Most conversations about grow lights start and end with output numbers. That's a mistake. A fixture that puts up a great spec sheet number on day one and can't survive three years in a working cultivation environment isn't infrastructure. It's a recurring expense with a delay built in. The Valoya RF700 was engineered around a different question: what does a fixture need to hold up, physically and spectrally, over years of real operating conditions, not just a lab test at time

This one tends to get pushback the moment it comes up. Raise it with a plant physiologist and you may get a flat denial that you're questioning the laws of physics. Worth addressing head on, because the pushback is fair and the point still stands. The inverse square law is real. It is not up for debate. Move a light meter away from a single point source and intensity drops exponentially, every time, no exceptions. A candle in a dark room behaves exactly the way the math says

Every LED spec sheet has a lifespan number on it. Most of the time it's an L90 rating, meaning the point where the fixture has dropped to 90 percent of its original lumen output. Sounds like a solid benchmark. It isn't, not for growing anything. Lumens measure how bright light looks to a human eye. That's a useful number for an office or a warehouse. It tells you almost nothing about what a plant is actually receiving. A fixture can hold its lumen rating just fine while the s

Every white LED on the market today is, at its core, a blue diode. That foundational wavelength typically centers around 450 nanometers, the same blue associated with the earliest LED technology. What turns that blue light into the white light we actually see is a phosphor coating applied over the diode, converting part of that blue output into green, red, and the rest of the visible spectrum. It is a long standing piece of materials science, and it is worth understanding, be

High-pressure sodium lighting, especially the double-ended thousand-watt HPS, has been the workhorse of the horticulture industry for a decade, and it remains relevant for many growers today. Some stick with it because the system already works. Others simply have not had a reason to change. Either way, running legacy HPS is one decision. Making sure it is properly optimized is another. A lamp replacement schedule is one of the easiest maintenance items to let slip. Without a

If you have shopped for LED horticultural lighting or looked into rebates and incentives, you have likely come across the term "DLC listed." The DesignLights Consortium (DLC) is a third party verification organization, often described as the ENERGY STAR of the lighting industry. A DLC listing tells you that a fixture has been independently tested and verified to meet a set of minimum performance requirements. For many rebate and incentive programs, DLC listing is a mandatory

Prepared by: Brian Gandy, Sustainable Terrains February 4, 2026 1. Core Mechanism Under canopy (UC) lighting represents a fundamental shift in controlled environment agriculture (CEA). The objective is to correct the spatial light disparity inherent in top-down lighting systems, in which lower canopy regions typically receive suboptimal Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density (PPFD). Mechanism: By directing light upward from the substrate level, we bypass the shading effect of th

Last year, I did a deep dive on High-Pressure Sodium lamps. Coming full circle on my last decade of Lighting research and development...

Let's get practical for a moment and talk about something every grower using high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps needs to hear clearly: If...

By Brian Gandy Founder, Sustainable Terrains / Relamp & Relax Program I’ve been deep in the weeds on researching and recycling HPS for...

The short answer? Usually not. It might seem like a no-brainer to swap your 1000-watt HPS with a 1000-watt LED, but that kind of...

A Decade in the Lighting Industry Over the last ten years, I’ve seen LED horticultural lighting go from a promising technology to an...