The electromagnetic spectrum, including Kelvin and nanometers, is the first step in understanding grow lights. Green light is the worst light color for plant growth, as it results in shorter, smaller plants with fewer leaves, lower chlorophyll, and reduced yield. Red + blue light, with its shorter wavelength, is essential for promoting vegetative growth and playing a crucial role in regulating plant hormones, particularly auxin.
The color of light can have a significant impact on plant growth, with blue light being the most beneficial wavelength for photosynthesis. Yellow and white light have the lowest effect on plant growth, as they are not absorbed by chlorophyll and are not useful for photosynthesis. However, they can be used in combination with blue light.
Too much light can lead to negative outcomes like leaf scorch, dehydration, and inhibited growth, especially in indoor plants that rely on regulated exposure. Red light impacts plant growth in several ways, including during blooming and during the blooming process. The shade of the light quantifies how much energy a plant ingests, as varieties in light have various frequencies.
Blue light promotes greater stem/leaf development, while red light is good for early growth. Far-red light has the opposite effect to red light, making it unsuitable for growing. Traditional light bulbs are typically far-red, and UV light is harmful to plants, but it can promote healthy growth as plants work to protect themselves against it. Any light with a 6000-6500k wavelength works well, as long as it is close enough to the plant.
📹 Why Are Grow Lights Purple? Plus 3 KEY REASONS Why You Should Avoid Using A Purple Grow Light
Have you ever wondered why some grow lights are purple? And do they actually work better than white ones? In this video we’re …
Is yellow or white light better for plants?
Pinkish-white LED grow lights mimic natural sunlight, promoting photosynthesis, flowering, and plant architecture. They cater to a plant’s complete life cycle from seedling to harvest. Yellow grow lights stimulate secondary metabolites, enhancing flavors, aromas, and medicinal properties. They also support plant defense mechanisms, making plants more resilient to environmental stressors. Yellow grow lights are particularly beneficial during flowering and fruiting stages, as they promote bud development and flower formation. Both lights are reliable and versatile solutions for a plant’s complete life cycle.
What color light would a plant grow the slowest?
Blue light is crucial for plant growth during germination, promoting sprouting and root development. Violet or purple light is a secondary light source that facilitates leafy vegetation growth. Green light is generally reflected away from plants, but plants absorb a small amount during photosynthesis. Yellow and white light have the lowest effect on plant growth. Red light impacts plant growth in several ways, including during blooming and flowering. Certain red wavelengths increase the production of a hormone in a plant’s vegetation that prevents the breakdown of chlorophyll, generating more nutrients and taller plants.
Research on the optimal color spectrum for cannabis has led to the development of advanced lighting systems for cultivation facilities. SpecGrade LED’s OpticPAR grow light technology allows growers to adjust the relative concentration of different color spectrum components to match a plant’s lighting needs with pinpoint accuracy at every stage of the plant’s growing cycle. This technology is essential for cannabis cultivation, as it allows growers to customize and specify the light spectrum for better plant growth.
Is pink light good for plants?
Pink is a color with diverse connotations, but it has a special application in plant biology. Most plants thrive in pink light, which they absorb through photosynthesis. At the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), a laboratory glows in pink light, allowing scientists to control plant growth and influence leaf and root formation. Dorota Jaworska, the Institute’s plant facility technician, explains that plants appear green because they reflect the green part of white sunlight and absorb other colors.
By modifying the light, scientists can study the resulting effects on plants, such as height, length, droopiness, and molecular changes. Arabidopsis thaliana, first selected for this use at the beginning of the twentieth century, has grown to become the standard for genetic experiments on plants.
What light color is least effective in growing a plant?
The green light wavelength is the least effective for indoor plant cultivation, as other wavelengths are more readily absorbed and utilized by plants, leaving green light for our eyes.
Which color light is best for plant growth?
Plant growth relies on various light wavelengths, with blue being the most crucial. Red, the second most important wavelength, is highly potent when combined with blue light. Orange, similar to red but less effective, is less effective. Ultra-violet, while harmful, can promote healthy growth by protecting plants. Violet, while not significantly affecting plant growth, can enhance color, taste, and smell when combined with red and blue lights. Green, while not needed by plants, helps regulate the “night” cycle and maintains the grow room.
Yellow, on the other hand, is not needed for strong and healthy growth. A combination of red and blue light is the best for promoting healthy, quick-growing plants. The ideal horticulture lights should have a red to blue ratio of 5:1.
What color of light is not useful to a plant?
The scientific community is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the underlying mechanisms that give plants their characteristic green hue. It has long been established that plants utilise solar energy to facilitate the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into organic matter. However, the underlying mechanism behind the green pigmentation of plants has remained enigmatic. The research team has shifted its focus from biological processes to physical phenomena, examining how individual colors within the green spectrum can provide insights into these questions.
What color light do plants grow worst in?
Plants absorb energy from light, with green light being the least effective due to its own Chlorophyll pigment. Different colored lights help plants achieve different goals, such as blue light encouraging leaf growth and red light allowing flowering when combined with blue. Understanding the impact of light colors on plant functions is crucial in a world that relies on plants for food. Advanced LED technology allows for controlled lighting in controlled environments, enabling design of lighting to encourage flowering or produce higher fruit yields. By understanding light colors, many plant functions can be enhanced and promoted.
Is red or green light better for plant growth?
The McCree curve reveals that red photons (600nm to 700nm) are the most photosynthetically efficient, followed by green (500nm to 600nm) and blue (400 to 700nm). UVA and Far red photons also contribute to plant growth, but efficiency decreases as wavelengths go outside the PAR range. Blue light, which falls between 400 and 500 nanometers, is crucial for plant growth and shape regulation, although it is the least photosynthetically efficient in the PAR spectrum.
Do plants grow better under red or blue light?
The grow light spectrum plays a crucial role in plant growth, with blue light promoting vegetative and structural growth and red light promoting flowering, fruit, leaf, and stem elongation. Each crop type is sensitive to different light spectrums and quantities, which directly affects photosynthesis rates. Controlling the grow light spectrum can significantly impact growth areas like flowering, flavor, color, and compactness. However, signaling specific growth factors is part of a larger, complex cycle that also depends on the environment, temperature/humidity, crop species, light intensity, and photoperiod.
Is green light bad for plants?
Green light, considered the least efficient wavelength in the visible spectrum for photosynthesis, is still useful in plant architecture and is transmitted through or reflected by leaves. Most plants reflect more green than any other in the visible spectrum, but a relatively small percentage of green light is transmitted through or reflected by the leaves. The relative quantum efficiency curve shows how efficiently plants use wavelengths between 300 and 800 nm.
A series of experiments conducted by Michigan State University Extension investigated how different wavebands of light (blue, green, and red) from LEDs influenced the growth of seedlings. The results showed that plants grown with 50% green and 50% red light were approximately 25% shorter than those grown under only red light, but 50% taller than all plants grown under more than 25% blue light. Blue light suppressed extension growth more than green light in an enclosed environment.
Instead, 25% green light could substitute for the same percentage of blue light without affecting fresh weight. However, the electrical efficiency of green LEDs was much lower than that of blue LEDs.
Should I use red or blue light for plants?
The optimal grow light spectrum for plants depends on factors such as how specific plants use PAR-spectrum light for photosynthesis and the wavelengths outside the 400-700nm range. Red radiation, around 700nm, is most efficient at driving photosynthesis, especially in the flowering stage for biomass growth, which is important for Cannabis growers. Blue light is essential for both vegetative and flowering stages, mainly for establishing vegetative and structural growth.
The ideal grow light spectrum depends on whether the light source is sole (indoors) or supplementary (greenhouses). Photosynthetic efficiency occurs at the red and blue peaks, meaning plants absorb these spectrums most when growing. The ideal grow light spectrum is more detailed than sunlight, with millions of years of experience.
📹 Grow Lights 101: Best Plant Growth Spectrum Color? White vs Red/Blue LED + What is PAR & ePAR Light?
Do plants use more light colors than we realized? What does the latest horticulture research mean for grow lights? What’s the best …
I tend to like to keep a mixture of light in my grow rooms !! A little bit of everything! I’ve found spacing purple lights every other light and mixture grow lights mostly white every other with a few extra led strips and also smal shop lights! All light can be beneficial it’s about the balance of it!
8:58 I’ll use a neutral light for my plants but personally my entire room is covered in a 30m long purple christmas light that my neighbor gifted me 😅 I have photophobia with migranes, so I’m really light sensitive, purple light is a bit more bearable and since it’s spread out over a bajillion leds it doesn’t hurt my eyes so much, but for my plants I’ll start using a diff light!
Low wattage purple lights are good if you’re trying to keep a plant alive and growing but slow growing because you need the extra time for crop rotation’ I keep clones slow growing under 24 hours of purple lights because the mother crop takes quite some time to mature and if I didn’t give those clones low power purple lights they would rapidly outgrow the space I have available.
I think most people have their personal favorite color combination. I use blue/white leds in my grow tent for short dense foliage. Red tends to create tall spindly plants. My greenhouse uses white led (5K) shop lights. They supplement the weak sunlight that penetrates the triple glazing on the green house. The combination of natural light along with white leds seems to improve growth on my vegetable plants.
about 14 years ago I took Luxeon III 3W emitters, and using the graphs for Photosynthesis A and B, I took the integral to find the area below the curves, and used that as a percentage of total wattage, and then used red (670nm?), blue, and royal blue emitters according to the wattage by area. I added two “white” emitters per 100 watts for a more comfortabe “rendering” effect – apparently these “white” emitters “filled in the gaps” of green, yellow, orange and other frequencies. The light still works today, and while not as bright as it was (but certainly enough that you do not want to stare at them), it STILL works better than any of those “full spectrum” or cheap China R/B/UV/FR lights. Those weird purple COBs are NOT what you want.
There is just a tiny problem to me, the strict green part of the colour spectrum. If we see the leaves green, is it because they reflect this colour only and so it can travel to our eyes and then we see them green so it seems strange that it can penetrate the leaves. And yes some plants have purples leaves but it is pigments which hide the chloropyle which is still green but…. same idea they reflect a part of this purples spectrum as well instead of absorbing it… . so these is also an attention to take about wich colour of leaves does the plant you wanna grow have. Then a full spectrum is also smart in the sence than whatever is the colour of your leaves reddish, greenish bluesih you will have a correct effect because there is always a big part of the light that the plant will absorb efficiently.
The only grow light you need is the Bonzai Hero grow lights from Holland. You can set them to growing or flowering and they really do work I have been using them for years. The reason why your leds may or may not work very good is how the dome/reflector or whatever it is called in english is shaped. A good led and perfect shape of the reflector/dome it sits in will spread the light the best way = a good result.
Okay, pretty good article up to the point at the end when you throw in some random pseudo medical jargon… For my personal experience neither of those claims are true. I actually like what it does for my mood. As for plants that might explain some things. Did not have good luck with mine and I cannot figure out what it was. Not sure but possibly it was the light. I do have one of those purple lights for a small house plant but, I use it for myself. I can angle some of them up so it’s not blaring in the eyes….
Something to also possibly emphasize is that the single colors when combined, don’t actually create the “seen” color, ex. red+ green don’t actually make yellow, and red+green+blue does not actually make white. It just looks that way to our eyes/brain, which I know you did qualify correctly. It’s just that many people don’t necessarily pick up on that nuance.
We are going to use time lapse to prove that germinating with sunlight spectrum cuts indoor yield in half. 6500K is the reddest light plants should see until 2 weeks into flower. Because we can’t get our lights as many million miles away as the sun is, penitration is the limitation of growing indoors. 6500K blurple is even less efficient than florescent 6500K. 2400K blurple is objectively dead wrong until the 6th week of flower indoors. Veging below 3000K cuts yield 75% indoors. So the fact that flavors are better with 5000K-4000K-3000K whites is the least of what makes blurple trash before F6.
I totallyyyyyyyyy disagree with saying purple lights are ugly 🤨 As someone with sensitive eyes, white lights severelyyyyyyyyyy hurt, and I cannot handle them being near me, let alone being comfortable with their light. And then I can only have them for so long, which sucks because I wannnnt to look at my plants. Switched to purple and now I’m muchhhhhh more comfortable, doesn’t hurt to look at them or my plants, it’s a very verryyyyy nice vibe at night time when u dim them down, they don’t randomly blind ur screens and such, or make u feel like ur living outside in the sun. Purple > white for me frfr. Wouldnt go back
The single main point, you completely ignored, as to why traditional grow lights are purple… has to do with the fact that all photosynthesis takes place in the Blue & Red spectrums. Chloroplasts do not undergo photosynthesis at all in Green Light. Frequencies in the Green spectrum do catylize certain enzymes that effect plant growth & development, but Green Light contributes nothing to photosynthesis itself. So the 1 & ONLY reason traditional grow lights were purple… is because the focus was put on the spectrums that are responsible for photosynthesis. Furthermore, the fact that Green Light penetrates deeper into plant tissues, does not equate to plants utilizing that light. Green Light is only absorb by the Carotenoid pigments in plant cells, & these pigments are abysmally inefficient at absorbing that Green light. Depending on species, only 2% – 20% of Green light is actually absorbed & provides excitation energy for various physiological functions in plants. The primary function of Green Light in plants effects Cell Turgor, aids in the Osmosis of nutrients into cells, Catylizing certain growth hormones, Stem Elongation, & triggers the Stomata to open or close, in plants growing in forest understories. Green Light contributes nothing to the photosynthetic production of food.
Wrong. The manufacturures did not “choose” the spectrums they produce. Solid state physics did. Certain semiconducters and combinations of semiconducter elements emit specific wavelengths of light. Actually, the photons emitted are of very pure, single wavelengths. Anyway, the physics drives the color emission, not the people making the lights. (Learn something before opening your mouth.)
honestly think your wrong purple led work well why would you make a article to avoid them really there is alot thing to avoid but purple leds really good somtimes can strain eyes but can put cool mood in room too. I notice youtube people make to many articles sum im thinking you are a liar but hey its the internet.
Leds do not directly produce white light. There are two ways in which white light is produced from Leds as below: Using a blue Led with a phosphor coating to convert blue light to white light by a process called fluorescence. Combining red, blue and green Led to produce white light. White light is produced by varying the intensities of the individual red, blue and green chips.