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Grow Lights for Indoor Plants and Indoor Gardening: An Overview

Warm vs cool? "Full-spectrum?" LED, CFL, or HID? Here's what you need to know about mars grow light for starting seeds, gardening inside, or houseplants.

Indoor growing offers many advantages. The biggest benefits are the most obvious: garden pests can’t get at your plants, and you have total control over the weather.

Yet unless you’re lucky enough to have a solarium or greenhouse attached to your home, providing sufficient light to your plants will likely be an obstacle (shade-tolerant houseplants excepted). South-facing windows may provide enough light for a tray or two of seedlings, but if you want to grow vegetables, or any other sun-loving plants, to maturity, you’re going to need LED grow light bar.

The indoor lighting found in most homes does little to support photosynthesis. Traditional incandescent bulbs do not have the proper spectrum of light, or intensity, to supplant the sun. Household fluorescent bulbs can make effective grow lights, but only if they are placed in within a few inches of the foliage and left on for 16 hours per day – not ideal.

When shopping for indoor led grow lights, you’ll notice they are labeled with numbers like 2700K or 4000K. This refers to their relative warmth or coolness on the color spectrum – the higher the number, the cooler the light. Foliage growth is generally best around 6500K, though many plants need a period of warmer light, around 3000K, in order to produce flowers, and thus fruit.

In other words, if your goal is to simply produce seedlings, leafy green vegetables, or root crops, you only need higher spectrum bulbs. If you want to grow flowers, marijuana, or any fruiting plant (cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, lemons, etc.), you’ll also require low spectrum bulbs. You can some types of bulbs are available in full-spectrum form, however, simplifying things.

The standard fluorescent bulb, commonly denoted T12, makes a decent grow light for houseplants, starting seeds, supplementing the natural light of a window, and other situations where lighting needs are modest. They are fairly weak in light intensity, however, and must be placed within a few inches of the foliage to have much of an effect.

, which are narrower in diameter than T12s (but still widely available wherever lightbulbs are sold), have a much higher light intensity, making them suitable as a sole light source for sun-loving plants. Compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) are an option for small spaces, or if you don’t like the look of long rectangular fluorescent light fixtures – CFLs will screw into an ordinary incandescent light fixture.

Look for specialized full-spectrum fluorescent grow bulbs (like this , or , which fits into a standard socket) to provide the right balance of light for flowering plants.