ECO Farm Z8–800 Samsung LM301B LED Grow Light VS Gavita Pro RS 2400e 800W LED Grow Light

 Indoor plants are a great way to add greenery to your home. However, they can be difficult to care for. One of the biggest challenges of growing plants indoors is getting them enough light. In this article, we’ll go through our top picks for the best grow lights for houseplants.

Without enough light, plants will become spindly and weak and may fail to bloom or set fruit. To help your plants thrive, you need to provide them with the right type of light. This is where grow lights come in.

Advantages of LED lighting

Greater Efficiency: Generally, LED lights consume less energy than other types of grow lights. This means less electricity bills and a smaller carbon footprint for you. LEDs also last longer than fluorescent or HID lights, so you won’t have to replace them as often.

Longer Lifespan: As mentioned above, LEDs last longer than other types of grow lights. A good LED grow light will last at least 50,000 hours before needing to be replaced, and some LEDs can even keep running for over 60,000 hours.

Cooler: LEDs also generate much less heat than other types of grow lights. That’s great news if you’re running lights in a small house or apartment, because it means you don’t have to worry about overheating damaging your house. However, be careful if you live in a hot climate as your LED grow lights may not keep cool enough on their own. It might be a good idea to invest in LED fans and other cooling tools.

Full Spectrum: LEDs can produce a wide range of wavelengths to give your plants all their nutritional needs. That’s why LEDs have become so popular among indoor gardeners: They make it easy to maintain ideal growing conditions, leading to bigger and better harvests.

ECO Farm ECOD Samsung UV+ IR 800W Dimmable LED Grow Light

Features:

This ECO Farm LED grow light adopts the top quality equivalent diodes, producing a 800W PPF output of 2019.6 μmol/s and a PAR efficacy of 2.8umol/J, ideal for home and vertical farm planting. This full spectrum grow light meets the lighting requirements of every stage during the plant’s growth cycle. It consists of 660nm of red light, IR, 3000K and 6500K of the white light spectrum, providing plants in all stages from veg to flower with everything they need in the natural sunlight.LED plant lights enable cultivators to produce density buds, the 8-bar configuration allows widely application in the home grow (grow box and grow tents), climate rooms, commercial growing (horizontal and vertical), greenhouse cultivation, vertical racks, hydroponics.

Gavita Pro RS 2400e 800W LED Grow Light

Features:

Gavita LED grow lights produce 2400 μmol/s at an impressive 3.0 μmol/J efficiency and provide a broad spectrum of white light and enhanced blue light to help enhance flavor and aroma. This powerful full-spectrum light source is designed for all aspects of plant growth — from the vegetative stage to the end of flowering and when higher light levels are required. Using the Gavita Master EL3 controller, the luminaire can be dimmed by up to 10% without any loss of efficiency. The RS 2400e is built with high quality components including Gavita drivers and custom Gavita branded diodes to deliver the performance and longevity you’ve come to expect from a trusted brand.

Main factors of choosing the best grow light

Now you may have a basic knowledge of the grow light, then we will go ahead to our main topic — How to choose the right LED grow light for indoor growing?

There are many different types of LED grow lights and LED grow light bulbs on the market. Different factors will affect which grow light bulb is best for you. These factors you should consider:

1. Light Spectrum

A color spectrum is a graphical display of each of the colors in the light. Scientists use wavelength numbers to refer to the colors instead of color names, which is a much more accurate way to measure the color.

The various light colors effect plants growth differently. This is not all visible to the naked eye. Typically, what humans refer to as “light” is actually only the visible area of the light spectrum (~400–750 nanometers).

This visible light spectrum range covers most of the range of wavelengths needed to grow plants, known as the PAR or photosynthetically active radiation.
light spectrum range

Different wavelengths of light have different effects on plant photosynthesis. The light required for plant photosynthesis has a wavelength of about 400–700nm. 400–500nm (blue) light and 610–720nm (red) contribute the most to photosynthesis.

Blue (470nm) and red (630nm) LEDs can just provide the light needed by plants. Therefore, the ideal choice for LED plant lights is to use a combination of these two colors. In terms of visual effects, the red and blue plant lights are pink.

Blue light can promote the growth of green leaves
Red light is helpful for flowering and fruiting and prolonging the flowering period.

There’s a variety of plants and each of them has different habits, and also different growth stages have different light needs. For the healthiest plants you really need to include light from right across the color spectrum. While it’s true that certain types of light may be more effective at different stages of the growth cycle, your plants still need light from across the spectrum at any stage of their growth. If you concentrate your light too much on one end of the spectrum you probably won’t like the results. The spectrum required for plant growth should be a continuous spectrum with a certain distribution width. It is obviously inappropriate to use a light source made of two specific wavelength chips of red and blue with a very narrow spectrum.

Full spectrum means all colors (but means much more than just color named Electromagnetic spectrum) produced from natural light and a term used for grow lights.

Full-spectrum grow lights are the closest to real sunlight and will help your plants grow the best. Natural sunlight emits all spectrums of light, even ultraviolet and infrared, which aren’t visible to the naked eye.

2. Light intensity — PPFD (photosynthesis flux density, PPFD)

Both PPFD and Lux are units used to measure the intensity of light. Lux is universally used to measure and compare the brightness of visible light that reaches a surface, also referred to as illuminance. PPFD is referring to the amount of light suitable for active photosynthesis of plants.

Whenever dealing with lighting conditions of plants, Lux might not accurately represent the real light intensity suitable for photosynthesis. If you’re seeking the optimum PAR range, switch to PPFD. If you want to determine the overall light intensity in your grow room, choose the unit of your liking — PPFD or the lux option, here we will explain the PPFD in details.

For grow light, wattage is not as important as you think, but the light intensity (PPFD) is the very most important factor when choosing grow light.

The amount of light is actually measured as PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density), sometimes abbreviated to PPF (Photosynthetic Photon Flux, umol/s). PPFD is a better way to measure the quantity of light for LED grow lights, than lumens.

PPFD is a ‘spot’ measurement that tells you how many photons from the PAR range hit a specific area of your canopy over time. It is expressed as micro moles per square meter per second (μmol/m2/s).

Note that the PPFD value is heavily dependent on two factors that can vary widely: the distance between the LEDs and the plant, and the loss of PPF from vegetation canopy.

The more light reaches the plants (μmol/m2/s, aka PPFD), the greater the rate of photosynthesis. But light can only do so much: after approximately 350 μmol/m2/s, light stops having as much of an effect on photosynthesis, since the plant’s chloroplasts can only process so much light at a time.

3. Grow Light Efficiency — PPF/W

In order to know how effective a grow light is at growing plants, we need to understand what is called its ‘efficacy’. That is, how efficient is it at converting the Watts we’re putting in, with plant-available light that comes out.

Watts go IN to a grow light. PPF is what comes OUT. To understand the efficacy of a grow light, we simply divide one by the other — i.e. PPF per Watt (PPF/W) or PPFD per Watt (PPFD/W).

Higher light efficiency means more energy-saving. The energy that we use for growing light indoors starts off as a watt.

Conclusion

Indoor plants are delicate and require extra care. Grow lights are essential to provide sufficient light for healthy growth of plants and all their processes i.e. photosynthesis and flowering can proceed without hassle.

LED or fluorescent lights that cover the ideal spectral range and have the perfect intensity are ideal as grow lights. When using grow lights, keep a certain distance between the lights and houseplants so that the heat does not affect the plants.

Don’t forget to turn off the lights at night because plants need rest just like us. Even if you forget to do this, there is a way to save your plants. Look for yellow leaves in the plant. Make sure your plants are not deficient in nitrogen, if any. If not, replace the lights and remove damaged leaves.