What’s PPF.PPFD.PAR.PPE of LED Grow Light?

PPF is the term used to define the measurement of PAR. It stands for photosynthetic photon flux and its value determines how much PAR is being produced by any one lighting system over the period of a second. PPF is the second essential ingredient in your recipe to the perfect lighting for your grow space.

PPFD is the amount (also referred to as intensity) of PAR light that lands on a square meter each second. PPFD is measured in micromoles per square meter per second (μmol·m^-2·s^-1). In other words, PPFD is how much PPF is hitting each square meter of your crop at any given second.

PAR – Photosynthetically Active Radiation are the wavelengths of light within the visible range of 400 to 700 nanometers (nm) that are critical for photosynthesis. PAR is measured as Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density (PPFD), with units in μMol/m2/s. (micromoles per meter squared per second).

PPE describes how much light a grow light produces from its input power. The metric used to measure PPE is micromoles per second per Watt – which simplifies to µmol/J since a Watt is a Joule per second.

The goal of the growers is to buy LED grow lights with the best effect for indoor plants, which measures the reception of blue and red light by plants in the par spectrum. Photosynthetic photon efficiency (PPE) should be higher than 2.1 µ mol / J or better for indoor growth facilities with 1000 ft2 or more canopy. In greenhouses using both sunlight and supplement lighting, PPE should be greater than 1.7 µ mol / J in facilities with the same 1000 ft2 or larger canopy.

The industry standard for measuring grow lights LED efficiency is micromolar per joule (sometimes written as umol / J μ Mol / J, umolj-1 or PPF / W). This means that each joule of electrical energy (Joule = watt * second) will produce a certain number of photon micro magnetic poles. The higher the number, the better.