Looking for high quality LED grow lights at an affordable price online? Then you’re in luck, because GrowAce is your source for LED’s. Whether you’re looking for supplemental lighting or you want to replace your H.I.D. system, we’ve got what you need to grow as big as you want with a fraction of the energy you’ll use with other lighting systems. Don’t bother hunting around your local hydro shops or building your own- let us take care of your lighting needs with our LED grow light kits.
We offer the latest and greatest units on the LED market. The Advanced Spectrum line of LED’s offer dual lens technology to give you intense, focused light down on to your grow with a good spread across your plants. They also have 1w and 3w chips in each diode for the power you want at the spectrum you need (and some lights are even equipped with Infrared diodes to help stimulate resin growth). The California Light Works line of lights offer both strong LED diodes as well as T5 fluorescent peripheral lights to help give your vegging and flowering plants an extra boost of blue light. Both LED’s also offer heat sync technology to help cool the light faster and more effectively than other lights on the market.
No matter what you’re trying to grow, we’ll set you up with the LED grow lights best suited for your garden. Need some lights to clone? Try a few 14w or a 50w LED panels above your starter cells to get those clones nice and tall. Those HID’s not covering your plants completely? Advance Spectrum 36w LED grow bulbs can be plugged in to a flood light socket, and placed anywhere around your plants that needs a little more light. And for anyone growing full-sizes plants, we’ve got an array of lights that’ll cover 4 feet of space and more!
If you’re reading this, chances are this isn’t your first look into LED grow lights. In fact, you’ve probably already searched online for the right info, but now you have more questions than answers.
“Diodes? Chips? Targeted wavelengths? 4000k? Primary vs. supplemental lighting?” LEDs may have sounded great at first, but after so many questions, you find yourself on the verge of going with an HID or not growing at all.
LED grow lights may seem a little intimidating at first, but once you gain the knowledge about LEDs, you'll find that they can give you the same yields — if not better — compared to HIDs. That’s where this guide comes in handy.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the ins and outs of LED grow lights to help you understand what makes them so useful in the grow room or grow tent, and how to make the best choice for your plants. From what they do to how they’re made, all the way to choosing the right setup for your grow room, this guide will be a roadmap on the way to high-quality harvests using LEDs.
As the name suggests, these types of grow lights use light emitting diodes (LEDs) to grow plants instead of high pressure sodium, metal halide, or fluorescent light bulbs. LEDs are electronic-based, which makes them the only type of light that doesn’t require a chemical reaction to work. This opens up a whole host of advantages over HIDs that we’ll discuss in a bit.
While LEDs vary in design and intensity, they all work essentially the same way:
The radiation generated by LEDs naturally is a piercing blue. A phosphor coating is added over the chip to defuse it so it’s not hyper intense, which would harm the chlorophyll in a plant. Chip dye can be added to each diode to give off particular photons (colors) of light outside of the white/yellow/orange light we’re used to seeing. The strength of each chip, the photons they emit, and the number of diodes in a grow light all come together to give you an LED.
Interestingly enough, LED grow lights offer a few assembly and setup options. Most LEDs don’t require you to put anything together, unlike HIDs that require you to assemble a reflector, ballast, and bulb. For the most part, they’re straightforward:
Now, there are lights like those from Horticulture Lighting Group that require some assembly. Though it’s not difficult, you’ll receive a mounting board, a driver, and a number of LED panels to install. In these cases, here’s what you’d do:
There are also certain lower wattage LEDs bulbs that you can install into flood lights, too. Those are as simple as screwing the LED bulb into the flood lamp, plugging in the lamp, and turning it on.
LED grow lights have gone through a number of improvements to get to where they are today, so it makes sense that many growers are wary of them. On the flip-side, HIDs have been around much longer than LEDs and have become a tried and true way to grow indoors. In the end, though, LED grow lights have proven their efficiency and effectiveness in the grow room. Here's why:
While LED grow lights (electronic) may operate in a different way than HIDs (chemical), they're essentially made with the same parts. You have the diode that emits light like a bulb, a driver that transfers energy to your diodes like a ballast, and the housing of your LED which acts more or less like a reflector.
With that in mind, let’s break down the major components of a grow light: diodes, power supply, and housing.
A diode is what’s used to translate electricity to visible light in an LED. While a diode itself contains lots of different parts (like wires, heat sinks, and bases), we’ll focus on the main components in the diode: the chip and the lens.
Chips are the surfaces that electricity runs across to give us light. The brightness of a diode is based on the strength and number of chips inside, and each of those chips has a wattage it takes to give off light.
Most LEDs use .5w, 1w, 3w, and 5w chips that offer you a certain amount of lumens. The more lumens a chip can give off, the brighter the diode will be. The more diodes you have, the stronger the overall LED grow light will be. And the more lumens a light has, the better it will be at penetrating your plants' canopy for vigorous growth.
It should be noted that the more chips you have on a diode’s surface, the higher the lumen output will be out of a diode. For example, COB chips work by using a lot of little, low wattage chips (around .25 to .5w) on a relatively small surface. All of these tiny chips come together to give you a super bright light, even with a phosphor cover.
Dying and Covering Chips— Chips are usually (but not always) dyed to give off a certain color that mimics a particular wavelength of light along the light spectrum. Non-programmable diodes are dyed the color they should be, whereas diodes in adjustable LEDs are dyed blue, red, and green. The particular color combination will allow you to get white, blue, red, green, and violet wavelengths that plants need.
Whether they're dyed or not, a small phosphor cover is placed on the chips to dampen the piercing light that electricity gives off from the chip. In the case of ultraviolet diodes, the chip cover is made of crystals like sapphire to offer that intense wavelength when light radiation is offered. Infrared diodes, on the other hand, have secondary internal reflectors that filter light coming out so that only IR wavelengths of light are emitted.
The lens covering each diode helps focus the light coming from each chip so that it doesn’t emit into the open air unfocused and ineffective. This lens is what facilitates the intensity of the light given off by the chip. Therefore, the type of lens a diode has will help determine how the light is focused down onto your plants.
Contrary to popular belief, the beam angle (or the width of the beam of light coming out) doesn’t depend solely on the type of lens used. Rather, it comes from how close a chip is to the lens. The further a chip is from the lens, the more narrow and intense the light will be coming from the diode. The closer the chip is to the lens, the wider and softer the beam of light will be. Here’s what this idea looks like in real life:
