Indoor Garden Lighting Options

For anyone’s budget – hobby or enterprise, keeping the cost of grow lights and their operation at a reasonable level is important. Your improvised sunlight must be effective and economical without sacrificing your plant’s needs. You want the best harvest for the least amount of money invested.

Traditional HID grow lights are expensive to purchase, and even more costly to operate long term. They are also not particularly green in terms of reducing your carbon footprint.  You want safer food to eat at the same time as you are trying to lessen your carbon footprint. Both must be done at a price that is affordable for you to maintain.

While you’re considering your options, keep in mind that the price of your grow lights is just the beginning of the out of pocket costs. Running them daily and keeping your electricity bill paid is another. Lighting is never an inexpensive purchase and grow lights can really run up a hefty shopping cart total. While you are researching the cost of different grow light fixtures, you should also be making notes on the output of usable spectrum.

Your plants won’t use all of the light spectrums produced by HID lamps. In fact, you’ll be wasting even more money than buying more lumen wattage than you really require. HIDs create very hot grow room temperatures, which in turn will have you paying for excessive electricity to maintain a safe growing climate.

You Do Have Better Grow Light Options

CFL lamps, or compact fluorescent lamps are far less expensive both to buy and to operate continuously. While they run cooler than HIDs, be prepared to pay for more energy every month than if you were running LED grow lighting.

LED lighting is really your best choice. While the lamps themselves are not cheap to purchase, they are far less expensive to operate. LEDs use 80% less electricity, burn much cooler and deliver the perfect spectrum to your crop through each stage of growing. Rather than one lamp for the life of the plants, you use the right spectrum to help your plants perform the task at hand.

• Blue for stem and foliage growth
• Red for flowering
• Orange for fruit production

Not only will you see a huge savings in electrical use, your ventilation equipment will last longer when your lighting produces 90% less heat. The light may appear dim to you compared to more traditional lights, but a 90-watt LED light fixture actually puts out more growing light than a 400-watt metal halid or HPS lamp.

LED Grow Lamps Last Longest

Don’t let that purchase price of the light scare you off!  The diodes in an LED grow light fixture can last for up to 100,000 hours. This computes to be more than 5,550 consecutive 18-hour days… can you handle 15 years ROI? No grow lamp bulb is this efficient and cost effective. All while reducing the carbon footprint needed to grow nutritious, chemical-free food with more flavor than what you buy at your local grocery store.

HOWEVER…

To size up the situation in a nutshell, your indoor garden is far more budget friendly with LED lamps. They can save you hundreds of dollars over a year in an average home growing space. All of which looks good on paper, BUT if you want to grow fruiting plants, prepare to lay out a sizable sum on that LED fixture. The most you can grow with the average LED grow light is leaves – they don’t give plants enough energy to provide you with peppers, tomatoes, and harvests like that. If all you want to grow is lettuce – LED is perfect. Otherwise, you might want to check into taking out a loan, because fixtures like NASA uses run tens of thousands of dollars each.

While LEDs are getting better all the time, it isn’t the right light to grow everything under the sun. Maybe someday, but not yet.