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Being stuck at home – even during the winter months – is a great opportunity to grow an indoor garden. It’s a relatively cheap hobby, even factoring in the amount of plants that might not make it, and can significantly improve the air quality in your house too.
Along with water, plant food, and the optional operatic singing (there’s still debate as to why, or if this works, but it’s worth a shot), an indoor LED grow light can be enormously helpful to kick growth into high gear. The various colors of the bulbs simulate sunlight, which plants need to capture and process, and eventually helps them grow up green and healthy just as if they’ve been outside.
How Does an Indoor Grow Light Work?
As simple as it may sound – just shining a light on a plant – the world of grow lights is a dense online jungle to navigate for someone just starting out seeding.
The biggest basic difference is in the bulbs: brightness strength is measured in lumens, which are much more powerful than wattage, and 100 lumens is equal to about 20 watts. You’ll also notice that bulbs are measured in kelvin too, which is a way of measuring a light’s temperature spectrum.
LED lights often have blue and red, and sometimes purple, often referred to as “blurple” when it’s all three. A warmer tone will be a lower kelvin, and a cooler tone will be higher. If you’re planning on growing veggies, a full spectrum light with a color temperature in the blue range (5,000 – 7,000K) is recommended, and for fruits and flowers, the red range (3,500 – 4,500K) is the guiding light. These tones boost growth and absorption more than others, but for photosynthesis, plants really still need the full color spectrum if possible.
A leaf’s chlorophyl absorbs the red and blue light extremely well, but can block that light from penetrating further into the plant below and preventing deeper growth beneath the leaf’s structural surface. White LEDs fuel growth in the mid-spectrum, bringing out the deep greens in a leaf, but often slacking on the sides of the spectrum, leaving out cool blues and intense infrareds.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Grow Light?
If you’ve got a sunlight-hungry plant and a bright spot by a big window, using a grow light may not be necessary. But during the winter months when the sun is low or obstructed, plants often don’t get enough of what they need, and an indoor LED light can fill that void, keeping them growing all year long.
Even if you do have sun-facing windows, you may be running out of windowsill real estate for new plants, and a grow light allows you to put your new additions anywhere you want, even in a small backroom with poor natural lighting.
Achieving a balance of light across the spectrum is important too, as plants tend to compensate for whatever color of the spectrum they’re lacking. For example, plants with an excess of shady blue will grow stretchy to search for the sunlight, while on the opposite end, an overdose of high-end infrareds can cause burning and bleaching.
Whatever light you grow with, it’ll need to be on for long stretches, often 12-16 hours, with at least eight hours of darkness. Keep that in mind especially if you’re getting plants for a bedroom, where you may not want a light shining all day. Also if the light doesn’t already come with a built-in timer, we suggest investing in one, to set it and forget it.
Gardening, even with just a couple small plants, is a deeply rewarding activity where you reap the benefits of a greener home, connection to nature, and get fresh fruits and veggies too. These are the best grow lights to help you get there.
