what's going on guys welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the M my Garder channel in today's episode we're at the hardware store and we're trying to find grow lights we're trying to find the best grow light at the hardware store that money can buy let's go all right so we're in the most obvious starting section of any hardware store and that's the light bulb section the first thing you're going to look at is compact fluorescent or LED if you have compact fluorescent you're going to go with low cost LEDs are going to be higher cost but more energy efficient and LEDs tend to have a longer life expectancy than compact fluorescence do compact fluorescents also have a tendency to kind of be notorious to to break and they do have some um some gases inside the bulb that light up but very inexpensive um this bulb right here $11 it's 100 Watts so it's uh uses only 23 Watts but it basically is a 100 wat equivalent and it has right here 1,600 lumens and a sing single bulb again lumens is how much energy or how much light it gives off so if we go with a a higher Lumin bulb you're actually going to have more energy for the plants to grow now one downside with this light though it's very inexpensive and it's going to grow plants totally fine is you're going to look at the Kelvin you want to make sure that the Kelvin is going to be at least 5,000 Kelvin or higher I prefer around 6,500 Kelvin for a good grow light they don't always have grow lights in here I'm sure if we looked around might be able to find something close but the Kelvin on this bulb um we can see here has soft white so a soft white is going to be somewhere along kind of the 4500 Kelvin it's it's not quite a blue light the Spectrum uh I'll throw I'll have Ashlin throw up a a uh picture of the Kelvin scale and a soft white Falls more in like the daylight Spectrum so there's going to be some yellow still in there rather than blue which actually helps plants photosynthesize so not quite the right color that I'd be looking for but on top of all of that direction matters so when you put this light into an outlet the light is going to be going downward and out it's going to be just it's going to be spread all around meaning it's going to have pretty weak directional coverage so if you're a plant your plant is like a solar panel and that light needs to hit that solar panel directly so it's best to have something that's going to be beaming most of that light straight down onto your plant rather than you know spreading that light all around where it's kind of bleeding out into the other parts of the room where you don't have plants really cool light but probably won't go plants let's go all right so now we're doing one better this is an LED now the LED this light is $13 and we're actually talking about a dimmable spectrum light so you can actually go as low as 2700 Kelvin it's going to have as you can see here um it's got quite a lot of yellow and orange to it all the way up to 6,500 Kelvin which is what we're being hit with right now so they cycle these lights on off and on to kind of demonstrate what you can do but it's wonderful because um this light here has capabilities To Go in different directions now you can just by all means get a non dimmable you know just plain old LED grow light and it's going to do fine the only downside with these are the amount of lumens they give off so you're hitting the right Kelvin you're having a long life expectancy but the amount of lumens that these are going to give off is going to be much less lumens than a compact fluorescent and that's because these LEDs stand for light emitting diode and there's probably only four to five light emitting diodes in this bulb right here just not enough room to pack them all in so as suspected we actually found the light here and it only gives off 800 lumens so it's half the amount of growable energy being given off than the compact fluorescent though you can get to that 6,500 Kelvin it's just not giving you those lumens which is important if the color is right but the lumens are off still doesn't matter it's about getting the the kind of the the Goldilocks of both of those you want right lumens and right Kelvin to have success growing plants indoors so we're going to keep looking because I think we can do a little bit better all right so because again we're kind of working with what's at the hardware store we then go to the next best option which are the T8 bulbs T5 T8 are both going to be kind of in that same category so these are very inexpensive they're longer so you're going to need like a shop light right these come in sections of usually like 2T or 4T sections for shop lights and the great thing about these is that they're going to be in a shop light unit so the unit itself can be hung from different places can be suspended and it usually has a reflector which points most of that light down which reduces that bleeding that we talked about that wasted light now the great thing is each one of these lights puts out an output of 2600 lumens and they have a Kelvin of right around 5,000 so these are awesome this whole pack of Lights here is 50 bucks on top of the unit itself which might cost about 20 bucks you're still looking at like right around $60 for a really good setup in my opinion the other thing I was going to mention too I know you guys asked this all the time lumens if you don't have enough lumens what do you do well you can do one of two things you can buy either a more powerful unit with more lumens or you can actually double up your units so if we had two units you'd take 2,600 time 2 which is you know 6,000 uh 6,200 or sorry 5,200 so you're going to have 5,200 lumens if you tripled it getting in the math Zone here if you tripled it you're looking at 7,400 I think yes 7,400 lumens and so you're actually able to add lumens but you can't add Kelvin um that's not going to have a addition like that right so you just add more lights or get a more powerful fixture just down here we have one better and that is in my opinion the LED now the LED has less lumens slightly less lumens but a much longer shelf life so these life uh the life of these bulbs is around 50,000 hours still looking at 2,000 lumens so slightly less but you're still at that 5,000 Kelvin threshold which is great you're going to be putting in obviously also tad bit more expensive we're talking like 20 bucks for two lights $10 a light but you're getting basically in a in a two bulb 4T shop light you're getting about 4,000 lumens which is awesome that's a lot of light to be growing plants one final thing to note is if you can't get more lumens out of your fixtures what you can do is move the light closer right cuz imagine light getting dispersed and wasted all of that light is going to get concentrated down the closer you get to the plants so what's really nice about these is because they don't run hot you can get them a lot closer and you don't risk burning plants with uh with compact fluoresence you want to stay about 6 to 7 Ines away cuz they get really hot all right so now we're getting into kind of the the desirable spectrum of lights that I would recommend for most people and as we start to get better you start to get into some different perks yes they do get a little more expensive but you actually have these lines here which are relatively new because of Technology getting so much better you actually have these portable lights now I love these portable lights because they're a lot of them are rechargeable or you can just plug them in but you can put them on stands so if you have like a plant or if you have like a grow light station like these ones here yes they're about $120 but they have two lights that can swivel so you can actually directionally change where those uh where that light is going and because it's LEDs they have a much sharper beam angle the beam angle is basically the direct it's basically the angle of the light coming out CFLs compact fluorescent have a very wide beam angle basically light goes everywhere whereas LEDs are a lot more direct so they're already going to have a kind of a built-in advantage and then once you put a reflector on top of that or can swivel them and move them you're getting even closer now the thing you have to be really careful of is if you're going with these you have to look at the lumens not all of these lights here are going to be very effective and you might just be wasting a ton of money because a lot of these lights are very potent for the amount of size that they take up but we're talking 2,000 lumens but a Max Kelvin of 4,000 Kelvin which is so you want to go with some lights here like this one here 12,000 lumens but 4,000 Kelvin you just have to look around some can get up to that 5,000 threshold they do make them you just got to look for them but these are awesome cuz you're talking 70 bucks for 12,000 l lumens again lumens isn't everything cuz if you you could have 40,000 lumens and uh you know like a very warm light and not very like blue doesn't mean anything so let's do one better cuz I think we can do one better all right so now we're doing one better these are going to have to take either you knowing how to hard wire in or an electrician but if you're having like a grow room and you don't want any type of setup I think this is a route that I would love to go in the future by just wiring a boatload of these suckers in these are round panels they're downlighting for ceilings and here's what you can do you can actually put these dimmable lights in because they're actually adjustable so if you come in close here you'll notice you can go to 3,000 Kelvin all the way up to your amazing 6500 Kelvin it is really really hard at a hardware store that doesn't specialize in grow lights to just get something that's going to be grow light specific this a grow light by all intensive purposes 6,500 Kelvin is going to get you amazing amazing grow light capabilities for 21 bucks now the only downside I mean the only downside to this you're going to have to look around obviously at your hardware store 800 lumens that's a bit of a let down because at that point you might as well go with a 1,600 half-priced compact fluorescent and just kind of do the same thing with like a screw in fixture right so I think we can do even better yet now we're getting somewhere this is a color changing flat panel this sucker is 1T by 2 ft so you're talking two square feet of gable space imagine this sucker being installed in like a ceiling you had a lot of them and you could really pump out the light yes you're definitely talking very high cost because of installation but because it gives you color changing capabilities you can change it to that grow light like we just talked about and we're talking 2,000 lumens so now you're getting somewhere you add probably four or five of these and they're only 50 bucks with a life expectancy of 50,000 hours you add five of these together you're talking 10,000 lumens and you're in grow light territory with some great light coverage because it takes up so much space that's awesome but I think we can do one better now I know that you guys are thinking why not use strip lights this is basically a Consolidated version modular for all these other lights we're talking about do not use these the reason why is these lights are very very inefficient these are LEDs they're going to be light emitting dodes but they're so far apart and they take a lot of setup to get them established that you're spending $33 on something that might only give you about 400 to 500 lumens really really inefficient so now we're into what I would consider to be the best option at the entire hardware store for something that you could have as a grow light and that is going to be these right here they come in four and 2T sections they are known as a high bay light and what this allows you to do is allows you to hang them it requires very little there's very little barrier to entry installation is literally as you can see hooking up they have those little carabiners those hook up to either a chain or some rope or whatever you can literally hang them from anywhere any type of s hook makes them very portable and the fact that these are bright so these give you five ,000 Kevin not as high on the Kelvin scale but we're talking a boatload of lumens you guys for a 100 bucks for a 100 bucks you're able to get 12,000 15,000 or at high capacity which is the daylight 5,000 Kelvin 18,000 lumens for a 100 bucks that is absolutely insane this is going to grow some amazing seedlings all the way through winter you could probably even borderline get stuff to full Fring stage not quite sure cuz I've not quite tried it with this specific light but anything with that many lumens and that much Kelvin is going to get you really super close if you're growing things like leafy greens definitely you could do that and as you can see there's so many different options will pan here this is the example I just pulled right here that's the $100 one but they make other ones as well like they make these ones that are adjustable so you can swivel them super cool gives you extra uh you know extra flexibility also there's this one here check this one now the lumens you want to check the lumens but this light right here is so I can't even grab it this light right here is basically like a giant Spotlight for your plants so if you have like a fruit tree in your house like a fig tree you're wanting to grow all winter long you hang that sucker up it's like you're putting it's like you're a UFO sucking the plant like that's what it's going to look like so you can get so much capabilities to grow your plants right from the hardware store you don't need to go to a grow shop you don't need to go online and spend a ton of money and I really want to say this too if you're intimidated by grow lights you don't have to be there's a lot of people online they're going to tell you you need the Lux you need the lumens you need the Kelvin you need the this that and everything else you do not there's small nuances between all your lights but the big thing are the lumens and the Kelvin at that point wattages don't really matter because that's how much energy the light actually takes not how much energy light energy is given off you can have a very inefficient light like an incandescent use a ton of wattage but give off very little lumens cuz a lot of it's wasted through heat whereas LEDs very little is wasted through heat so you need lower wattage way more transferred light output huge difference once you actually start getting into LEDs and compact fluorescence and you don't need to know a ton to grow a lot of plants indoors so I hope this helped I also want to thank the Home Depot for not kicking us out but but you guys can find these lights at almost any hardware store I guarantee you I really hope you guys enjoyed if you did make sure to hit the like button subscribe and uh also make sure to let me know down in the comments box down below if this video helped in some way
