Proper Lighting For Your Plants and The Environment
By Rafael Guzman
Original article:
Paweł Witkowski, Ewa Korzeniewska
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How good are you at properly taking care of your plant? You may know to give your plants water, nutrients, space to grow, and light, but do you know what kind of light to give to your plant for it to grow? In “Comparative analysis of HPS and LED luminaries in terms of effectiveness of greenhouse plant lighting and light emission,” Paweł Witkowski worked alongside their colleague, Ewa Korzeniewska, to discuss the question of whether using LED lighting over HPS lighting, a cheap but very powerful light source, is better for nurturing a growing plant. Witkowski works at the Agricultural University of Kraków in Krakow, Poland, while Korzeniewska is a faculty of electrical, electronic, computer and control engineering at the Lodz University of Technology. In this article, they conclude that LEDs are more beneficial than HPS lights (and even possibly the best) for reasons such as energy efficiency, preventing light emission into space, helping plants grow faster, lasting longer, and not reaching extremely hot temperatures, unlike HPS lights.
To backtrack a bit, Witkowski and Korzeniewska thought this research to be important because this information can not only help people be more environmentally friendly, but it is also a helpful tip for those who need advice when it comes to gardening such as you or myself. They stressed the importance of light when it comes to growing plants which is backed by several others. In the New York Times article, “How to Bring Nature Inside With the Right Houseplants,” Tim McKeough writes about the sentiments of the owner of a plant store who says that ‘light is the most important aspect of keeping plants happy’[1] (McKeough 2021). To prove which type of lighting is better, Witkowski and Korzeniewska used various simple methods to experiment. Plants are typically green because their chlorophyll molecules absorb red and blue light better than other light colors, but Witkowski and Korzeniewska found that no other color light is especially impactful to plant growth.This is backed in the article, “High-brightness LEDs—Energy efficient lighting sources and their potential in indoor plant cultivation” which states, “Chlorophyll molecules absorb blue and red wavelengths most efficiently”[2] (Yeh and Chung 2009).
Knowing this, they saw that LEDs could be controlled to only shine red and blue light while HPS light shone other colors, such as yellow and green, which just wasted energy and caused unnecessary light to go into space. For the other conclusions, they recorded the average lifetimes and temperatures of each type of lighting and compared these two aspects. It is clear that these methods proved LEDs to be the better light source over HPS for plants and environments since it did not waste energy on unnecessary light that would pollute the environment, gave the plant all the light it needed to grow, and are less hot so they do not damage the plant like HPS light may.
This is some really cool information that is not very well known to many people. Spreading this information can not only help those who want to get into taking care of plants, but also those who just want to help the environment in general. We should all switch to LEDs so that we can take more care of our sky, as well as our environment so that we can see a more healthy and beautiful nature. Different lighting is always being innovated, so research will continue to see which type of lighting is best for the world, and hopefully we can all learn to use what is best for us in order to protect the things we care about, like our plants and our environment.
References
McKeough T. How to Bring Nature Inside With the Right Houseplants. The New York Times. 2021 Mar 2 [accessed 2021 Jul 22].
Witkowski P, Korzeniewska E. Comparative analysis of HPS and LED luminaries in terms of effectiveness of greenhouse plant lighting and light emission. 2019 Applications of Electromagnetics in Modern Engineering and Medicine (PTZE). 2019.
Yeh N, Chung J-P. High-brightness LEDs-Energy efficient lighting sources and their potential in indoor plant cultivation. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. 2009 Feb 23 [accessed 2021 Jul 22].