Full Spectrum LEDs vs. HIDs
The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers
Epic Gardening
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2019
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
Today we take a question from a listener about the best type of LED grow lights and if they're a better option than HID or high intensity discharge lights for growing fruiting crops as we move into fall and winter.
Learn More: The Best Full Spectrum LED Grow Lights
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone welcome back you're doing amazing today and I hope your fall |
| 0:04.8 | garden is doing well today we are taking a question from Lori Huang she says hello |
| 0:09.5 | Kevin with all these new LED growboards on the market I was wondering what your opinion is on the use of these boards to grow indoor fruits and vegetables |
| 0:17.0 | versus ceramic metal halide or H-I-D lights. |
| 0:21.0 | After a bug-infested outdoor growing season this year I want to venture |
| 0:25.0 | into the world of indoor hydropunate gardening and of course side note from |
| 0:29.2 | Kevin here this can also work for soil gardening indoors and I would like to use a reliable source of light for fruiting tomatoes cucumbers beans etc |
| 0:36.4 | Thank you for your wonderful podcast and website love you well Lori. I love you too |
| 0:41.8 | Thank you so much for that question. So today we're going to talk about this. |
| 0:45.5 | Now this is an answer that can be quite complex. I do have a video on YouTube about exactly |
| 0:51.1 | how to evaluate an LED grow light because as compared to ceramic |
| 0:55.1 | metal halide and HID lights in general which is high intensity discharge basically |
| 1:01.4 | things that aren't LEDs. They use classic lighting technology. |
| 1:05.0 | It can be hard to do a one-to-one comparison for these, |
| 1:09.0 | especially because there's multiple different types of LED technology as well. |
| 1:14.0 | So I'm going to give a quick take, a hot take, |
| 1:18.0 | and then I'm going to go into some of the details. |
| 1:20.0 | So the hot take is this. |
| 1:22.0 | If you want guaranteed performance for relatively low cost |
| 1:26.4 | you will probably still want to go with an HID light ceramic metal halide is a really good semi full spectrum option so it's a light |
| 1:36.2 | that you could in theory use for vegetative and flowering phase because the spectral output is pretty good and it's relatively inexpensive, although it's one of the more expensive |
| 1:46.2 | types of HID lights in general. If you wanted to go with a metal halide for your vegetative phase and then switch the bulb to a high pressure sodium for your fruiting flowering phase with those tomatoes or those peppers or those cucumbers lorry then you certainly could do that as well. |
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