Triaxis Energy

Fluorescent, HID and HPS lights have been the artificial light sources for indoor gardening as long as people have been doing it.  There’s been no major changes in light sources for quite some time.  Now comes LED lighting.

LED or (Light Emitting Diode) lighting is not a brand new source of light.  It’s been around for many years.  You’ve seen them in things like computers and TV standby lights for example but as technology has changed so has their implementation.

The problem with conventional lighting High Intensity lighting is that it uses vast amounts of electricity and produces a lot of heat as well which can harm plants and even kill them if managed poorly.  Fluorescent lighting at least managed to eliminate most of that problem but don’t put out as many lumens as High Intensity lighting.  Given that LED’s don’t produce huge amounts of lumens either they do use less power than High Intensity lighting and produce little heat as well.

The very unique thing about LED’s is their ability to give the plants only what they need to grow.  Plants mainly only use two colour spectrums to grow: Blue for vegetative growth and Red for flowering.  Since all other sources of light produce white light (which contains all colours of the spectrum) a large percentage of electricity is wasted on light spectrum’s not being used by the plant.  LED’s can be made colour specific by using individual LED bulbs of Red or Blue thus using power for more of the light your plant needs.

Very little electricity is used to power LED’s.  LED’s only use about 25% electricity of conventional lighting plus they put off very little heat.  What’s good about less heat?  Well, lights can be placed closer to plants allowing for less light dissipation and more light getting to your plants.  The only strange things about LED’s is that when plants touch the bulbs they seem to grow in strange patterns or just erratically but this still doesn’t harm the plants.

Cool new or at least “newer” technology that is raising some interest in the indoor gardening world.  Less heat, less electricity, lower bills… seems to be pretty smart technology for growing plants.  If you can get 3 to 4 times the lighting for the same electricity.  The down side is that they are expensive to buy these lights but if you have the budget and the ambition LED’s might be right for you.