Bespoke LED grow lighting makes it easy for you to increase yield and reduce costs, delivering a tangible return on investment and ensuring that yields are managed and maintained to the expected levels. The right combination of LED light source, intelligent technology, and industry expertise can transform your glasshouse and help you tackle any legacy issues that may be impacting growth or yield.
To create your ideal LED-based grow light design, it’s important to consider three key factors: selecting the right light layout and design for your crops and location, planning for the long-term, and investing in bespoke LED grow lights that can be adapted to suit different plants and glasshouse requirements.
01: The Light Recipe
“It is incredibly important to get the light recipe right,” says Craig Price, Operations Director at Light Science Technologies. “This is paramount as not only do different species of plant respond to different light spectrums, but they also respond to the amount of light. Too little results in poor growth and too much can over-stress the plant.”
Light spectrum is one of the most important factors to consider when investing in glasshouse lighting. The right light spectrum can fundamentally change glasshouse yield and plant quality, while incorrect use of light spectrum and light placement may not deliver the desired results. Understanding the light spectrum and how it can both influence and be influenced means that any area can be turned into a high-yield vertical farming space, even if it doesn’t have access to any natural light.
Thanks to their adaptability, LED grow lights are ideally suited to all stages of plant growth as they can be customised to use relevant light wavelengths that optimise growth while ensuring that lighting is evenly distributed. These lights are also capable of emitting light in the blue and deep red light spectrums that plants favour for growth – light spectrums that traditional lighting systems usually cannot achieve. However, plants don’t just favour red and blue light, they also need other colours, particularly yellow and green, to achieve optimum growth and photosynthesis. LED grow lights are capable of being customised to adapt colour spectrum to suit specific stages of plant growth and to align with the latest insights and research.
It is entirely possible, using the right lighting and layout, to turn an indoor warehouse without any sunlight or high-quality light, into a grow space using uniform light distribution and the right LED grow lights. Bespoke LED grow lighting can be installed on-site to enhance or create high quality light spectrum, distribute light evenly, and ensure that the light has a high Colour Rendering Index (CRI). This allows for growers to not only continue delivering high yields during the winter months but to use alternative spaces for crop planting that would previously have not been ideal.
Bespoke LED grow lights can be customised to suit specific spaces, crops and lighting conditions and to achieve very specific results. While the cost may initially be higher than standard lighting solutions, it does deliver a return on investment (ROI) across LED grow light lifespan, crop yield, crop quality and profits.
02: The long-term LED benefit
“Bespoke LED lighting can potentially save a company money over the long term,” says Price. “I use the term ‘square peg into a round hole’ when explaining to companies how LED lights can change their financial profile and ROI. With these lights, you have the ability to increase, decrease and change the light recipe to remove any sub-optimal performances within the system, and this will only impact positively on the bottom line.”
A fully upgradable, bespoke and intelligent LED grow lighting solution has the potential to deliver optimal yield and reduce both your CAPEX and OPEX costs. Bespoke LED grow lights don’t necessarily mean heavy investment either. The key here is to work with an experienced LED grow light partner that understands every variable and can help you to design a solution that fits your unique growing parameters.
A bespoke LED grow light solution has the added benefit of saving you money over the long term. With LED grow lights, there are tangible energy savings that will be felt by your budget compared with traditional lighting solutions such as SON and HPS Light offer products. While LED grow lights can be initially more expensive as an investment compared with alternatives, they consume less power and are far more energy efficient.
This translates to immediate savings on electricity costs. Additionally, LED grow lights have a longer lifespan, delivering high light quality for up to 50, 000 hours and with replaceable sub-components that allow for ongoing maintenance and management. With sustainable and interchangeable LED grow lights, you can reduce costs and generate maximum yields for more than 25 years.
03: Fitting the pieces of the puzzle
There are immense benefits to investing in bespoke LED grow lighting, but these can only be achieved by investing in quality LED lights that deliver on their promise, by investing in the light recipe that can achieve your very specific results, and by working with a trusted partner that understands exactly what your business needs.
As a grower, you want to manage your crops to very high specifications and with minimal room for error, reducing the risks commonly associated with agriculture. Using bespoke LED grow lights, you can gain even deeper control over your environment and potentially increase your efficiencies and yield. This allows you to grow more in a smaller space while reducing your impact on the environment.
At Light Science Technologies, we use our laboratory and industry experts to help you create the right light recipe that will work in your environment. This recipe will be to the scale that’s needed for your business and will be designed to ensure that performance is optimal, and optimised, for the next 25 years and beyond. The goal is to provide you with more than just a recipe to ensuring LED grow light success, but a complete solution that takes light, nutrients and other environmental parameters into account.
Our Patented LED grow lights are embedded within a sustainable luminaire body and are designed to help you reduce costs over the long term through reduced power consumption and intelligent use of technology. Within our current product portfolio, we’re able to deliver performances of up to 3.33 µmol/j but our aims are to increase this to – 4.00 µmol/j and beyond.
We work across multiple horticulture disciplines that including vertical farming, glasshouses, and medicinal plant facilities to create full bespoke and turnkey solutions for controlled environment agriculture (CEA) applications. Our ongoing investment means that our technology is constantly evolving to adapt to the changing needs of the grower and the market, ensuring that you have access to sensors, insights, and solutions that can help you optimise your environment and results.
“We already have an extensive product portfolio that we classify as 80% complete, giving our clients 20% customisation and allowing for us to offer a truly tailored solution,” concludes Price.
The right partner will work with you to create an affordable bespoke solution that achieves better light quality, energy savings and yield. Work with a trusted partner who can create the right recipe for your environment and who has the latest technology and science at their fingertips, ready to help you shift your yield forwards.
Bespoke lighting may sound expensive, but it doesn’t have to be, and the right lighting could see you achieve returns on investment (ROI) that help you grown more for less. We can help you transform your greenhouse lighting with the right technology, expertise and science.
Contact us on 01332 410601 to speak to one of the team.
