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Making the change to LED can make a big difference in a grow’s environment. Christopher Sloper, author of “The LED Grow Book,” talks about what changes to expect, and how to best use them to boost your grow.
Kyle Brown: How does working with LEDs change the working environment?
Christopher Sloper: This has got to be the strangest answer you’re probably going to get: The biggest reason for me with modern LED lights is the calmness. It’s not that it’s very peaceful to work around them; it’s that the traditional HID (high-intensity discharge) gardens are just very noisy and loud, and very obnoxious. You’ve got these big bulbs that are hot. You’ve got this big ducting work traditionally to move heat out of there. So now you’ve got all this big, huge mechanical stuff and lots of air volume moving. [With LEDs], the first and biggest change in the room is that they’re so much nicer to work with.
LEDs are truly a focused source of light. I go into people’s grows all the time and they ask why I’m a fan of LED. I walk over to their wall and slap the wall and say “This is why. Why can I see a shadow on the wall from my hand? Why are you putting light on the wall? You’re paying for [these shadows].” This is the problem with traditional lighting. The LEDs being directional, I don’t have any of that.
Brown: What changes about the lighting itself?
Sloper: A lot of people are saying they’ve spent the last three or four years researching LEDs, and they’ve finally unlocked the perfect spectrum. And this is a straight-up perfect myth. It’s not that we’ve perfected the spectrum, it’s that finally the emitters we’re making today actually have enough photons coming out of them. In layman’s terms, the photons per watt have increased.
There’s photosynthesis that we’ve all studied in school … there’s another really geeky word called photomorphogensis. That’s a great way of saying, “Are the plants tall? Are they short? Are they skinny or fat?” So we can manipulate plant’s physical traits through light and by the different percentages of maybe reds and blues.
So, as far as the sugars and photosynthesis portion of it, the plant doesn’t really care what color the photon is. Ultimately, the plant has mechanisms that release that energy and break it down into red 660 [wavelength]. The solution to it is going to be an all-white emitter. Because what is light? It’s a little bit of red, a little bit of blue and a tiny bit of green, and some manipulations in levels there. You know, go out and look at the sunshine. Go look at it in the middle of the summer, and go look at it in the fall. It only changes a tiny bit from summer to fall, right?
That’s a long way of saying that when you’re working under the traditional red and blue LED lights, you walk out of the grow room and you can’t see anything. Your eyes are shattered. You feel sick to your stomach for a little while. So new LED lights will be primarily white.
Plus, when you’re under some of these different colors … the plants look a brown-gray color. And the problem is you can’t see past it and see when molds develop. You could have spider mites and mold, and the plants look healthy to you.
[But with a more white LED], you’re bathed under this beautiful light that doesn’t make your eyes go crazy and you spend more time in your garden, which means your plants are going to be healthier because you see more of the problems.
Brown: What about differences in temperature?
Sloper: The traditional HID lamps have a dirty little secret where they show the spectrum from just about 400 to about 750 [wavelength]. Above 750, you start getting into the infrared region … the old 1970s’ “keep-your-burger-warm” lamp region. That’s basically heat being pushed into the system, and forced down onto the garden. So we had a lot of heat issues [on the surface of the plant]. That pretty much 100 percent goes away with LEDs.
People want to grow under the exact same conditions as they grew under before [with HID lights and cooling]. They’re looking at the upper 70s. If you’re not supplementing with CO2, you’re in the low 80s. I don’t like to say a specific number, but warm your room up three to five degrees and don’t be scared. Once you see your plants just explode, you’re going to call and thank me.
Without that heat, transpiration just isn’t occurring. Under the LEDs, if the plants are cold, they’re just not going to … transport enough nutrients, and they’re not going to get as big a growth as you’d like. Simply turning down your air conditioner … and saving yourself some money on your cooling cost will increase your yield.
