Eye Safety When Using Grow Lights Openly In A Living Room?
 

Hi all!

I wanted to see if anyone has practical experience using LED grow lights which would be capable of blooming cattleyas in a living room or any space people would be occupying regularly.

For a few reasons, a grow tent option won't really work for me, and of course I don't want to set up lights that will damage my eyes or the eyes of my guests just so I can grow ornamental plants.

I currently use several cheap goose neck LED grow lights to grow a few plants, and I've never perceived that they did any harm to my eyes, but I know with higher output models there is a risk.

Has anyone found a setup like this that will both protect their eyes while allowing them to bloom higher-light plants? Thank you!

Welcome to the OB!

I grow in a grow tent, but have seen many orchid growers bloom Cattleyas in open indoor setups by using shelving racks (commonly used for pantry storage) with lights pointing directly downward.

I would think cost and esthetics would remove most of the truly dangerous light options from consideration. Strong light can harm eyes, but most companies selling a consumer grade product aren’t going to bother selling something that can *easily* cause significant lasting damage. Commercial grade or other more specialized equipment could come with a eyewear-required warning, but assuming a light is sold for home use and you won’t be starting at it for hours, you probably don’t need to worry.

The eye damaging light is ultraviolet. Most LEDs sold as plant lights don't emit much, if any, UV.

As far as I understand it, getting LED's to produce UV light is pretty difficult. So unless you get a lamp that was designed specifically for UV you shouldn't get any light in the UV range. I think people may be carrying over the legitimate concern for this that existed when metal halides were used for high output grow lights.

No LED grow lights (to my knowledge) emit dangerous UV wavelengths, primarily because it is unnecessary for plant growth and unnecessarily drives up the costs of building and running the lights. If light intensity is a concern for you, as long as you're not staring directly into the lights you won't feel blinded. That shouldn't be too much of an issue since grow lights are generally pointed down at plants.

I work in the indoor farming industry and even under lights hitting the plants with 700 umol PAR no safety glasses are needed. We simply avoid looking directly into the lights. Our normal working intensity is half of that, and even working directly under the lights doesn't cause discomfort. (and we can grow some fairly high light crops under that).

For reference, the general ballpark intensity advised for Catts under LEDs as single light source is 10-14 hours with 150-300 umol PAR.

Related to this discussion, I received this response from Spider Farmer after emailing them regarding this topic:

"Greetings from Spider Farmer.

Regarding your inquiry, we have confirmed with the engineer that this (using the grow lights openly in a living space) is harmful to the eyes and the purple light is harmful to the human body, so we do not recommend that you do so.

If you have any further questions in the future, please feel free to contact us any time and we will be happy to assist you."

Purple lights are a different story. If they’re individual wavelength LED chips they could definitely harm the eyes if the light nanometer is low enough. Purple lights often mix blue + red wavelengths, and it’s the blue end of the spectrum that can cause eye damage.