Fluorescent Grow Lights

Grow lights are designed to imitate natural sunlight to help your plants grow in an indoor environment. There are a variety of types, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For a long time fluorescent grow lights were the best type of grow light available, but the competition has grown stronger as technology improves.

Fluorescent grow lights are a great choice for most indoor growing situations. They use very little energy to run because they are designed to be extremely efficient. They produce very little heat, which not only wastes electricity, but can affect the temperature of your garden. In addition you can buy specific bulbs to target different parts of the lighting spectrum or a bulb that covers the broad spectrum. This allows you to target certain growth periods in plants to encourage a specific type of growth, like produce, for example.

Of course, they have some disadvantages as well. While they are efficient, new bulb technologies can be even more efficient at producing high quality light with a minimum of electricity usage.  They also get some criticism because of the flicker they produce. The light is actually not a steady stream, but a constant on and off that produces the appearance of a constant light source. Other grow light bulb types do not suffer from this same argument.

So what are the other types of grow lights? The one moving into the mainstream the quickest is the LED grow light. These growing lamps consist of multiple small LED bulbs that are targeted toward specific wavelengths of light. They are energy efficient and have produced excellent results in comparison testing.

Which you need depends heavily upon your intended use. The prices of each will both be high, so you want to get the types that will work for your indoor gardening situation. An advantage of other grow light types is that you can sometimes just buy a bulb that can work in an existing light fixture and save because you don’t need to buy a whole new panel or fixture.