Growlights.

More light means more yield — the rest is arithmetic

In horticulture there is a well-established rule of thumb: within a crop's usable range, roughly one percent more light delivers about one percent more yield. That simple relationship is why supplementary lighting is one of the most powerful tools a greenhouse grower has. Photosynthesis runs on light, and wherever the natural daily light integral — the total amount of light a location actually receives over a day — falls short of what the crop could use, grow lights close the gap and lift production, particularly through the short, dark days of winter and at high latitudes.

LED fixtures now dominate new projects, and for good reason. They are far more efficient than the older high-pressure sodium lamps, converting more of each watt into usable photons and less into waste heat; they are dimmable, so output can be modulated to the moment; and their spectrum can be tuned to the crop rather than fixed. Many growers run pure LED installations, while others adopt a hybrid of LED and HPS to combine LED efficiency with the radiant warmth HPS lamps add to the crop — a genuine consideration in cooler houses.

What turns lighting from a purchase into an investment is designing it from data rather than intuition. The lighting plan starts from the specific location's light statistics — how much natural light arrives, and how that varies month by month — measured against the target crop's light requirement. From that gap the design fixes the installed intensity (in micromoles per square metre per second), the hours of operation across the season and the spectrum, so the system delivers exactly the supplement the crop needs and no more.

Because lighting is both a large capital cost and a significant ongoing energy consumer, that dimensioning is where the economics are won or lost: every installed kilowatt has to earn its keep in extra yield. Over-light and you burn money on electricity the crop cannot convert; under-light and you leave production on the table through the darkest months. DutchGreenhouses® computes the lighting plan from your climate data and integrates it with the heating and energy strategy so the numbers work. Get in touch to design a lighting plan for your greenhouse.