Best 480W Grow Light Spider Farmer VS TotalGrow

 Grow lights allow you to garden almost anywhere and in every season. While grow lights are often popular when seeding your spring garden, you can also use them year-round for herbs, houseplants, and vegetables.

When you’re looking for the right grow lights for your needs and space, remember to always look for the most environmentally friendly lighting options. Even slight efficiencies, like placing your lights near a sunny window or finding lights with a timer, can really add up over the years. You’ll feel good knowing that you’re practicing green habits like gardening while reducing your carbon footprint in general.

Think of your grow lights as a long-term investment. You will be able to use them every season to grow delicious herbs or any other plant. They are especially good for growing seedlings before the weather is warm enough to plant outdoors. Growing your own plants from seed can also help you save money compared to buying a nursery. Perhaps most importantly, they bring life and light to those dark months of the year. Here are some of the best grow lights when you start your own indoor setup.

The Advantages of LED grow lights

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Higher Efficiency

LEDs are far more efficient than HID lighting. Pound-for-pound — or rather kilowatt-for-kilowatt — they produce more light than HPS fixtures. The diodes of LED luminaires have an inherent advantage in converting electricity into light. This means you’ll have lower electricity bills, and you may not need as many fixtures to provide the same amount of light.

With better electrical efficiency comes better power efficiency. Tailored LED spectra provide plants with the conditions they need to increase growth per kilowatt. With an optimized light spectrum and strong light intensity, plants produce better-selling materials that command higher prices due to their higher quality.

The low power consumption of LEDs also reduces carbon emissions. This environmental benefit has prompted many governments to offer rebates for switching to LEDs, so check with your local jurisdiction.
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Reduce HVAC Requirements

Since LEDs generate far less heat than HPS, air conditioning costs can be reduced by 30–40% when you switch. If you design your facility from scratch, your designer can specify a smaller HVAC system, reducing your capital expenditures.

Unlike HPS, the LED spectrum does not contain infrared light. Infrared is radiant heat that increases leaf temperature. The leaves are cooler and you can run a higher room temperature, resulting in significant savings in HVAC costs. Lower leaf temperatures can also help reduce pests and mold.
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Long life and low maintenance

Unlike HIDs, LEDs do not need to be replaced every three to four crops and are less prone to damage. HID bulbs are fragile, and as growers know, they need to be handled with great care to avoid costly breakage. The potential for breakage — and the resulting release of metal gases such as mercury — could violate European Good Manufacturing Practices and other standards. If you want to dispose of these lamps properly, you will need to work with and pay for a dedicated recycling service.

On the other hand, LEDs have excellent durability and runtime. Once suspended, LED fixtures provide 50,000 hours of runtime and often require replacement after ten years of use. The IP-rated waterproof luminaire is easy to clean and the individual diodes are encapsulated in polymer rather than glass, making it the most durable lighting solution available today. If your fixtures have an IP-67 rating, you can hose them down between production cycles.

‍Vertical Growth and Dimming
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Since LEDs have almost no infrared in their spectrum, they can hang near crops, which opens the door to vertical planting, allowing you to make the most of your square footage. Multiple LED strips can be placed on the crop without the hot spot feature of HID technology. Unlike HPS lights, LEDs can be dimmed without loss of efficiency, meaning you can slowly increase light intensity throughout the crop cycle while remaining cost-effective.

Spider Farmer SE5000 480W Full Spectrum LED Grow Light

Features:

This Spider Farmer LED grow light features a uniquely designed 6 extended LED strips that provide more even canopy coverage, especially on the outer edges of the growing area. With 1680 SAMSUNG LM301B diodes, the SE5000 Led Grow Light consumes 480 watts at 1333 umol/s, achieving an impressive PPE of 2.75 umol/J, covering a high yield full-cycle growth of 4'x4'. The full spectrum (380–410nm, 660–665nm, 730nm, 3200–4200K, 4800–5000K) is ideal for vegetable flowering to suit every stage of the plant cycle. The dimmer knob is ideal for growers to adjust the light intensity for different growth stages. The daisy chain feature allows you to connect up to 30 spider farm grow lights — dimming multiple lights at the same time.

TotalGrow MH Lumyre 480W LED Grow Light

Features:

TotalGrow LED grow lights feature multiple high-intensity light strips in a slim profile and built-in power supply to distribute the ideal light intensity evenly across your growing area to meet your growing goals. Superior, customizable full spectrum supports efficient, high-quality growth of any life stage and crop variety. This plug-and-play solution with direct daisy chaining is easy to implement, has low up-front and ongoing costs, and sustainably produces high-quality crops. The efficacy of this LED grow light is as high as 2.8 μmol/J to meet the light intensity your plants need. Robust, reliable, ideally shaped design for ease of use and excellent uniformity.

Things to take care of while buying the right light

Efficiency:
The efficiency of the Grow Lights is one of the critical aspects you must check. An ideal grow light must be operated at a high level to produce high energy with a low maintenance cost.

So, before jumping to the suggestions of the best LED grow lights, you must consider all these aspects, make your calculation and then choose which one is ideal for you according to your requirements.

Real Wattage vs. Theoretical Wattage
Most of the LED lights have two wattages: Real Wattage and Theoretical Wattage displayed on their packaging. Theoretical Wattage is the potential wattage on which an LED light could run when LED chips run at full power. For example, A 1000W LED light can have theoretical wattage of around 600Watt. But LED lights never run on full power as it will shorten their life.

So, LED lights always run at 50–60% of their theoretical wattage, known as their real wattage. It is the amount of light LEDs actually consume to perform. So, a 1000W LED light generally has real wattage of around 300–400 Watt, and you must consider both these wattages before buying a grow light.

Cooling System
Large LED lights emit more heat while providing intense light to your plants for their growth, and thus they must be equipped with a proper heat sinking system and cooling fans for heat dissipation.

In the absence of both these things, the life span of LED light will shorten, and performance will decline. Also, the overheating won’t be good for your plants as well. So always give attention to the cooling system of LED grow light before buying one.

Things to remember when using the led grow lights

• Don’t Move Them Around Too Much

Grow lights, especially the modern-day panel-based variants, aren’t the most durable ones. You have to move them around very carefully to ensure that they do not bump into something or accidentally fall down. This is a general practice that applies to pretty much any piece of electronic item that you are working with, try not to bang it around too hard and it will work just fine.

• Set UpSurge Protection

A fluctuating electric current can also damage grow lights, just like it does to most other electronic items. A surge in the voltage can lead to circuits being fried out which will lead to the grow light malfunctioning. Sometimes these surges can even cause fire-related accidents which you might want to keep an eye out for. Make sure you are taking sufficient measures to enforce a good quality surge protection while using grow lights.

• Make Sure You Hang Them Correctly

Grow lights, when used inside a grow tent, are hung from the top. Depending on the different phases of growth, you might need to raise them or lower them too. This is something that has to be done in a very precise and careful manner. If you don’t hang your lights correctly, the first impact will be on the plants that you are growing as some portions will have light come to them from a closer distance while others will have it come from farther away. The bigger threat is that a poorly balanced light can topple over and fall any day — and can get damaged due to the impact of the fall. Hence, make sure you’re hanging your grow lights in the right way.

• Service Them Every Few Seasons

Try and get your grow lights serviced every few seasons. We’d recommend using the light for two growth cycles, and then sending it over to the technicians/company experts who can clean it up, tighten up things, and ensure that it is working as intended.

• Dim Only When Need Be

Dimming the light too much, especially if you are using older models, can cause the ballasts to go bust. Hence, make sure you are dimming the lights based only on your need and you aren’t doing it very frequently. Dimming is great to provide the plants a natural lighting environment, but make sure you are doing it gradually and not in a way that is too frequent as it might have an adverse effect on the ballast, which is generally considered a very delicate part of the grow light.

Do note that these are only some tips and recommendations that we find are the best way to ensure that your grow light lasts long. This is not a definitive list and there are some external factors that can still cause things to go wrong. However, these are among some of the best practices that make sure your light continues to perform well. Do let us know if you’ve got any tips or practices that ensure that your grow lights last long and we will make sure to have them included in this list.

Conclusion

We hope our detailed buying guide on LED Grow lights will help you choose the best LED lights for commercial spaces and small rooms.

All the links we mention in this article are true and reliable. We’ve included the most important recommendations in this article, based on the latest market availability, and we’ll update our list of top LED grow lights for you from time to time. Stay tuned to us for more gadget suggestions and updates. Happy gardening!