Grow Lights for Indoor Plants

Growing plants indoors can be an interesting challenge. Plants need a certain amount of natural light that many indoor environments can’t provide. This may require you to look into buying grow lights for your indoor plants. Don’t let the apparent complexity of these light fixtures scare you away from the purchase; you will just have to do some light research to make sure you make the right decision.

The most difficult aspect of purchasing grow lights is the specific lighting and temperature needs of the different types of plants. There are high light, medium light, and low light requirements for different plants. Some need to be kept at a constant tropical temperature year round, while some will do okay or even thrive with some seasonal variance. A lot of this you can’t always control, but it is important to consider it because of the cost that purchasing artificial plant lights brings.

Buying grow lights for indoor plants represents a significant investment. Before you venture into this costly purchase, it is worth considering if you can grow your plants indoors without using artificial lighting. Most homes and apartments have some natural light from a window, even those on the bottom floor. If you have plants with high lighting needs, making this purchase may be unavoidable, but a couple hours of legitimate sunlight is enough for most low light and some medium light plants.

If you’ve decided that you absolutely have to purchase indoor plant lights, then there are a few decisions ahead of you, largely based on your situation and gardening goals. The first step is to take stock of the lighting needs of your plants and how big your indoor garden is going to be.

The reason this is important is because if you just have one potted plant or low lighting needs for a slightly larger planter, then you might be able to just buy a grow light bulb. This will be a significant cost reduction over a full panel of grow lights. You can just install the light bulb into a lamp that you already own and position it over your plantings.

Obviously, a single grow light bulb will not be enough light for most indoor plants and gardens. Luckily, there is a grow light available for just about any possible situation. Whether you need a full panel of lights or just a couple independent grow light fixtures, they should be available.

Once you have decided upon the size of your artificial grow light needs, you need to figure out which type of lights you want to purchase. There are a few choices and each has its own pros and cons. LED grow lights seem to be a favorite among first time grow light buyers because they are extremely power efficient and come in different wavelengths of light. If you are new to indoor gardening, you probably want a general purpose light output, however, so that may not concern you right off the bat.

Fluorescent grow lights still represent a significant portion of the market. These are also power efficient and produce good results. It can be difficult for this bulb type to reproduce a natural spectrum of light, but the higher end bulbs do an adequate job.