Mars Hydro FC 4800 480W LED Grow Light VS Viparspectra KS5000 500W LED Grow Light

 It used to be that lighting was one of the most expensive aspects of growing plants. A good set of HID or CFS lights could set you back a couple hundred with all the required equipment. Now, thanks to LED lights, grow lights are much more affordable, making growing plants at home much more attainable.

Can I Grow a Plant Without Using LED Grow Lights?

Yes, you can make use of other types of grow lights to grow your plants. These include HPS lights, Metal Halides, CFL lights and other similar options of lighting. However, LED grow lights are generally considered the best out of all these due to multiple reasons such as being non-toxic, being cheaper to operate and for being long-lasting. In fact, you can totally eliminate the need for using grow lights and even choose to grow your plant outdoors or in an area where you get a lot of sunlight. However, using grow lights gives you a greater advantage as you can control the intensity of the light as well as the amount of hours that the light is provided to the plant.

Mars Hydro FC 4800 480W LED Grow Light

Features:

This Mars Hydro LED Grow Light is designed for the highest yields of any compatible LED grow light. The FC 4800 is foldable up to 180 degrees, making it small, compact, and easy to install. The sturdy design and superior quality components make the FC 4800 a durable light with an impressive lifespan. The Mars Hydro FC 4800 LED Grow Light features 2070 pcs Samsung Lm301 and Osram 660nm diodes for stunningly high output and low heat, which mean lower costs for you. An independent and detachable power supply makes setup a snap and the all aluminium heatsink creates better heat dissipation and eliminates noisy cooling fans so your space runs cool and quiet.

Viparspectra KS5000 500W LED Grow Light

Features:

VIPARSPECTRA LED Grow Light uses market-leading Samsung LM301H diodes (3.10 μmol/J) and Osram 660nm diodes, more energy-efficient LEDs that increase crop yields and save operating costs. High-end components give the KS5000 incredible performance. The KS series is designed for individual or commercial growers who want to optimize their growing space for maximum crop yield while producing the highest quality crops. The KS5000 Dimmable Grow Light with Daisy Chain allows you to connect up to 100 KS5000 grow lights to your commercial grow, horizontal and vertical farming, greenhouse grow, pipe grow, hydroponics, 4x4 grow tent. 

Buying LED Grow Lights: Factors To Consider

Whether you’re new to growing indoors altogether or just new to growing plants with LED plant lights, you may not be familiar with some of the unique characteristics of LED lighting. Here are the main factors you want to check on when purchasing LED horticultural lights for your plants grow.

The factors are listed in no particular order. Only you can know which one is most important to you, given your specific growing situation.

Light Spectrum
Most indoor horticultural LED lights use LEDs in multiple colors. The majority will be various shades of red and blue, with the better lights also using some white LEDs as well as some infrared and ultra-violet ones.

This mix of colors gives you all the light plants, need for every stage of growth: cloning, veg and bloom. It is referred to as full-spectrum light and is generally what you want.

Finally, I need to mention all-white LED fixtures. These lights use only white LED, which gives them a spectrum similar to natural sunlight (which is also a mix of the HPS and metal halide spectra). Proponents of white light claim it is best for plants, because it gives them the light they are used to from the sun.

More and more, the indoor plants industry as a whole is moving toward white light. White LED grow light fixtures are becoming much more common on the market as a result.

And white light does work well to grow and flower plants. But it includes a lot of light in the yellow and green ranges, which is light plants do not use much during photosynthesis. Thus, it goes to waste, right?

That has been the case made by manufacturers (and fans) of fixtures with mostly red and blue LED lights. They say these are more efficient, because you are not using any of the electricity you paid for to produce light that plants don’t want.

But plants do want that light. Sure, they don’t want as much of it as they do of light in the red and blue wavelengths, but they do still want it. That is why the best-selling LED grow lights these days all include white LEDs on their lights. And many use mostly white LED light.

Light Intensity
For LED lights, the most widely used measure of intensity is PAR (technically, it is PPFD and not PAR, but most still refer to it as PAR). It stands for Photosynthetically Active Radiation and is used to measure the amount of light in the wavelengths that plants use for photosynthesis. Some brands will list the lumen output, but that isn’t all that useful for grow lights.

Some brands give PAR readings for their indoor plant lights; others do not. Those that do often only give one value, which doesn’t really tell you much about its effectiveness for vegetative growing, much less blooming.

That value was taken dead center beneath the light. A large value here means you have a powerful light in the middle of the coverage area, but it tells you nothing about the strength of the light around the edges.

Ideally, manufacturers will provide a PAR footprint that shows PAR readings throughout the coverage area. Most do not do this, however, so you will often have to look to tests done by third parties, such as review sites, for this information. For white LED lights, lumen output can have some value. For others, it is mostly useless.

Coverage Area
This refers to the area a grow light can cover while still providing enough light for the plants in that space. For the flowering stage of growth, plants need more light, so you will have to move the light fixtures closer to the canopy. This increases the intensity, but also decreases the coverage area.

This is why LED lights have a smaller coverage area for the flowering stage than they do for vegging. Always make sure the space given by the manufacturer is for blooming, unless you only plan to veg with your light.

Cooling System
Te best LED grow lights give off far less heat than HID bulbs, but powerful LED diodes still emit enough heat that they require cooling. Any larger LED fixture must have heat sinks to reduce the amount of heat emitted and internal fans to disperse whatever heat remains.

You want to make sure that a LED light’s cooling fans and heat sinks are adequate for the amount and strength of diodes in contains. If it isn’t, this will considerably shorten the life span of the LED chips and make them far less efficient.

Another issue to consider is noise. Fans can generate a lot of noise, so fixtures with multiple fans will be much louder than you might think.

When you add their noise to that of oscillating fans and exhaust vans for your tent, you can end up with a fairly high noise level. If this is a concern, consider a fixture with fewer, or even no, fans.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this review on the best LED grow lights for growing plants! We’re passionate advocates and dedicated users of LED grow lights for our own indoor cultivation, and hope that we’ve been able to give you all the information necessary to navigate this complicated field. As always, good luck in all of your growing adventures!