Expert indoor grower and EpicGardening.com founder Kevin Espiritu stops by to break down the basics of hydroponics. Read more to learn how to get started growing your own food indoors!
LightBulbs.com: First of all, what would you say is the best type of grow light to use? Why?
Kevin from Epic Gardening: This isn’t a question that has an easy “Use this one!” type of answer. As with most lighting questions, the answer will always be: it depends. That being said, there are better types of grow lights to use for each phase of growth.
For example, when starting seedlings, you don’t need to provide a lot of light, so running High Pressure Sodium (HPS) or Metal Halide (MH) lights isn’t necessary. You’ll be wasting energy running the lights and providing far more light than your young seedlings need. A simple T5 setup will work just fine.
However, if you’re growing plants that fruit or flower, like tomatoes, you will probably want to use a HPS lighting system due to its proven effectiveness in bringing plants successfully through the flowering phase. Trying to do this with CFLs, while possible, is not a good use of energy. And when I say energy, I mean your personal energy as well ;)
What do you think about new LED grow lights? Are they as effective as traditional styles of grow lights?
LED lighting systems have made huge improvements over the past years and in some cases can be comparable to more traditional types of growing lights. They have a few unique advantages to them that other types of lights do not:
- They don’t output a lot of heat, meaning you can place them very close to the surface of your plants
- They use much less energy than almost all other types of lighting
- They’re made up of many small lights, so they can have specialized arrays of individual lights that are customized to a specific growing need
Those are some powerful benefits, but they do come at a cost. While I don’t pretend to be an expert on fast-growing LED technology, in my personal experience they have been less effective at growing flowering and fruiting plants than my HPS or MH lighting setups. I would default to using LEDs or CFLs when growing leafy greens, herbs, etc., but I would still use a more powerful HPS setup if I was growing something like indoor tomatoes, peppers, or cucumbers.
What is your favorite type of grow light to use and why?
I absolutely love my tried-and-true 4’ 4 bulb T5 setup. It’s perfect for growing microgreens, which I do commercially now. Because I don’t grow microgreens all the way through the vegetative phase, they need very little light, so I find T5 CFLs to be a very efficient way to light them.
For the average indoor grower, what kind of lighting setup would you recommend?
In my opinion, every indoor grower who has a bit of experience under their belt should have a High Pressure Sodium (HPS) setup. It’s one of the most effective types of hydroponic lighting out there, and when used correctly can be quite efficient as well. You’re not going to get a more powerful light, and most experienced indoor growers are growing plants that fruit and flower, where they’ll need a lot of warm light to thrive.
What type of lighting would you recommend for someone new to hydroponics?
For someone new to hydroponics, I’ll go back to my tried and true CFL T5 array. You can get high-quality setups for around $100, and if you both warm and cool color bulbs, it’s feasible that you could even grow plants that flower and fruit. However, I would recommend that someone new to hydroponics start with plants like lettuce, spinach, and herbs to get a feel for all of the other intricacies of hydroponics.
Where do you see lighting for hydroponics systems going in the future? Why?
I have a few crazy ideas here. I would love to see LED lighting systems experience a 10x improvement in effectiveness. If they could reach that level, I could see them replacing almost every other type of lighting due to their unique combination of energy efficiency, ability to organize them in specific ways, and their low heat output. I could see a future where commercial hydroponic growers, especially those growing plants that do not flower, are using 100% LEDs and saving a ton of money on their lighting costs while not sacrificing much in the way of efficiency.
Kevin is the founder of Epic Gardening, a place for people who grow. He's a fellow gardener who shares his methods of growing food at home, whether that be through hydroponics, aquaponics, or good old-fashioned soil gardening.
