Choosing the Best Grow Lights For Your Indoor Growing Setup

Is this the season you’re finally ready to set up a grow room or indoor gardening station?! Or maybe you need to upgrade your grow lights for better results?

Grow lights can make or break the health of your plant starts, but grow lights don't need to break the bank! Choosing grow lights can be incredibly confusing and overwhelming, especially when trying to understand terms like Kelvin, lumen, and light spectrum.

Plus, the question always arises, which type are the best grow lights: LED, fluorescent, or HID? I’m going to answer your questions by addressing some of the biggest lies about grow lights! 

Grow Room Setup 

This year, we made some huge changes to our grow room setup to fix long-standing problems, and boy, am I excited! The biggest upgrade was our grow lights. 

Now is the perfect time to share information with you on how to shop for and choose the best grow lights. I’ve also created resources on using grow lights for tomatoes and other plants, using a seedling heat mat, and selecting the best seed starting trays to help you create the indoor growing station of your dreams!

Types of Grow Lights

There are three main types of grow lights you can buy:

• High-Intensity Discharge Lamp

• Compact Fluorescent 

• LED 

A common misconception you may hear is that one type is better than the others for growing seedlings, when in fact, all three types of grow lights can work perfectly fine. The application and scale of your seed starting operation will determine which type of grow lights are best for you. 

High-Intensity Discharge Lamps

These are the oldest style of grow lights. A high-intensity discharge lamp (HID) is essentially a bright light created by an electric arc inside a vacuumed tube or bulb. High-pressure sodium lights and metal halide lights are two types of HID.

Compact Fluorescent Lights

Compact fluorescent lights are a gaseous mixture inside a glass tube or bulb that produces ultraviolet light when electricity passes through it. Compact fluorescent lights need to be much closer to your plants to be effective, and they cover a smaller area in growable light.

It was becoming harder and harder to find compact fluorescent tubes for my grow light setup because they have a bad reputation, mainly due to environmental factors, and they are easily breakable because they are made of glass.

LED Grow Lights

An LED is a light-emitting diode that produces light when an electrical current passes through a microchip. LEDs are the most modern technology, very efficient, and they put out a decent amount of light for growing. LEDs were cost-prohibitive for many growers even 5 years ago, but they have continued to come down in price. 

Energy & Efficiency

These three types of grow lights are essentially interchangeable for growing seedlings. (Pro-Tip: If you are growing plants to full maturity with grow lights, you will need the deeper canopy light penetration that metal halides or LEDs provide.) Let me be clear, though, these lights are still vastly different in many ways, including power consumption and light output.

As far as light output (or how much photosynthetic energy they put out), metal halides put out the most growable light, compact fluorescent lights put out the least, and LEDs are right in the middle. 

Metal halide lights have the highest power consumption; LEDs are the most efficient and use the least electricity; and compact fluorescents are somewhere in between. For comparison, my LED grow lights consume about 100 watts, which is about half the power of my comparable compact fluorescents.

Kelvin Rating & Lumens

After deciding which type of grow lights will work best for your application, consider the Kelvin ratings and lumens, as well as the length and width of the lights you need for your setup.

Lumens refers to the brightness of the light emitted. For starting seeds, a Lumen capacity of around 3000 provides enough light for strong, healthy growth.

Kelvin rating (K) indicates a light's color temperature from warm to cool. It is not the same as the light spectrum, which specifies the range of colors (wavelengths) present in light.

The higher you go on the Kelvin scale, the bluer the light gets. The lower you go on the Kelvin scale, the warmer or redder the light gets. Seed starting requires lights that are at least 5000 K. I prefer mine closer to 6000 K, but I do not find it necessary to use 6500 K lights marketed specifically for growing plants. 

Buying Grow Lights

Many places sell grow lights, especially online, but watch out for stores that charge a premium just because growing plants is a niche market. You don’t need to spend the extra money for something special or buy the really expensive setups!

As a beginning gardener, I started seedlings under a shop light! I went to my local hardware store and bought an inexpensive shop light with compact fluorescent tubes, and it worked well for many years. It was not as efficient as a true grow light setup, but it was affordable and served its purpose.

Choosing the Best Grow Lights

This compact LED standing grow light is available from the MIgardener store. It is a great choice for seed starting, kitchen growing, and small-space indoor setups! 

The 2' LED bar delivers a crisp 6400 Kelvin daylight light, and the stand adjusts easily so you can keep your plants at the right distance as they grow. It gives seedlings and young plants the consistent brightness they need for a strong start.

I also buy grow lights from Amazon. I like this linkable grow light system for larger setups! I have had these lights for multiple years now and have seen great success. 

We recently upgraded our grow room and installed Vivosun’s large grow lights. These suckers are Bright, with a capital B, and they have insane coverage! One of these new grow lights puts out twice as many lumens as our compact fluorescents did. 

Whichever ones you choose, I hope you learned something new and this information helps you choose the best grow lights for your setup!