Benefits of LED Grow Lights

LED grow lights are an excellent product which allow the hobbyist gardener and professional grower alike to produce great results without the need of natural lighting.  This is helpful in cases where plants must be grown indoors due to weather or cultivating outside of their natural climate or season.  They give you growing options, run cheaply, and are much better for the environment than other types of grow lights.

Like all grow lamps, an LED grow light will allow you to grow a small herb or flower garden in your home or apartment even in cases where sunlight can’t reach your plants.  Natural sunlight is always preferred, but isn’t always available.  If you love having plants around, but your apartment just isn’t suited for natural lighting, these LED lights will give you the ability to cultivate almost any plant that you desire.

One of the best benefits of LED grow lights is that they are very energy efficient.  When comparing to incandescents (a very poor choice for a grow light both due to ineffectiveness and high running costs), an LED will need less than a tenth of the wattage used to reproduce the same amount of light, or lumens.  In addition, most incandescent bulbs are only rated to last for 170 hours.  LED lights are usually rated to last for tens of thousands of hours or more.  So even if the running costs were the same, incandescent would still lose the battle.

The battle between LEDs and fluorescents is much closer.   Fluorescent grow lights are also fairly efficient compared to incandescent bulbs, but still not as efficient as LED lamps.  The other way that fluorescent loses the battle is with environmental concerns.

An LED grow lamp is made almost entirely out of plastic and can be disposed of at any regular landfill.  Besides that, its long lifespan ensures that it won’t find itself in a landfill for a lot of years.  By comparison, fluorescent lights contain small amount of mercury and should therefore be disposed of at a special recycling facility.  If not, mercury can leak into the ground and contaminate drinking water.

You really can’t go wrong using LED grow lights as long as you’re not growing the most particular of crops.  They meet the needs of almost every plant type by targeting the specific wavelengths of light needed to grow and thrive at each stage of the plant’s life. You indoor garden will never look better once you hook one of these grow lamps up!