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What are the best lights for growing cannabis indoors?

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hydroponics led grow lights ECO Farm

Here is a short summary: Growing indoor will provide you with the opportunity to influence all environmental factors. This way you can optimize soil, air, water and grow light to create the perfect conditions for your plants. The more you take care of them, the better your yield. And with light it is easy.

Lights are essential because they largely determine your plants' grow cycles, their photosynthesis and therefore their health and their buds. Lighting is the food of your marijuana plants. When first creating your grow room make a blue print to decide what system for water management, light and air flow you want to use. In this piece we will discuss the details about lighting.

Which Lighting is Best for Growing Cannabis indoor?

There are a variety of different light types, with various pros and cons depending on what you’re looking for. We offer a rundown of the most common options below. Stuck for time? Check out the pros and cons of each at a glance.

LED Grow Lights – The Modern, Efficient Solution

Short for light-emitting diode, an LED is a simple form of light with an efficient energy signature. Due to how the light is generated within an LED, they use a meager amount of electricity for the same amount of light compared to other sources.

However, LEDs have a pricing problem. The inexpensive ones are the type you don’t want. The lights you need for cultivating cannabis are costly.There are many LED grow lights for sale online.

If you try and use the cheap, Christmas-style lights, your weed harvest is going to be smaller than the LED’s carbon footprint. If you want to invest in your bud correctly, prepare to spend a substantial amount of money.
One great benefit of LED grow lights is that they create comparatively little heat when compared to other types of light. This ensures you don’t overheat your grow room. Marijuana plants like a warm environment. However, excessive heat damages them, and may also cause a fire in your grow room.
LED grow lights can also distribute a fuller spectrum of light due to how the light is created through electroluminescence. This can result in a better, higher quality yield from your bud.

This benefit is somewhat counteracted by the fact that the average LED light board is quite low powered. As a result, you either require multiple boards or a huge, single one. Also, you only get the best results with full spectrum LED grow lights.

HID Grow Lights – The Traditional, Energy Hungry Choice

HID grow lights, short for High-Intensity Discharge, are large light bulbs that emit a tremendous amount of heat and light. They usually require a full exhaust fan to remove the excess heat, and electricity consumption is enormous. Also, they generally need a decent amount of time and space to set up a properly working system.

HID Lights are typically divided into a few different varieties or sub-categories:

Metal Halide Grow Lights

Metal Halide or MH grow lights are primarily used during the vegetative stage. This is the part of the cannabis plant’s life where growth takes off, and leaves begin to flourish. MH lights produce a strongly blue-tinged light, which the plants prefer at this stage of growth.

It might sound strange that a plant prefers a type of light. However, different colored lights are mostly just different wavelengths and intensities. Due to this difference in wavelength, the plant prefers stronger or weaker lights at various stages of its development.

For the early vegetative stage, the blue glow from the metal halide lights is best.

High-Pressure Sodium Grow Lights

High-Pressure Sodium, or HPS grow lights are far more efficient than other forms of HID. They emit a gentler, yellow light that cannabis prefers when it is in the flowering stage. This yellow light helps encourage intense bud production. It allows you to configure the eventual size of your harvest more precisely.

You can buy HPS lighting in a variety of strengths, but don’t use 1000w. It is far too powerful, and is only suitable if you have created a vast underground field of weed! A pair of 400w or 600w HPS lights should suffice.

Fluorescent Grow Lights – Best Used for Small Grows

Fluorescent lights have cool, warm, or full-spectrum colors. Growers sometimes use them because they are cheap to buy, and have a low energy consumption which saves money on energy bills. They also provide a pleasant color for an indoor growing site.

They also don’t require a ridiculous variety of different lights like HID lights. Furthermore, fluorescent lights don’t need the investment of an additional setup like with HID. You also don’t need to include a particular ventilation system to keep the room’s temperature down.

However, fluorescent lighting provides lower yields than its rivals. You must also position them close to your plants to derive any benefit. This means you can use them in a small room, but they are ineffective if you plan to grow several plants.

Recommended grow light for growing marijuana

The New GH 340 is specifically designed for supplemental lighting in greenhouses. It features a very small shadow effect yet covers a large area. The GH 340 is chainable and as many as 10 lights can be run from a single power drop to save on installation costs. It also features wireless two-channel spectrum control and integrates with a wireless photo sensor for automated dimming depending on the amount of sunlight available. The GH 340 uses passive cooling with no fans and has an IP rating of 65. Draws 340 watts max with up to 3.0 μmol / joule efficiency.

Final Thoughts on the Best Grow Lights for Indoor Cannabis

When growing marijuana indoors, you have to decide what takes top priority. Do you care about your energy bills, the environment, secrecy, or efficiency?

If you’re looking for discretion, LED grow lights and fluorescent grow lights are the likeliest options. If it is efficiency you’re after, HID is probably the best grow light for marijuana available. That is, as long as you don’t mind the increase in your electricity bill.

Then again, if you have a grow space of less than five square feet, fluorescent light is enough when your plants are small. You can upgrade to a 250w HPS as the plants get larger. If you have space, an MH light for plants in the vegetative stage, and HPS for the blooming phase works well. Using MH lighting throughout is fine, but will have fewer flowers, more foliage, and a lower yield.

Different options work best for different solutions, so pick the one that’s right for you and work to its advantages. Once you have selected the right light for your needs, you can start growing cannabis. After you have chosen the soil type, your fertilizer preferences, and a few other things!

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