FlyTrapCare Forums

I'm in the process of setting up an indoor grow space and have found it rather difficult to choose grow lights. There are many options available at all sorts of stores ranging from walmart to home depot and amazon, but most of them are not bright enough for carnivorous plants. Though most lights have some sort of specs such as watts and lumens, these specs aren't very useful. Power consumption is measured and watts, and while brighter lights will tend have a higher wattage, so will inefficient lights. Lumens measures how bright our human eyes perceive the light to be, but our eyes are more sensitive to wavelengths that plants can't use as efficiently for photosynthesis. A more useful spec is called PPFD, which can be used to determine if a plant will get enough light under a grow light. I won't talk about the theory behind PPFD as there are other threads that do so, but think of it like this: even if you keep a light on for most of a day, if it has a low PPFD, your plant will be light starved. PPFD is typically measured in umol/s/m^2, and these units will be implicitly used from here on out.

Below, I'm going to document PPFD measurements of some lights I've either purchased or encountered. If any other users with PAR meters are willing to contribute with measurements of their own grow lights, that would be amazing!

Every measurement will contain three numbers: the PPFD at 3, 6, and 12 inches. For example, 200/100/80 means that the PPFD is 200 at a height of 3", 100 at a height of 6", and 80 at a height of a foot.

The ANTLUX 4ft LED Grow Light 80W
Amazon Link
My opinion: Avoid. Not bright enough for most CPs. This is a work in progress. I'm planning on editing this post with additional measurements in the near future.