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Cultivating Plants Indoors Requires Special Grow Lamps

By Lisa Kaspiron
Nov 8, 2009
Lighting is critical to herb cultivation. Growing inside requires providing your crops with light that is like what they would receive outside in nature. Growing lamps are extremely important for any grow room gardening operation. The sun provides a lot of light for crops growing outdoors and creating that light inside can be difficult.

When designing your grow room lamp system the important thing to remember is the light spectrum frequency of the light you utilize. The light spectrum is a measure of the frequencies of light waves.

Light spectrum is important because different wavelengths of light have different effects on growing plants. Planning should be used to determine not only what types of bulbs to use but also at what point during the growth cycles.

One of the biggest obstacles to growing indoors is generating sufficient energy, most of which is used up by the lights. To avoid this problem special grow lights are very efficient compared to normal light bulbs and are able to make enough light while not using a great deal of power.

The main bulb types are fluorescent grow lights, HID lamps including high pressure sodium lamps and metal halide lamps, and LED grow lamps. Gardeners utilize these types of bulbs either alone or with each other.

Fluorescent lights are very popular and are one of the cheapest garden lighting options. Normal household fluorescents will work however there are several kinds of fluorescents designed specially for growing. For small spaces engineers have created compact fluorescent lighting systems. These designs do not take up much space and are good for very small rooms or grow boxes. For more intensity high output fluorescent bulbs can be used and provide up to twice the intensity of normal lights.

High pressure sodium light and metal halide lamps are both preferred by many gardeners and are categorized as high intensity discharge lights. High pressure sodium produce bulb in the yellow-orange range of the spectrum. They are most effective when utilized for the vegetative cycle of growth. Metal halide bulbs emit light on the blue end of the spectrum and are normally used for the flowering stage of plant growth.

LED grow lights are quickly becoming popular because of their efficiency and convenient size.
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