What's going on everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the epic gardening podcast. My name is Kevin. I am the founder of epic gardening.com and today we are talking about metal halide grow lights.

These are a form of HID lighting, also known as high intensity discharge lighting, and they are a very popular type of hydroponic lighting.

The question is why?

Why would you use a metal halide grow light over any other type of light.

So first we'll talk about that.

What is a metal halide grow light?

Well, it's one of the best grow light

alternatives for growing greens.

And when I say greens, I mean anything that doesn't flower.

Or it does flower, but typically we wouldn't grow it to that point, like lettuce,

basil, kale, arugola Chard. You get the picture.

Metal-Howlight girl lights have been around since the early 60s, and have been further developed

for a bunch of different applications. Street lighting, car headlamps, but our favorite is growing greens.

So they're very similar to a mercury vapor lamp, but the main difference is that

they contain additional metal halide compounds in the quartz arc tube.

And the reason that they contain these is to improve efficiency and color rendering.

So usually metal halide... and color rendering.

So usually metal halide lights are rated with a pretty high

lumen output of around 100 lumen per watt and they last around 20,000 hours and don't degrade as quickly as other lamps.

I mean they're pretty quick compared to like an LED but in general they degrade

relatively slow. 20,000 hours is a lot of time. So this makes them a valuable

addition to our gardens. But because of the nature of how they produce light, they also

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