LED Vs. Fluorescent Grow Lights

Growing a garden of plants inside is a hobby that brings many people better living, reduced stress and increased happiness. However, before investing in light bulbs, know that your plants need a certain kind of light, and failing to give them that light will produce inferior plants. When deciding only between fluorescent grow lights and LED grow lights, recognize that fluorescent is both much cheaper and much inferior. LED lights are excellent for plant growth but can be prohibitively expensive for small-time growers.

Fluorescent Lights

These bulbs are popular with many growers, especially growers on a budget. Compact fluorescent are good because of their small size and are therefore suitable for making multiple-bulb gardens. Your average fluorescent light is going to put our roughly 60 to 70 lumens per watt of usable light energy for the plants to use. Lumens can be used to estimate the brightness of the light, and therefore the suitability of the light level to be used as a growing light. The sun produces about 10,000 lumens/sq ft on a sunny summer day, and plants typically need at least 3,000 lumens per square foot. This means several fluorescent lights might be needed to light an indoor garden.

Considerations for Fluorescent Lights

Fluorescent lights are good for small growers on tight budgets and for first-time indoor gardeners who have little experience with HID (high-intensity discharge) systems for indoor gardening. They come in several different colors (known more correctly as Kelvin ratings). When selecting a bulb, select a spectrum of light best suited to your plant by looking up the plant in question and checking the bulb's packing. "Cool white" is a blueish light that is good for vegetative stages of growth, whereas "warm white" is often better for flowering plants and flowering periods.

Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Grow Lights

Thanks to rapidly evolving technology, LED grow lights have quickly progressed into a viable technology. LEDs produce more light per watt than fluorescent bulbs, typically as much as 150 lumens per watt on some high-output models. Further, LED lights run very cool, which is ideal for plant settings where high amounts of heat can fry plants rather than induce them to grow. LEDs also have a long life, can emit the intended color spectrum without filters for more output and are highly compact. However, LED prices are still high, and LED light setups will probably be useful only to more serious growers.

Costs of LED Lights

LED lights, while running much more efficiently in the long run that fluorescents, will require larger start-up costs because the technology is still new and developing. Small-watt lights (less than 30) are beginning to be available at less than $200, but most grow lights of high wattage, like those necessary for reasonably sized indoor gardens, can run quickly into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Although NASA and other scientific organizations have continually pushed the cost efficiency of these products since the 1960s, and some believe that LED lights will become the future of indoor gardening, LED lights need to come down in price before they are available to many besides commercial growers.

Expert Insight

Be sure to check out other types of lighting fixtures for your growing situation; it might be that neither LED nor fluorescent lights are the best lighting fixture for your operation. High-intensity discharge lights are an older technology that come in two different types, HPS (high pressure sodium) and MH (metal halide), that are very popular for indoor growing operations today. These lights are good at emitting efficient light in enough quantity of lumens for plant growth, and they are cheaper than LED lights. Researching the pros and cons of HID lights will help to inform your decision about grow lights.

References

• Kent Kobayash, CTAHR, University of Hawii at Manoa: Growing Plants Indoors Under Supplemental Lighting
• Gardeners.com: Gardening Indoors Under Lights