Besides some trace elements, plants require six basic food sources to grow – water, CO2, nitrogen, phosphorus, Potassium and light. The first two are easy. Here in the States we have plenty of water and we only need good air circulation to bring in CO2 unless you are setting up artificially high CO2 levels for rapid plant growth. The next three can be provided by any high quality plant food or fertilizer. But the last one – light – can be a problem.

Before high intensity LEDs your options were limited to:

A greenhouse – And this is still the best solution even with today’s high intesity LED Grow Lights. Nothing can beat “free” sunlight, the same sunlight your plants evolved under. But a nice greenhouse can easily set you back $20,000 to $200,000 depending on the size and options. Small temporary greenhouses are available cheap but these are really only intended for starting seedlings.

Metal Halide or High Pressure Sodium Lighting – For now these are still the best solution in a large grow operation even though both lights produce a lot of light in frequencies plants have a hard time utilizing. I consider Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium the “Mack Trucks” of the grow light industry. You can produce a lot of light with them, much more than with any LED Grow light but that light comes with a set of costs you need to contend with – very high power bills and a tremendous amount of heat.

Flourescent Lights – Like the lights listed above, flourescent lights produce a lot of light in frequencies plants have a hard time utilizing. Plus florescent lights start loosing efficiency and the tend to fail at about 2 years old. Because of these issues flourescent lights are much more costly to operate long term than a well designed LED Plant Light.

Window Sill Light - If you are fortunate enough to have a window pointing in the right direction that is not blocked by trees, this is still a great way to start seedlings, but you can’t grow full size high light plants this way.

Non-high Intensity LEDs – LEDs have been around for many years and many have tried growing plants with them. But results were extremely poor because low intensity LEDs just can’t produce enough light. You could mass hundreds of LEDs together to produce enough light but the cost was prohibitive.

Then high intensity LED lights came along and everything changed. Suddenly developers could concentrate enough light to grow high light plants like tomatoes, peppers, Medical Marijuana or Cannabis indoors without breaking the bank. All without the high power consumption or heat issues Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium lights suffer from.

Typical life span of a LED is 35,000 to 100,000 hours – that’s 365 days of 16 hours / day of continuous light for 6 to 17 years! Also because LEDs produce light in narrow frequency bands, a LED plant light can be custom designed ot taylored to produce light in the ranges plants absorb the most. And this is exactly what we do with our Grow Sun Plant lights.

Plants are sensitive to light across the entire spectrum but they are most sensitive to light in the red and blue ranges, this is why plant leaves look green. They absorb the reds and blues while reflecting most of the greens and yellows. That reflected red and yellow is what you see when you look at a plant.

Plant leaves are sensitive to all frequencies of light but they are most sensitive to red and blue

So, if a plant leaf absorbs mostly red and blue lights and you have the opportunity to deliver only these light bands, doesn’t it make since to do so? Well, that’s exactly what we do with our Grow Sun LED Grow Lights. We produce mostly red light because red stimulates the most growth then we add in some blue light because without some blue the plants tend to get leggy.

But what about flourescent lights? They run cool and are energy efficient too! In simple terms, if you had 10 watts going to each major color band – red, yellow, green and blue, your plants would only use half of the yellow light and half the green light. So you would really only be getting the equivilent of 10 watts of red, 5 watts of yellow, 5 watts of green and 10 watts of blue out of the 40 watts – you would be wasting 10 watts or 1/4 of your power!

And what about Metal Halide or High Pressure Sodium lights? These lights suffer from the exact same spectrum issues that florescents suffer from. They produce a lot of light in the green and yellow spectrums where plant leaves under utilize light. But on top of this Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium lights produce too much heat to be used in a small grow room.

Grow Sun LED grow Lights will be available from this site soon but we have to stock our distributor first.

In the mean time do you have a business license or a retail store and interested in wholesale pricing? Foxx Equipment has inventory and wholesale orders can be placed with Foxx Equipment.

Kansas City – 1-800-821-2254 – kcsales@foxxequipment.com

Denver – 1-800-525-2484 – densales@foxxequipment.com