A 12-Volt LED Indoor Growing System

Uses

• The 12-volt LED lighting system works with both hydroponic growing systems and plants grown in soil. Gardeners often use the system to start plants indoors with the intention of transferring the plants to an outdoor garden when temperatures warm up and the threat of frost passes. Some people use the systems for year-round growing operations. Since 12-volt lights are adaptable to energy sources such as the batteries found in cars, solar panels, campers and boats, the possibility for growing your own veggies while traveling is a real possibility.

How They Work

• Most 12-volt LED systems consist of 225 red and blue bulbs arranged in rows on a panel you hang above your plants. Since plants require different spectrums of lights to grow, they most easily absorb red and blue lights. While fluorescent lights produce colors the plant cannot use, LED lights provide the exact colors the plant requires to maximize chlorophyll production. Plus, LED lights produce no infrared ray or ultraviolet radiation that may harm or destroy your plants.

Advantages

• Since LED lights produce no heat, indoor gardeners find that their plants do not get burned or damaged if the lights are placed too close to the plants. Indoor gardeners can place the lights right above the plants, useful in small growing spaces. LED lights give 75,000 hours of light while compact florescent lights last about 5,000 hours. On older LED systems, when a bulb was damaged, entire rows of lights would go out. Today’s upgraded systems mean that when a LED bulb gets damaged, you may see two or three lights go out, causing little to no harm to your growing plants if you don’t catch the loss right away.

Requirements

• If you prefer to use the growing system in your home, you must use a transformer to access the electrical current. When using LED lights, develop a more aggressive watering schedule since plants grow faster with these types of lights. If you experience frequent power outages, choose an LED light system that includes a memory function for automatically resetting your system to a predetermined setting, if the power goes out and comes back on again.