Easy Beginner's Guide To Grow Lights For Houseplants 💡 GROW LIGHT 101 🌱 Why, When + How To Use Them

Hello everyone, welcome back to my channel. For anyone that's new here my name's Claire and this is Yoli and we've also got special guest Teddy here with us today as well. This video could be slightly manic. In today's video I'm going to be attempting to make the mysteries of grow lights a little bit simpler and more understandable so that you kind of have a basic knowledge of what it is you need before just jumping in and buying a random set of grow lights that might not be right for you at all. I know I said a while ago that I was going to do this video, I'm sorry that it's slightly late. I just, I planned a whole video and then it just felt a bit kind of technical and maybe a bit confusing and I wanted to try and keep this as clear and short and simple as possible so hopefully that will be the case. Just to say as well this video isn't sponsored in any way by any brands or anything like that so any grow lights that I talk about specifically are ones that I've tried and tested and would personally recommend. So a lot of people ask if grow lights are actually necessary and if so why? What difference do they make? If your house doesn't receive a huge amount of natural light and you've got a lot of high light tropical plants then chances are even if they're coping they probably aren't thriving as much as they would be if you were to up their light intake. Especially during the winter months when our homes aren't receiving as much natural light and fewer hours of light then a lot of house plants can kind of go into a bit of a dormancy period. This is when they stop growing, stop pushing out new leaves and in some cases can actually die off. Although lots of house plants will still go through this kind of hibernation period because it's outside of growing season it is possible to keep them happy and thriving all the year round if you essentially recreate their optimum growing conditions which unless you live in a house with a glass roof will usually involve using grow lights. The same applies if you've got a flowering plant that isn't flowering when it's in season and typically should be. If it's not receiving the right balance of light even if your plant's growing well it might not be flowering the way that it's actually capable of. A sign that your plants might not be receiving enough light is simply that they might not be looking as full and healthy as they should be. Plants that aren't getting enough light tend to be a lot thinner and leggier simply because they aren't getting enough energy from the light for fuller bushier growth. If you've mainly just got low light house plants then sometimes just moving them closer to a window during the dark months is enough for them but it's really important to just make sure you research all of your individual plants lighting needs because getting too much light or not enough can be really damaging for them. When you first start looking for grow lights the most important thing this is probably totally obvious but I'm going to say anyway is read the customer reviews. When I first started searching for grow lights on Amazon there were loads of them with kind of five star ratings and as soon as I started reading reviews on some of them they were really contradictory and made me think twice. I'm pretty sure this is because some suppliers actually pay for ratings nowadays so just make sure you read through everything really thoroughly. It's probably just me being really sceptical but I'll usually actually start with the bad reviews just because you know that they're genuine and a lot of the time they'll have lots of information in there that can kind of help you straight off the bat determine the good grow lights from the bad grow lights. The questions section on Amazon is also really really useful if you're umming and ahhing about a certain brand or if there's something that you specifically want to know. You'll probably notice when you start to look for grow lights that they come in quite a few colours. Put simply this is just because the natural daylight that we receive from the sun although it looks clear and white is actually made up of three main colours blue red and green. The most common house plant grow lights that you'll see are usually either going to be clear and white or purple. The white grow lights tend to provide a full spectrum of light so blue green and red but will just appear like clear lights to our eyes. They'll usually contain a high balance of blue light which helps your plant to produce chlorophyll which is the thing that gives them their green colour and helps your plants to grow healthily. So if your plant's looking slightly dull or as I said before slightly stretched and leggy and not as full as it should be then chances are it's not receiving enough blue light. It's not however as simple as saying yep that's happening to me I'll go out and buy some blue lights and that will fix everything because it's really important to find the right balance of light which you'll never get from just one colour alone. Red's light sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to blue and it's fantastic for things like propagation because it can help young plants develop roots it can help new seeds to germinate but generally in more mature plants it's just used for flowering and fruit bearing plants because it helps them to produce flowers and fruit. The purple grow lights that you often see are a combination of blue and red light and very often they'll provide a really great balance spectrum for a lot of particularly young house plants. In my old place I had a corner that only received a very small amount of natural light and I had oh that's bright these grow lights set up and they kept my plants really happy. I got these ones off Amazon I think they're about 30 or 40 pounds. I originally just bought four of them they're all on a string as you can see yeah I originally just bought four of them but I got on really well with them so ended up ordering more. These ones are really great because they have different brightness levels you can set them to it just means that you can set the intensity of the light to the amount of natural light that your plants will ideally be receiving but as I said before just remember that all plants require different amounts of light and some will love loads others won't love as much. Like lots of grow lights these ones have got a little time system on them which is super easy to program and it just means that once you've found a routine that works you don't have to worry about turning them on and off every day. At the moment I'm using my purple grow lights purely for my propagations and young plants and they're all growing really well. The ones that I've got down here in my room these white ones here are a lot more neutral looking they almost just kind of look like a fancy lamp. They provide full spectrum light which can be adjusted to be warmer or cooler the warmer white appearance provides a higher amount of red light and the cooler colour provides more blue. Besides doing the job they just look a lot less harsh and make your house feel less like a rave room. They're also adjustable meaning you can bend them to target all areas of your plants and not just the tops which for my bigger plants is really important. I was actually really worried about these big plants when I first moved here because this is a north-facing basement so it really doesn't get a lot of natural light and I wasn't sure that these grow lights were going to be strong enough because they're not my kind of big system which I will talk about in a minute. But yeah my fiddle leaf fig and my elephant ear which are two really quite fussy plants have done really well under them so I would highly recommend these grow lights. The fact that my fiddle leaf fig is looking slightly worse for wear on some of her leaves is nothing to do with the light it's just to do with the fact that I live down here with Yolie who's got a very long waggy tail. These grow lights have also got a really good clip that you can attach to surfaces which is really really useful. Again these ones were off Amazon, I can't remember exactly how much they cost but I will link them in the description box below. The Mars Hydro grow lights are also a really fantastic full spectrum grow light that cover a much larger area with higher intensity so great if you've got lots of plants. I haven't got mine set up at the moment so I can't show you but I will link them as well below. In regards to the type of bulb that you choose when you're looking for grow lights, the choice is really yours. I mean I personally only use LEDs nowadays, all the ones I've spoken about so far are LEDs and they're absolutely brilliant. The job that the different types of bulb do can be pretty similar but they do tend to have a slightly different upfront cost which if you're investing in grow lights for the first time can sway people away from LEDs as they tend to be a bit more expensive. That being said though fluorescent and halogen bulbs are definitely more expensive to run. I have used fluorescent grow lights before, I think my first first set of grow lights were actually compact fluorescents and I think I just went for them because they were cheap and I didn't really know much about grow lights and they weren't bad but I do remember them being very very very expensive to run. They were great but the thing is with fluorescent and halogen bulbs is that their lifespan isn't as long as LEDs so even if LEDs are slightly more expensive to invest in initially, god why is that so hard to say, even if they're more expensive to invest in initially they are going to last you a hell of a lot longer. LEDs are the most cost effective and energy efficient to run and also because they don't heat up in the same way as the others there's a much lower risk of your plant's leaves being burnt or damaged. I actually dropped my fluorescent lights in the end and they broke and that's another great thing about LEDs, they're a lot more resilient than halogen and fluorescent bulbs. These ones get knocked off the bed on a regular basis by Yoli and they are absolutely fine. Another thing with fluorescent lights is that if you do drop them and break them they actually release a really harmful gas so you do just have to be really really careful about that. The good thing however about fluorescent and halogen bulbs is that you can quite often actually find them as just kind of standard bulb size bulbs that will just fit in kind of light fittings around the house so if you don't particularly like the look of grow lights you can just pop some in lamps and gather your plants around the lamp. The thing you've got to be a little bit wary of with this is that just like normal light bulbs they do heat up quite a bit so just be careful not to put your plants too close because their leaves will end up burning. You can actually buy LED grow light bulbs for this as well but for some reason they're just not as easy to come by yet where I'm from. A timer system again is a really great shout with these. If your existing lamps don't have a timer system on them you can just buy standard plugs that you plug into the wall, plug your lamp into and you can set a timer on that so that you won't end up going overboard with light and you won't have to remember to turn them on and off every day. You have to take into consideration with fluorescent and halogen bulbs the wattage of the bulb because this not only affects your plant but it also impacts how expensive they are to run. Running a high wattage bulb for the same amount of time as a low wattage bulb is going to use way more electricity. LED lights which I've already said are a lot cheaper and efficient to run are measured in lumens. The lumens in grow lights light bulbs are going to be significantly higher than the lumens in the normal kind of LED light that you might have in your home because they're not designed to be nice and cozy they're designed to produce essentially daylight. So you usually need to look for a grow light bulb with 3000 lumens at least per square foot of growing space. I know I said I wasn't going to get too technical in this video but there's really no other way to say this next bit so I'm just going to try and make it as clear as possible and get it over with quickly. When you hear people talk about grow lights you might also hear them refer to something called PAR. PAR stands for photosynthetically active radiation and it's a type of light essential for your plants to live and grow. It's important to take into account when choosing grow lights because the PAR is the amount of light that your plants will actually be able to absorb in order to photosynthesize and grow healthily. PFF stands for photosynthetic photon flux and is the amount of PAR, the usable energy, that's actually produced by the grow lights each second. It doesn't tell you how much light actually lands on the plants and is absorbed but rather how much is actually produced by the grow lights themselves. And the last technical term I promise PPFD or photosynthetic photon flux density is the measure of light produced in the targeted area that you place your plants in. This can vary slightly depending on the type of plants but as kind of a general rule when it comes to seedlings, propagations and baby plants you want to look for lights that offer around 200 to 400 PPFD. This can also be a really good option for mother plants that you might have chopped back recently to propagate just because the light isn't so intense and overwhelming as they build their strength back up. For example I've currently got my little monstera propagations along with the mother plant under 400 PPFD lights. For indoor fruit trees and flowering plants around 600 to 900 PPFD is great as it aids the production of this. As a general rule the higher the PPFD rating usually equals a stronger and more efficient growth rate in your house plants but as I've already mentioned you do just need to make sure that you're also providing them with the right spectrum of colours for each specific plant. And we're trying again because my phone died! So as I've spoken about already all grow lights are slightly different in terms of intensity, light spectrum, stuff like that but it is really important that when you're setting up your grow lights you place your lights close enough to your plant for your plant to properly be able to absorb all of the light that they need from them but not so close especially with fluorescent and halogen bulbs that they risk actually burning or damaging your plants. As I mentioned in my previous point a timer system or a timer plug of some sort is a really good shout just to avoid overloading your plants with too much light. With these ones I tend to place them about 10 to 20 centimetres above my plants and similarly with the ones behind me they are adjustable so as I say I'll move them around quite a lot just to make sure that all areas of my plants are being targeted but I never usually move them any further away than 10 to 20 centimetres either. Most decent grow lights will actually come with some information on this but I've just kind of experimented over the years, done some research and yeah if you're in any doubt I would say maybe start slightly further away and you can always move them closer. When I had my Mars Hydro grow light set up I had them positioned a lot further away from my plants probably more like 50 to 100 centimetres just because they're stronger, the light's more intense and they're designed to cover a much bigger surface area. Just to reiterate again it is so important to research how much light your plants actually like and need. If you've got a really great grow light set up but still aren't giving your plants the right amount of light or the right balance of light then this can absolutely cause issues. For example some plants will love 12 to 14 hours a day of really bright intense light and others will need at least 12 to 14 hours of darkness. One of the reasons the Christmas cactus actually blooms around Christmas is because it's getting more hours of darkness at that time of year so it is definitely important to take into consideration. I've got my upstairs grow light set on a 12-hour timer so I'll just group together all of the plants that enjoy similar hours of light. Down here because it's my bedroom I just manually turn these ones on and off. I literally use them like a normal lamp so I'll turn them on in the morning, in the evening I'll flick them to a slightly warmer setting so it feels a bit cosier and then I'll turn them off when I go to sleep so they probably get I don't know 14, 16 hours of daylight a day but they seem really happy. I've kind of tested a few different things and this seems to work well so I'm doing that. A lot of people worry about grow lights damaging your eyes. In short yes they can absolutely damage your eyes if you stare at them over a long period of time. Any bright lights particularly high amounts of blue lights can be damaging to your eyes if you constantly expose yourself to it hence why you should never stare directly at the sun. Down here except for now filming this video obviously I will always have my grow lights kind of facing away from me and from Yoli as well but as I say the majority of the time that I spend in my room is in the evenings and that's when I have them on kind of a warmer red setting anyway so it's a higher balance of red light which isn't as damaging to your eyes however I still don't advise staring directly into them. Because they're flexible they're really easy to turn and adjust so that I can make sure I'm not putting my eyes under any strain. If you're using large industrial grow lights and you're spending a lot of time around them then you might want to take some extra precautions. Some people like to use protective glasses, you can actually get special kind of grow glasses like sunglasses just to make sure that you're keeping your eyes safe. Setting up a grow tent as well is a really good shout if you've got the space to do it just because you can create a really lovely kind of stable environment for your plants in there and also not have to worry about looking at a grow light all the time. I've never had any issues with any of the grow lights that I've used but as I say like with any bright lights I'll just make sure that I don't stare directly into them. Grow lights that one person recommends might not necessarily be suited to you if you're growing different types of plants so as I've said many times throughout this video but I'm gonna say it one more time, just make sure you research your individual plant's lighting needs, what kind of spectrum of light they need, how intense they like that light to be, how many hours etc etc. As I say if you've got lots of indoor fruit trees, flowering plants and propagations on the go then a grow light with a high percentage of red is going to do your plants a lot of good and for kind of more standard tropical house plants it's just really important to find a full spectrum light that provides them with a good balance of blue. All of the grow lights that I've spoken about in this video I'll link down below, as I said at the beginning of the video I'm not getting paid to promote any brands or anything like that, I'm also not saying that there's not hundreds of other amazing types of grow lights out there but these are just ones that I've used, got on really well with and therefore would recommend but yes I will pop a link to all of them in the description box below. As I said at the beginning I really wanted to try and keep this video as simple and straightforward as possible but if any of you have got any questions or want to know more about technical stuff I will do my best on that then feel free to let me know in the comments down below and I'll do my best to help. I really hope you found this video useful, if you did then please make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel and I will see you in the next video!