Lighting Distances Explained for optimal plant growth!

When you want to set up grow lights for a hydroponics system, it can be important to think about placement and how you want lights to interact with plants. In fact, scratch that. It's always important.

A lot of beginners have questions about light placement. That's understandable, because it's kind of a tricky issue. How close do you put lights to plants?

Put lights too close, and you might end up burning plants. But when they're further away, they don't allow for the best kinds of plant growth. You need lights to be close enough to really nourish plants without being too close.

As far as the actual approximations for light systems, most growers recommend something on the order of 2 feet or thereabouts. As you perfect your trial and error approach, you figure out how many inches you can get to plants without burning them, and you basically want to keep them in the closest proximity that's possible. But that's not all growers do to maximize light.

Crop Techniques

There are a number of crop techniques like topping and super cropping that will get different parts of the plant closer to the light for better plant growth. In some cases, growers will cut off the tops of plants to keep them equidistant from the light source. Or they might actually have a plant grow horizontally, or structure grow light horizontally, so that instead of shining down on the top, the light is shining down on the side. This kind of neat hydroponics hack was probably thought up by some engineer, and it works wonders on plants.

Corner Plants and Peripheral Light

Then there's the issue of how to get lights to plants in a corner of a grow box or grow space.

Growers talk a lot about corner plants. Why? Because without the right light intensity, they just don't grow as well.

One of the most common solutions is to line the inside of a grow box with a reflective interior material. That's what you get when you buy a grow box or closed grow system from Dealzer -- you get grow boxes with the right tools to make sure every plant will be supported.

For more about everything it takes to get plants looking good and perfect crop cycles, spend time reviewing parts of the Dealzer website to understand we how support a worldwide community of growers.