High Pressure Sodium Grow Lights (HPS)

Grow lights allow you to efficiently grow plants indoors where natural lighting isn’t available. This can be in a greenhouse or in your living room. There are several prominent types of grow lights using different light bulb technologies, but high pressure sodium grow lights are definitely one of the best. They have several benefits that separate them from the crowd but may not necessarily be a great light for a beginning indoor gardener.

High pressure sodium lights have a really long lifespan. This automatically makes them fairly cost efficient because you will not have to replace the growing bulbs very often. They also run in the same price range as other indoor plant lights.

Another benefit is that they are very good at producing a nice blend of red spectral lighting. Although they produce light across the whole spectrum, this type of bulb is naturally strong at the red end of the spectrum and naturally weaker at the other end. This is true of even the best high pressure sodium grow lights.

This means that HPS grow lights are good at producing flower and fruit growth, but weaker at vegetative growth. To fully utilize these lights, you really should either use them in conjunction with a complementary grow light (like a metal halide grow light) or rotate which light is being used based on the growing phase that the plant is in. Rotating the light source is something that a beginner probably should attempt, but that doesn’t mean that a new gardener can’t make use of these lights.

For basic growing use, it is not any more difficult to operate these lights as other plants lights. You just have to position them appropriately and turn them on and off each day. However, it gets more complicated if you have manage the growing phases of the plants with different lights. An experienced gardener will recognize when the best time to switch lights will be to get to flowering and fruit growth quickly, while someone less experienced will go through a lot of trial and error.