INDOOR GROW LIGHTS
For Your Hydroponic Garden

Indoor grow lights...
 

                           


Most everyone has successfully grown houseplants indoors without special lighting. House lamps and window lighting is plenty for schefflera or spider plants; but it's not enough to produce tomatoes and squash.

You'll need to provide your hydroponics food factory with decent lighting. Vegetable production requires very bright light which contains the correct type (spectrum) of light, or they won't flower and fruit. This can be provided either by sunlight or by special HID lights (high intensity discharge).

                           

In an outdoor garden, vegetable plants require 4-6 hours of direct sun, with 10 more hours of bright indirect natural light each day. Indoors, you can almost duplicate this with special (and fairly expensive) HID lamps, set on timers to run 14-16 hours per day.

As with temperature, more is not better when it comes to lighting your garden. You might think that keeping the lights on 20 or even 24 hours a day would encourage better or faster growth. Not!

During the day, plants use the light and heat to manufacture their energy. At night, when the lights go off and they cool down , they assimilate and grow. Plants need to rest and recoup at night, just like you do, or they quickly become exhausted and die. So stick to the light and temp recommendations outlined in this section and you'll do well.
 

                           
                              Taking a snooze
 

TYPES OF GROW LIGHTS

They've come up with an improved fluorescent light, the T5, which does a great job with leafy vegetables and herbs. But it just isn't the right spectrum to induce fruiting type veggies, like tomatoes, beans, melons and squash. If you want to stay strictly with the lettuces and herbs, then get a T5 fluorescent unit.

But if you think you might want to grow fruiting crops too, then go with an HID, as it will work for both. Or do like I did, get one of each and do a "split garden". A very versatile setup...


                           
                                 HID & T5 fluorescents


Now, to further complicate matters; there are two types of HID lights: HPS and MH... but not to worry, we told you we'd keep this simple for you, right?

Follow our quick and concise guide to indoor grow lights here:  LIGHTING SYSTEMS.