How to Use Grow Lights for Indoor Plants - Complete Guide

What's up, all my plant lovers? Today, we're going to be talking about grow lights. It's cold, it's wet. I have my gator on in my house because I'm just so cold and frigid, but the plants are staying nice and brightly lit. And over about the past 10 years or so, I've had the opportunity to garden in Indiana, Southern California, Seattle, Bogota, Colombia, and here in Eastern Pennsylvania, growing tons of different house plants and figuring out how to utilize grow lights to their highest performance possible inside the home. So this video is going to be your complete definitive guide to using grow lights for our house plants. I'm going to be talking about everything from the different types of bulbs out there, why we use grow lights, the colors and spectrums that are available and which ones are the best, how long to use your grow lights, how far to distance your plants from your grow lights, all those sort of topics and more. So let's get into it. So of course we use grow lights because plants need sunlight in order to perform photosynthesis. And there's just typically never enough window space for all of the plants that we want to grow inside the homes. So anytime that you want to grow plants away from those windows, you're going to need to use grow lights to supplement the amount of available sunlight. Even still, plants that require tons of sun, like a citrus that is right by a southern facing window, adding additional grow lights for those plants is even still quite essential in order to grow a happy plant. And the reason is because the pure sunlight outside versus the sunlight that has to pass through that glass window pane inside your home has a much different level of intensity. Imagine you can go outside on your deck, do a little sunbathing and get a nice little tan. However, even on that same hot sunny day inside your home behind a glass window pane, you're never going to achieve that same kind of tan. And while our grow lights will never equal the intensity or the purity or provide the growth potential that the outdoor sunlight can, they will still provide a modicum of growth for a house plants growing inside. And that's why I use them. Now, as most of us are aware, there's a few different kinds of light bulbs out there that can be used to increase the growth of our house plants. We can even use simple classic incandescent light bulbs. That would be the first option. And I would typically classify that as the worst option because they don't last long. They get hot, which is never a good thing because we're going to be leaving our grow lights on for substantial hours during the day. And they also use a lot of electricity. So we typically don't like to use incandescent light bulbs. Another option are fluorescent light bulbs, which I don't actually own any, kind of tells you how I feel about them, but they're definitely better than incandescent lights. They don't use nearly as much electricity. They don't get hot, but they don't offer great light intensity. And I find that plants just don't really grow that much using fluorescents unless you use quite a lot of them. So they are rather good if you want to fill a room with a bunch of grow lights. However, that creates a pretty industrial vibe, not something that I'm trying to incorporate into my interior escape. So the next option is what's called HID lights or high intensity discharge bulbs. Now these are like your classic incandescent bulbs, but they're much larger and they need balustrades in order to actually use them. So these lights are typically confined to growers that want to grow things like crops inside a small greenhouse, inside their basement, like I do. They're not very useful or recommended for growing house plants because they offer way too much light for our house plants. They also get quite hot and they use a lot of electricity. So we only want to use these for plants that we really want to have explosive growth throughout the winter and try to replicate summer as much as possible. That's not what I'm trying to do inside my house plant garden. If that's what you're trying to do with plants inside your home or in your growing operations, then maybe these HID bulbs are for you. There's two different kinds. There's the high pressure sodium and the metal halide. If you want to learn more about those, I recommend do some extra research because that's kind of a different topic than what we're talking about here today for our house plants. And last but not least is what I use, which are LED light bulbs. However, there are tons of different kinds of LEDs out there. Some of the common factors of LED is that they are very energy efficient. So utilizing them for long periods of time and having a lot of them really doesn't affect your electricity bill very much at all, which I love. They don't get hot, which is also super important to me because I often travel and I leave my lights on their timed schedules and I want to ensure that nothing's getting hot and burning while I'm not home. So utilizing the LEDs is really important for that as well. And LEDs just last a long time. So you're not having to consistently change out your light bulbs all the time either, which is also an added benefit. However, there are a lot of different levels of quality of LEDs out there. And typically what I find is that some of the more higher price tag LEDs out there definitely create a better light spectrum, better intensity, whereas some of the lower price LEDs out there just simply won't offer the same growth potential. Some of my favorite LEDs out there. I love this beautiful bar by Mother. This is definitely one of the best quality LED light bars out there for the houseplant gardener. Another bulb that I have been using lately and I am falling in love with is the smart LED lights by the company called House Bright. You can actually change the color, which we'll talk about here in a second, with those light bulbs. But I find that the lighting of those bulbs is super pure. But the primary bulb that I do have around my house is just the classic GE LED grow light you can get at the hardware store. They're the cheapest. They don't offer a ton of growth potential, but they definitely do help. All right, so now let's talk about color and spectrum. We've all seen those pink grow lights out there. We also see other grow lights that are more warm like that. So how do we analyze that? What are the best options out there and how do we choose? So the color of the grow lights corresponds to the spectrum that's being produced and the wavelengths that are being absorbed by our plants. And they range from red to blue and everything in between. A general rule of thumb, when our lights are closer to that blue side of things, that promotes more foliage growth. Whereas when they're closer to the red side of things or the warmer spectrum, those are the colors that help help in fluorescence or flowering. But for me, because I grow a very wide range of different houseplants that need a lot of different needs and I'm constantly moving my plants and moving my lights around, I tend to go for what's called the full spectrum. Full spectrum grow lights that offer as close to the daylight color. Full spectrum and daylight are a couple of key terms that you want to look for when you're purchasing your grow lights, because that is going to replicate the outdoor daylight sun as closely as possible and offer the widest range of growth potential for the widest amount of plants. If you have specific plants that need specific needs, such as you're growing a crop that you want to get to flower, well then that's when you're going to want to go a little bit more niche and provide that plant a light that is in that pinkish reddish spectrum. However, I tend to stay away from anything that looks pink or ultraviolet or like something I'm at like a rave in a club. While they definitely help your plants grow, they are not very palatable inside your interior scape and therefore they do not have a place inside my home. Here you can see how this grow light bar has the combination of the red and the blue light so that it is providing a nice full spectrum. Okay, so now let's talk about how far to distance our plants away from our grow lights. All of the distance that I'm talking about are going to be in reference to LEDs, but it also works for fluorescence if that's what you have at home. Now for our grow lights to work at their highest potential possible, you want your plants to be between 6 and 12 inches away from those grow lights. Right here, this is about 6 inches. That is absolutely the perfect range for my succulents to be underneath this grow light bar. You never want your plants to be touching the grow lights. Even LEDs, there is going to be just a little bit of warmth and that can definitely burn the foliage of a plant if it is in contact with those lights. For other grow lights out there, incandescents or those HIDs, you definitely want to have an even further distance away because those get very hot. Even about 12 inches away, you can kind of burn the foliage of a plant if it's too close. But for LEDs, that range between 6 and 12 inches is the optimal range for optimal growth. That being said, for every inch that you get further away from your grow lights, the intensity and the efficiency of those lights on your plants gets exponentially worse. If you've ever been on a mountain on a pure, hot, sunny day, you notice that your skin will burn much more quickly than if you were a few thousand lower in elevation on that same exact day because you are a few thousand feet closer to the sun. Now in human terms, that is a lot. That's a big elevational change in difference. However, in absolute terms, distance from the sunlight, that's like a minuscule percentage difference from the sun. However, you can see that small change in elevation of a few thousand feet creates an enormous difference on the quality and intensity of the sunlight on our skin. Now take that example and translate it to how we use our grow lights. If our grow lights are the sun and we're moving just a little bit further away from those lights, the intensity and the efficiency of those lights gets significantly and significantly and significantly and significantly less efficient. Therefore, optimal growth comes from optimal positioning, aka quite close to our grow light. With that understanding, you can start to strategically place your plants in a way that is most efficient for those plants in your houseplant jungle. I have the grow light right here, and it is closest to my Anthurium. My Diffenbachia is a little bit further away, and I've done that strategically because the Anthurium wants more sunlight. The Diffenbachia doesn't need as much. So once you understand the role of the grow lights and which plants need more sunlight than others, then you start to strategically place them in accordance with those needs. All right, so how long should we keep our grow lights on? Now, you can see back here I have a timer, and I have timers all around this room in every outlet because I have all of my grow lights on timers every single day, and I keep them on for 12 hours. Now, why do I keep them on for 12 hours? Well, most of the houseplants that I grow and most that we grow come from tropical regions close to the equator. And if you've ever been to the equator, you would know that the days and nights are pretty consistent from January to June and December. They're always pretty much even keel around 12-hour days and 12-hour nights. So I find that by trying to replicate the natural settings of those plants out in nature, keeping a 12 and 12 timer is the best. That's going to allow for 12 hours of absorbing the sun's energy for photosynthesis and then 12 hours of darkness when the plants actually start to utilize that energy. Common myth, people think plants go to sleep at night. No, they do not. The nighttime is actually when the plants will utilize all the energy that they've accumulated during those bright daylight hours. That's why we never leave timers on all day. At the very maximum, 16 hours. All right, so now the most fun but challenging part of the situation, how do we make the grow lights actually look good inside our home? Now, this definitely takes a little bit of finesse, a little bit of creativity, and a lot of bit of researching online for good options. Yes, of course, you can go for the classic clamp-ons that you can get from the hardware store. They will typically come with those aluminum cases around the outside, which I have taken off because I didn't like the industrial energy that they provided. Yes, that's going to decrease the efficiency because now the light is less directional. It's more kind of unfocused. However, the improved look makes up for it in my mind. It's all about making compromises for you in your home and for who you live with. I know my wife would rather the house have less grow lights that look a little bit more neat and well-kempt. It's a compromise. Another way I like to use lights is with the grow bars that you can put underneath your shelves. It does require just a little bit of DIY action. You got to have a drill so you can drill some holes and put some U-hooks in there to actually hold those lights up. But once you do, it does create a pretty nice sleek energy to wherever you're growing. The hard part, of course, is finding shelves that have a wide enough gap in order to fit the grow light and plants underneath. But you can use those grow light bars in places where you don't really have anything else going on, like underneath the table. Put some grow light bars underneath, add some plants, and now I've just hidden a bunch of cords, and I've hidden my baseboard heater, and it just looks a little bit cooler, and I have more space for plants, and there's definitely enough clearance for some good plant life to actually be growing. And if you're even more DIY, why not build yourself your own little plant cart for plants on top and plants underneath, and add a nice little grow bar on the underside like I've done here. I even put mine on wheels so I can wheel it around as needed. And I would say my favorite way of using grow lights is with these architect lights because they're super versatile. You can move them around as you need, change the angles, all sorts of stuff. And I particularly like these ones because they have these nice little clamp-ons which you can just clamp on to the side of a table or wherever you need. And I love that because that means I can put more plants on the table and I'm not wasting space with the base of that lamp. And it's pretty cool. You can use it on your desk and then turn it around and give your plants a little light whenever you're not at your desk working. Now on the cheap end of the spectrum are these kind of clamp-on lights, which they have these tiny little bulbs. Their quality is not great. They don't add a lot of growth potential, but they're inexpensive. They're easy to use and clamp on. Many of them will actually come with timers, which is very helpful so you don't have to buy an extra timer. But what I love most about them is they come with these kind of movable arms so you can just kind of put them where needed. And that allows you to give different parts of the plant light from one week to the next. And last but not least, cool floor lamps that actually look good and integrate into your interior. We have this nice lamp and instead of using just a traditional bulb, we have put a grow light bulb into it and it shines on our Monstera all day long. And it's perfect. It looks good and it does its job. Really and truly, you can use grow light bulbs in any sort of lamping fixture that you have. Stay away from things that are like this. I don't know what these are called. You really want to gear towards lights that actually focus their light down on something and often have these sort of enclosures that will provide a little bit of extra illumination. Well, that's pretty much it. Now you have a much deeper understanding of grow lights, what's out there and what you should be looking for when you're trying to find grow lights to add to your house plant jungle. It's not that hard. It does take a little bit of research, a little bit of care and some experimenting, but that's all part of the wonderful journey of growing plants. If you did enjoy this video, make sure to give it a little like and consider subscribing to our channel. We're bringing new plant related content every single week. And if you're looking for a nice short video on how to create your own little small propagation station on a budget, check this video out for a little bit of inspiration. Anyways, thank you guys for joining me here on Plant Vibrations. I'll catch you real soon. Ciao.