LED Lighting

What is LED?

LED lights can be found almost everywhere, whether they are flashing away on your smartphone, lighting up your laptop screen or spot lighting your shop; in the lighting world, they are often considered the holy grail, lower power requirements and lower temperatures, so it’s no wonder horticultural innovators are working away, producing LED lighting for your grow room. Though, it’s not just the low power and temperature control that would be attractive to growers, the ability to fine tune LED lights to perfectly suit plants requirements is a small bonus.

In the early stages of LED grow light development, it was believed using just red and blue LED lights in grow rooms was the quickest road to success; providing plants with their “most important” spectrum requirements without wasting unnecessary light energy sounds great, right? Wrong. We all know plants benefit from the full useable light spectrum, they’ve spent millions of years evolving under the light of the Sun after all. So over time, manufacturers have developed full spectrum, white LED fixtures, like the LUMii BRIGHT, which contain a blend of pure white LED chips to more closely replicate Sun light, with a few additional tailored chips to fine tune the spectrum. LEDs can be made to emit specific wavelengths of light, meaning manufacturers can choose the ‘colour’ of the light they emit and create combinations to suit growers’ specific needs.

Naturally, creating an LED grow light that can rival, or successfully boost, trusted HPS lamps has not been without its stumbling blocks, in fact, there have been so many ‘almost…!’s that growers have become quite cynical, and understandably LUMii BRIGHT will face that same cynicism. This is why HydroGarden has waited over 4 months to launch it to market after letting a couple of keen LED enthusiasts comprehensively trial it for themselves. Here’s why they loved it…

Modularity

A single 100 W BRIGHT fixture would be ideal for a propagation tent or supplemental lighting with a HPS fixture; Alternatively you could daisy chain 4-6 BRIGHT fixtures together and swap out your primary HPS fixture entirely. Yes, the upfront investment would be higher, but over time the efficiency of the LED fixture would mean lower running costs with no lamp replacements, potentially less environmental control requirement and most importantly a 6 fixture unit can achieve a comparable yield to a 600 W HPS.

Efficiency

LEDs turn a higher percentage of energy into useable light when compared with HPS lighting, with an incredibly long working life; the Lumiled LEDS used in the LUMii BRIGHT are rated to around 60,000 hours which equates to roughly 13 years of operation! Using LEDs mean less landfill and less replacement, so are also better for the environment.

Supplemental Lighting

As mentioned above, LUMii BRIGHT’s full spectrum, white LEDs and low power consumption (100 W) make it great for supplementing HPS lamps, giving plants a boost during critical stages in their growth development. It can also be used to illuminate dark corners not typically reached by your HPS lamp, helping to ensure an even yield across your whole grow area.

Heat Control

The cleverly designed heat sinks takes the heat away from the chips and more importantly, away from your crop, while the reduced infra-red output means less direct heat to your plants. This can make it easier to maintain grow room temperatures; the exceptional running heat of a HPS lamp during the peak of summer, even with the help of fans, can be a killer (literally); just remember to account for this adjustment during your first winter using LEDs!

Constant development

As a result of the development over the last 5 years of LED lighting we are now at the point where LEDs can feasibly be considered the future of Hydroponic lighting, but as with any innovation, the technology available is constantly developing, driving down cost and increasing efficiency. HydroGarden is pleased to be leading this process with the LUMii BRIGHT, and by constantly testing new chips, new chip blends and new chip positions, with every small batch, we intend to keep BRIGHT as relevant as it can be.