If you are a professional cultivator, or a person who is growing plants indoors as a hobby but are really serious about, you'd probably already have a few grow lights installed. If you are just starting or are planning to, you would be looking for the good ones out there in the market, and LED grow lights are the best.

First things first; a grow lamp is one that is used to light up the indoor greenhouse where you are growing your plants. Some people might think this unnecessary, but you know that plants need a wide range of the visible spectrum of light to grow healthy and this is just not possible without providing artificial light of some kind. In fact one type of artificial light is usually not adequate and you would need to install different bulbs that give off light in different wavelengths to be useful. This is because the plant requires the ultraviolet band for growing well whereas the lower bandwidth will help in flowering and fruiting. This range cannot be provided by a single lamp, and this is the reason most indoor greeneries will have a number of bulbs that come on during different parts of the day or season.

Incandescent bulbs were traditionally used but this has now given way for more energy efficient High Discharge (HD) lamps, because they last much longer than the incandescent ones and also give off more light per watt of electricity. You also get them in different colors which is light in different bandwidths so that you can use the specific one that you need. They also last up to 300% longer than ordinary incandescent bulbs lasting an average of 20,000 hrs to the 750 hrs that the normal bulbs usually last for.

As good as these bulbs are the future is now with us and it is in the form of LED grow lights. LEDs are not a very recent phenomenon, they have been under development for more than 10 yrs, but the original lamps just did not have the necessary output to be useful for anything. Continuous research for the automotive industry has however changed all that, with LED bulbs now gracing the head and tail lights of a number of premium marquee sedans. Although the discharge for a single LED bulb has not gone above 6 watts, they are used in banks or rows of lights that give the necessary output. This is possible with these bulbs because they burn with a cold light; very little of the energy used is converted to heat and they are in fact more than 50% more efficient than the HD bulbs.

An LED grow light has a number of advantages over the currently used HD variety of lamps, they are more efficient, giving you tremendous savings in electricity bills, and also last a long time, years if necessary. Because very little heat is produced they can be kept closer to the plant, reducing the wattage of the lamp needed, giving you more savings. They are also cheaper than the other bulbs, and will probably get even cheaper with more and more people starting to use them. The most important thing about LED grow lamps however is that they come in any color that you like, giving you the option of choosing exactly which bandwidth you want, or installing different colors in the same bulb giving you something akin to natural light.

Going in for the latest technology, or even investing in future developments, is good because it means that whatever you get now will remain current for some time yet. Already a number of countries are starting to phase out incandescent bulbs, and although this has not started happening with the HD lamps, it is only a matter of time. The inherent advantages that LED grow lamps give you are overwhelming; it just depends on whether you want to be the leader of the herd or not.