Types Of Grow Lights For Hydroponics

While natural light is essential for plant growth in hydroponic gardening, it may well be substituted by artificial lighting. Grow lights, as they are referred to, are effective in replacing daylight for plant growth. Because plants need a certain amount of intensity of light and draw from the full light spectrum for different stages of growth, standard incandescent lights do not work well as grow lights. (Consider that you have to mimic sunlight as much as possible.) Usually, hydroponic plants do well with High Intensity Discharge (HID) bulbs, two of which are discussed below. Aside from those two, there are still several kinds of bulbs that are ideal for hydroponics:

Metal Halide Bulbs (MH)
This is the most popular HID-type bulb largely because it closely resembles summer sunlight; it produces the blues, which are ideal for vegetation plants. MH bulbs are likely to die out gradually and need to be replaced before they actually burn out, because they eventually don’t yield enough lumens to help the plants anymore. Good thing that they’re long-lasting, having an average life of 10,000 hours, or a year.

High Pressure Sodium Bulbs (HPS)
The High Pressuure Sodium bulb is best for supplementary lighting – this means that it should be used with natural lighting. HPS bulbs emphasize the orange-red band of the spectrum, which is good for flowering plants. Compared to metal halide, HPS bulbs as grow lights are longer-lasting (averaging to 18,000 hours) and are less costly. HPS bulbs, on the other hand, aren’t recommended to substitute natural light, because they are deficient in blue light. They are best suited for a greenhouse environment.

Fluorescent Bulbs
Where before fluorescent light bulbs were not intense enough, these days fluorescents are made that have enough lumens to supply light for hydroponics. This can be done either with high-output tubes or with larger quantities of lower-output tubes. Since they produce less heat than HID bulbs, they can then be placed closer to the plants, thereby making up for their “lack of intensity.”

LED Grow Lights
The newest version of grow light, the advantage of LED bulbs is that they’re comparable to the output of a high pressure sodium bulb while being remarkably energy efficient, and emitting almost no heat. The disadvantage is that they’re costly and promote slower growth. In fact, fluorescent grow lights can obtain the same results as LED bulbs, without the issue on finances. So while they are the newest thing, the jury is basically still out on whether LED bulbs shall be the wave of the future for grow lights.

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