Space is also an issue no matter the season since you only have so many windows to provide consistent natural light. Interior rooms and basements with limited sun aren’t ideal for plants.
According to Planta, light-deprived plants have fewer leaves, lack healthy coloration and grow spindly as they search for better light sources. Although it takes time for light-deprived plants to decline, they recover quickly when exposed to appropriate lighting.
Buying hard-to-kill houseplants is a good idea for plant newbies or those who tend to provide inconsistent care, but there are other ways to help your struggling indoor flora.
One of the quickest is a grow light if you can’t provide the necessary natural light for healthy winter growing. Tropical plants also require more light. If attempting to grow them in temperate regions, you may need consistent artificial lighting to keep indoor plants healthy.
Here are a few tips for choosing and using indoor grow lights to help your plants thrive all year.
Choosing the right grow light
The Photone app is an excellent resource for evaluating plant lighting
There are multiple ways to evaluate brightness, but the most precise metric for houseplants is photosynthetic photon flux density, or PPFD. While lumens and lux are certainly more familiar, PPFD has the advantage of directly measuring how much light your plants can use. Even the brightest lights aren’t enough if they don’t benefit your indoor plants.
Another advantage is that a plant light with a PPFD rating is usually the real deal compared to generic products marketed as grow lights. (Don’t get me wrong, those lights can work for many plants, but your mileage may vary.) Likewise, there’s no need to guess the lighting requirements of your plants when you can look them up on pages like the Photone Plant Light Database.
I don’t recommend setting up a grow space in a bedroom — even with grow light reflectors — unless you like waking up to bright lights.
Wattage
A fixture or bulb’s wattage is valuable for predicting your electricity costs. In terms of efficiency, an LED grow light delivers the biggest bang for your buck. I don’t recommend using any other type of grow light in a home setting if you’re trying to save energy.
Figuring out the cost of running a grow light is pretty easy with an online calculator. For example, my 36-watt Sansi LED bulb runs 12 hours a day, costing around $1.38/month in my region. While the cost of running a light or two won’t affect your power bill too much, it adds up as you increase the number of fixtures you run.
Light color temperature
Red LEDs are purely optional supplements to full-spectrum white LEDs in grow lights.
This doesn’t mean you can’t use a full spectrum white grow light with additional red and blue LEDs, but you should treat them as secondary features rather than the main event.
Mounting options
A Kasa smart plug is a flexible way to schedule your grow light.
Smart plugs were the best thing to happen to my grow lights. I can set up a 12- to 14-hour light cycle, commonly called a photoperiod, for my tropical plants and a sunrise/sunset cycle to simulate seasonal sunlight changes for my temperate plants.
Even if you use the same lighting schedule every day, a smart plug is more customizable than a mechanical timer or the built-in timers in some LED grow lights. This is especially true for smart plugs with an energy-monitoring function. I also link my smart plugs to a smart switch for easy manual controls.
