Custom LED grow lights are special artificial lights that we use for indoor gardening to support plant growth without natural light.
Generally, these lights allow current through light-emitting diodes with light resulting from the recombination of holes and electrons.
Interestingly, these lights provide room for tailoring and customizing light intensity, spectrum, and timing for the plant’s optimum growth.
Custom LED grow light supports plants through all growth phases, including fruiting, flowering, photosynthesis, and vegetative growth.
As an indoor gardener, these lights will offer you versatility, energy efficiency, and high durability.
Today’s article looks into custom LED grow lights focusing on their benefits and relevant aspects.
What Are Custom LED Grow Lights
Custom LED grow lights are unique artificial light-emitting diode lights designed to support indoor gardening.
Simply put, this light operates by allowing current through light-emitting diodes, thus producing light when there is a recombination of holes and electrons.
And unlike incandescent grow lights, you can tailor this option to provide a specific intensity and spectra to support light at a particular growth stage.
Generally, custom LED grow lights allow you to adjust timing, intensity, and light spectrum to fit a plant’s specific needs.
Controlling these elements helps you stimulate flowering, enhance vegetative growth, and optimize photosynthesis.
With custom LED grow lights, you’re certain of integration with high-quality LEDs emitting specific wavelengths like blue and red.
Moreover, the lights present remote control, dimming features, and programmable timers.
The customization capability gives LED grow lights high versatility, exceptional durability, energy efficiency, and the ability to mimic natural light.
Benefits of Custom LED Grow Lights
(An outside view of a greenhouse at night)
There are benefits you’ll get in using custom LED grow lights that you won’t find in any other options. This section highlights some of these critical benefits.
Optimized Light Spectrum
The main advantage of custom LED grow lights is the ability to be customized to a specific wavelength that supports a plant through a particular growth phase.
Optimizing the light guarantees your plant the correct balance of blue and red wavelengths.
Energy Efficiency
LED lights offer the greatest efficiency by converting a larger percentage of their input energy into useful light and minimal heat.
Similarly, custom lights will experience the same energy efficiency, thus ensuring you experience energy savings and low energy costs.
Long Lifespan
The LED lights used to design custom LED grow lights have high durability than incandescent and fluorescent light options.
Surprisingly, they can even last for 50,000 hours, thus reducing the need for repairs and replacements.
Control and Customization
Custom LED grow lights have advanced module that offers remote control capabilities, dimming features, and programmable timers.
Therefore, it becomes easy to manipulate your light to fit the plant’s specific needs.
Such a high precision level guarantees optimum plant growth and enhanced precision.
Heat Management
Custom LED grow lights emit less heat than other options like HID, fluorescent, and incandescent lights.
Therefore, you won’t experience damage to the plant, and spending more money on heat management systems won’t be necessary.
Limited Environmental Impact
(A marijuana plant under LED light)
Unlike fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lights with harmful elements like mercury, lead, and phosphor, LED grows lights are free of such elements.
Such elements harm your health and the environment by increasing your carbon footprint.
Space Efficiency
Besides LED grow lights being compact, you can customize and design them to fit different shapes and sizes.
This makes it easier to customize their growing area, thus providing uniform lighting to your plants.
Plant-Specific Application
Each plant and growth phase has a specific light requirement. For example, the light wavelength a plant will need for flowering differs from the one supporting the vegetative stage.
Therefore, custom LED grow lights give you the power to supply your plants with the required light.
Limited Disease and Pest Attacks
(Vegetable growing under LED grow light)
Most plants suffer from diseases and pests thanks to excessive humidity and heat.
Fortunately, custom LED grow lights emit less heat, thus denying plants the heat responsible for causing diseases and pests.
Aspects of LED Grow Light Customization
Custom LED grow light has several aspects that you can manipulate to meet the requirement of your indoor plants.
Light Spectrum
You can customize the LED grow light spectrum by selecting the specific wavelength that your plant needs.
More specifically, you can use blue and red to enhance photosynthesis and far-red/green to impact particular physiological processes.
Intensity Control
(A person using technology to monitor and control grow lights)
LED grow lights also allow you to adjust the light intensity and match the needs of your plants to the available light output.
Generally, seedlings/younger plants require a lower intensity, while mature plants in the flowering phases require a high intensity.
Photoperiod Manipulation
You can set your LED to grow light to provide light to your plant in a cycle that mimics natural light.
As a result, controlling growth patterns like inducing flowering and fruiting becomes easy.
Dimming Capabilities
This feature in LED grow lights allows you to adjust the light intensity to fit your plant’s requirements.
Also, you can create your desired lighting effect, manage heat levels, and, most importantly, save energy.
Heat Management
Another LED grows light customization aspect involves optimizing heat management.
Therefore, you can incorporate fans and heat sinks to accelerate heat dissipation.
Supplementary Features
Custom LED grow lights have supplementary features like Infrared (IR) and Ultraviolet (UV) LED to give plants a desired effect.
This could include providing pest resistance mechanisms, stress response, and resin production.
FAQs
What is the custom LED grow light lifespan?
The lifespan of LED grow light varies based on multiple factors like the maintenance level, operating hours, operating conditions, and LED quality.
However, on average, expect your LED grow light to last for about 50,000 hours which could increase to over 100,000 hours.
This durability is very high compared to HID, incandescent, and fluorescent grow lights.
Can you leave your custom LED grow light on throughout the night?
Yes! Nothing stops you from leaving your custom LED grow light on throughout the night if your indoor plant needs to require it.
However, most plants only require 12 hours of light supply.
And since we recommend powering LED lights during the day to complement natural light, there is no need to leave the LEDs on at night.
Moreover, such a move would result in high power consumption and energy bills.
Do custom LED grow lights consume a lot of power?
Not at all! Custom LED grow lights consume less power and emit more light than HID, incandescent, and fluorescent lights.
Also, they produce little/no heat, thus causing no damage to plants.
If you have fluorescent or incandescent grow lights, we recommend switching to LED lights to save on power costs.
At what time of the day should you use a custom LED grow light?
Well, the time you leave your LED to-grow lights on depends on your expected growth outcome and the specific needs of your plants.
But generally, your focus should be supplying LED grow lights in a manner that mimics night cycles and natural sunlight.
Surprisingly, plants, too, require a certain level of darkness for metabolic processes and rest.
We recommend 12-18 hours of LED light daily during the vegetative phase and less than 12 hours during flowering.
However, it would be best to determine the specific light requirement for your indoor plants.
Final Remarks
As an indoor garden, you will rely heavily on artificial lighting to support your plant growth, thanks to the lack of natural light inside your home.
Fortunately, we have worthwhile lighting solutions, the most reliable being a custom LED grow light.
This lighting option gives you the power to adjust the light aspect to meet your plants’ requirements.
Some aspects you’ll encounter include dimming capabilities, light spectrum, intensity control, photoperiod manipulation, and heat management.