Grow Room LED Grow Lights

Crop production in grow rooms, vertical farms, and plant factories is surely on the rise. There are plenty of benefits and specific reasons for controlled environment growing over traditional cultivation models.

In our grow light approach, we distinguish 2 categories:

• grow rooms with a single layer of crops and grow lights from the top
• vertical farming and plant factories with a multi-layer canopy setup. When your interest goes to multi-layer cultivation systems, please see vertical farming.

MechaTronix has developed specific LED top grow lights for grow rooms with its specific purposes and advantages.

CoolStack®

In most single-layer grow rooms, you will see our advanced CoolStack® LED grow light.

The CoolStack® is the most powerful and modular LED grow light for grow rooms available on the market today. Its unique cooling system and ultra-high efficiency mean that there is very limited heat production coming from this lamp, which makes it ideal for controlled cultivations in a closed room. The CoolStack® leads to a heat reduction of over 50% compared to traditional HPS SON-T lamps, which immediately leads to less need for extra cooling and the related energy cost, but also to a better controllable plant balance in your crop.

What makes the CoolStack® the ideal LED grow light for your grow room project:

Seven different power and light outputs guarantee the ideal match for the needed light level of your crops with a minimal number of light fixtures and an ideal light spreading.

While most grow rooms in the past were equipped with light bars, we aim at reducing the number of light fixtures per area to achieve a lower overall cost per meter. Also less cabling leads to a lower cost and an overall cleaner installation.

The ideal light distribution per crop with intelligent lens beam angle design

When your grow room is equipped with a minimum number of grow light fixtures, light distribution and light penetration in the plants becomes points of attention. Just spreading the light in the widest way is of course the easiest solution and gives in many cases a good even light spreading, but is far from ideal with regards to light penetration in the depth of the crop.

Plant trials over the last years have shown that crops with a more complex morphology like high tomatoes, cucumber, eggplants, and cannabis can deliver up to 20% higher production at the same light level when the light is deeper vertically distributed in the crop.

To achieve the optimal balance between even light spreading and deep distribution, we have developed a wide range of different beam angles and beam patterns.

Upgradable LED engines for a sustainable future

Over the last few years, extremely big steps have been taken in the efficiency of LED grow lights, which has brought us to an exponential increase in the use of LED grow lights for greenhouses for a wide range of crops.

The motivations of the growers have a wide range, with each its specific aims.

• Saving energy compared to HPS SON-T installations is probably the most common driver today for growers to invest in LED grow lights.
  
  As of today we can replace the light level of a 1000 watt HPS SON-T lamp with just 530 watts of LED grow light energy or a saving of 47%.


• More light for the same power consumption – especially light loving crops like tomatoes profit a lot from extra light for the same energy cost.
  
  While the standard for lighted tomatoes was 180μmol/sm² just a few years ago, the light levels now increase to 300μmol/sm².


• Better temperature controls during growth – one of the main disadvantages of growing with HPS SON-T lamps is the extensive heat these lamps produce.
  
  A 1000 watt HPS SON-T generates 700 watts of heat – more specifically the biggest portion of this heat goes to radiated heat which leads immediately to ambient temperature and leaf temperature increase.
  While growers aim for higher light levels, this heat can become too much for a well controlled production.
  In these cases a hybrid or full LED installation can be the way to go.


• Specific crop improvements during various growth stages. One of the biggest advantages of LED grow lights is the potential to steer plants with specific supplemental light spectra.
  
  In this way, germination can be sped up, stronger root production can be achieved or stretching of the plant can be avoided. Higher blue rates improve germination and root development, end-of-day treatments with far red can induce length growth from trusses and stems.

Today we can say that the efficiency of LED grow lights is significantly higher than that of traditional SON-T lamps, but the world of Horti cultural lighting is constantly evolving. MechaTronix is continuously investigating in research and collaborating with market leading universities and specialists. To anticipate the future findings we have developed our grow lights in such a way that the light engines can be upgraded individually without having to re-invest in a complete new grow light installation.

Why would you upgrade your grow light LED engines over time?

▲ Electricity prices evolution in €/Mwh Belgium

• When you would save more energy cost than the upgrade of the LED engines would cost over time.
  
  This is mainly the case for growers who pay high energy prices, like in west and north Europe, and crops that run with many lighted hours per season, like tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers,…


• When your crops would benefit more from the extra light you get after an upgrade than the cost of upgrade.
  Especially for light loving crops which would give a higher produce at a higher light level.
  
  For example a tomato grower who installed a light level of 180µmol/sm² in 2018 at an efficiency of 2.5µmol/W.
  This grower could today move for the same power consumption to a light level of 280µmol/sm² with a simple upgrade.


• When new light recipes are proven to be more efficient.
  
  Up to 2020 strawberries were grown under the classic 90/5/5 RBW spectrum. In 2021 new research stated that the use of far red has been proven to give a higher growth results.
  
  

Longest life time and lowest light decay over time.

It maybe doesn’t show from the outside, but the CoolStack® is a true masterpiece of technology.

Where most LED grow lights use simple cooling principles like a block of aluminum, watercooling or coolingfans, the heart of the CoolStack® has a sophisticated passive heat pipe and a stack fin cooler.

This technology, which is implemented in a lot of high end devices like lap tops, iPads and smart phones, guarantees you the best thermal management of the LEDs on the market.

The light efficiency, the life time and the light decay (how fast or slow the light reduces over time) are all directly related to the LED temperature of the grow light.

So with the CoolStack® which runs the internal LEDs as cold as possible, you as a customer will have a grow light that lives longer, has a higher efficiency of light per watt and maintains his light at a higher light level over time.

With a lifetime of 75.000 hours L90B10 and a warranty of 10 years there is quality wise nothing even close to what the CoolStack® offers.

Fixed light spectrum or dynamic spectrum – advanced morphology and energy saving

While all MechaTronix LED grow lights are dimmable and controllable by the climate computer since 2018, a lot of research has been conducted over the last few years with a strong focus on the potential of controllable light spectra in greenhouses.

Besides interesting insights into what plants need spectrum wise in each growth phase, dynamic lighting, where the light spectrum is changed during the day, has been proven to be highly beneficial to improve the morphology of the plant and to generate a higher yield for many crops.

Improved morphology and higher yields

The best examples of morphologic advantages can be seen in the research results for chrysanthemums and everbearing strawberries.

Wageningen University & Research (WUR) conducted deep research in collaboration with Plant Lighting on the ideal light strategy for cut chrysanthemums. They discovered that an end-of-day treatment with only far red light while the base spectrum was turned off, resulted in clearly longer flowering shoots with very little extra energy.

The spectral research of Proefcentrum Hoogstraten (PCH) on strawberry varieties clearly proved that extra far red during the day resulted in average bigger size berries and a higher yield, while end-of-day treatment with far red led to longer fruit trusses and a larger LAI of the crop.

These effects are mainly triggered by the Phytochrome balance in the crop: Red to Far Red ratio R:FR and Phytochrome Photostationary State PSS are both methods to trigger and control the elongation of crops.

While the Phytochrome Pfr antennas are in the far red bandwidth (730nm peak) and the Phytochrome Pr in the Red zone (660nm peak), the change in relation between these two tells the plant that it is in the shadow, which triggers the shade escape effect and leads to elongation.

Natural shade plants like anthuriums react in the opposite way. Absence of far red leads to stretch while a high dose of far red will avoid this.

Phytochrome sensitivity curve

Besides morphologic effects, far red has other effects on most plants.
As the energy of far red travels deep into the crop it leads to local higher energy, stomatal opening and in general a more generative growth.
A higher portion of the photosynthetic energy goes to the fruit and a lower portion to the leaf.
This leads, for example, in cucumbers to faster production of the fruit and in strawberries to an average higher sorting and an improved yield.

Our conclusion here is simple and straight forward.

As long as the heat from the lamps work beneficial in your grow room, stay with our CoolStack® passive LED grow lights.

Always aim for the best balance between the correct light spectrum what your crop needs and the highest efficiency, because the Opex makes the biggest impact on your total cost in a grow room.

Let us calculate what fits best in your grow room dimensions, so that you get the optimal result in both light distribution and canopy penetration.