- Hey, guys, this is Nate Storey with Bright Agrotech.
Today we're going to talk about T5 fluorescent lights.
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A fluorescent light is basically this glass tube
with a gas inside of it, and a filament.
So as electricity is passed through this tube,
the gas heats up and emits light.
There are lots of different kinds out there,
but they all function a similar way.
When fluorescent lights first came out,
a lot of people were using them in conjunction
with incandescent lights for grow lights.
There are actually lots of different
fluorescent grow lights out there these days.
However, there are some that just out-perform others.
One of those is the high-output T5 light.
When you're looking at purchasing a light,
first off, it's really important
that you're buying a grow light.
There are lots of fluorescent lights out there
for interior, for exterior,
for all sorts of different applications.
But the ones for growing plants typically have
a very specific Kelvin rating.
The Kelvin rating basically describes
the temperature of the light.
On a T5 like this you'd have T5,
which basically denotes the size of the tube,
that's 5/8 of an inch.
You have 54 watt, which tells you
how much electricity it consumes.
It says 6400 Kelvin, which is a pretty cool light,
cool temperature light.
It's really important to pay attention
to that Kelvin rating specifically
to make sure you're getting the right kind of light
for the right time in your plant's life cycle,
and also to ensure you're getting a grow light
and not just an off-the-shelf T5.
T5s are a great grow light.
They are more efficient in warmer temperatures.
So the kind of temperatures you see
in a growing environment, they're going to be
a little bit more efficient, often times,
than T8s or T12s.
They're high output.
They're low profile.
They generally emit in a range that's a little bit
more friendly for most vegetative plant production.
By and large, these are the lights
that we really, really like.
These lights are really, really great
for applications where you don't need
tons and tons of light, and you don't need
light that has a variable spectrum.
Most fluorescent lights tend to be cooler in spectrum.
That means more blues.
Which means you get, in the vegetative stage,
you get stockier plants.
You get more dense vegetative growth.
You get more color.
But at the same time these kinds of lights
still have limits on how much light they give off.
Which means the kinds of crops that you put under them,
you just have to understand what the crop's needs are
as far as light goes, and make sure you're matching that
with this fluorescent light.
As great as these things are,
they'll never give off as much light
as, say, an HPS, a metal halide,
or an LED growing fixture of the same wattage.
Actually, that's not entirely true.
Like with the metal halide, or a high pressure sodium,
similar wattage, similar output.
But you can just dump a lot more wattage
into an HPS, or a metal halide light,
so you can get a lot more light out of it,
which for high light demand crops
means that those lights are great.
Similarly with the LED fixture,
we can tune it up or down,
and we can deliver an awful lot of light
to a relatively small area with an LED grow light.
We become a bit more limited when we're talking about
big, big numbers from a light application standpoint
when it comes to fluorescent.
These are great for seedling, great for cuttings,
and great for relatively beginning
vegetative stage plant production.
These are really, really great hobby lights.
Almost everyone uses these lights at hobby stage.
I've used them.
Everyone that I know has used them.
They're just a great, all around light.
They're inexpensive, they work well,
and they're actually pretty darn energy efficient,
comparatively, especially compared to T8s or T12s.
It's a great, great light.
Now the limitations are when you start to move into
really big production environments,
and when you start looking really, really closely
at your operating costs.
If you're thinking about a commercial farm,
I would think long and hard about putting in fluorescent
over, say, something like LED.
The reasoning for that is that fluorescent
is a great light at very small scales.
But it's still not the most energy efficient.
It's limited in its spectrum, and it doesn't
put off as much light as other options out there.
The big pros about these lights are that
they're relatively inexpensive,
in comparison to something, say, like LEDs.
They have a nice low profile,
so if you're doing stacked production or something,
these lights slide in and can light beds really nicely.
You know, for what they are,
they're pretty darn energy efficient.
By and large, they're a great light for smaller applications
and applications where you're only doing vegetative crops,
you're doing cuttings, you're doing very small plants.
The cons are that you still are fairly limited
on light output.
There's just so much light you can get out of these things.
They do tend to get pretty hot,
hotter typically than LED fixtures get.
The temperature is fairly set.
You can get warmer or cooler ones,
but you start to sacrifice efficiency
as you move towards some warmer temperatures
with these things.
Again, just to recap, a great light
for small scale production.
But once you start getting bigger and bigger and bigger,
you should be concerned about your energy,
your light output, and your just overall
operational efficiency.
That's the point where you should be moving
from something like this,
to something like an LED fixture.
Thanks so much for watching.
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