tent.
Now lets move on to the next factor in choosing your grow light:
- LIGHT INTENSITY: This is the most important factor. It simply means the amount of light a bulb emits out. We will not go into physics or science of this. But To decide on this, check out the manufacturer’s recommended foot print to know the area in square foot covered by this light. For example, this TS-1000 model covers a 3 x 3 feet in bloom stage and 4 x 4 feet in the vegetative stage with a distance of about 18 inch and 24 inch from the source respectively. If you know a bit of physics, You should also look into PPF, PAR chart and PPE values given by the manufacturer to decide on the light intensity.
Few more tips on this: The light is most intense at the middle of the light source and less intense at the peripheries. Seedlings and Young plants require cooler light intensities than vegetative and blooming plants. So, this can be achieved by either increasing the distance of these from the light source or placing seedlings and younger plants at the peripheral areas.
- COLOR SPECTRUM: Make sure you pick the correct spectrum depending on which stage your plant is in like the vegetative stage or the blooming stage or a full cycle of growth from seedling to harvesting stage. There are two types of spectums for LED lights – Targeted and the Broad Spectrum. More blue spectrum is better for Veg, Red is better for flowering stage and some fixtures have a tunable spectrum like red only or blue or stuff like that.
This Mars-Hydro Ts-1000 is a broad spectrum led light which works perfectly from seedling stage to harvest stage. You only need to adjust the distance using the rachet mechanism provided. You can look at these multi color LEDs. This is actually very bright, though in camera it may not appear that much bright. This one also got a dimmer screw right here. You can dim this further depending on your needs. - WATTAGE: or the electrical power measured in Watts. This actually does not determine the intensity or the quality of light. This only gives you a general idea on how powerful your led grow light is. The model number like TS-1000 doesn’t mean 1000 Watts. Make sure you do not misinterpret this number. This Mars-hydro light is about 150 Watts. One thing you may need to know here is: How many watts are required for the area in square foot. Generally 30 to 50 Watt is required for 1 foot x 1 foot area of coverage. Like about 30 watt or even less for veg stage or indoor plants and about 50 watt per square foot for flowering plants.
- WARRANTY: 99 percent LED lights from good companies will never have any problem and they have a very high lifespan of atleast 50,000 hours of usage. But still go for a company that provides a warranty of atleast 1 year. Mars-Hydro offers a 3 year extensive warranty on every grow light they sell. That’s really good!
- You can use Discount code GARDENTIPS and avail a discount on their website mars-hydro.com.