With so many metal halide lamps available for growing plants, it’s hard to pick a winner. It’s more a matter of choice in most cases, dependent on your application, goals and budget. So, in this respect, there is a metal halide bulb for everyone.

Metal halide lamps will produce different results based on a mixture of their colour temperature, the bulb design (light distribution) and the intensity of light they produce.

This post will serve to provide a good benchmark metal halide grow lamp for which you can either run as an excellent choice on it’s own, or use it to compare with new metal halide lamps you may want to experiment with.

This lamp is the Sunmaster Metal Halide - which, in our opinion, is one of the best metal halide grow lamps you can buy.

The Sunmaster Metal Halide is an affordable yet high performance grow light bulb that comes in both a 4000K and 7200K option. The higher the Kelvin rating, which is a measure for blue light, the healthier your plants will be in the long run, producing more vigorous plant growth and better harvests too.

So, if you are looking for the best metal halide grow lamp available, the Sunmaster Metal Halide from Venture Lighting comes highly recommended.

At Chilli Willy, we stock the Sunmaster Cool Deluxe Metal Halide range, which is favoured by many growers because of its balanced light output at 6000 Kelvin, containing lots of blue light to keep your plants healthy and producing great harvests.

Products:

Sunmaster Cool Deluxe Metal Halide 600W

Sunmaster Cool Deluxe Metal Halide 1000W

Blue and red spectrum light are the 2 main areas of the lighting spectrum that plants need to grow.

White / blue spectrum light is more suited for propagating and is more for the early stages of plant growth (vegetative phase). Red spectrum light is required more when your plants are flowering and fruiting (blooming phase).

There are several types of grow lights available, including fluorescent grow lights, HID grow lights and LED grow lights.

If you are looking for more information on what type of grow light you need, then you may want to read the guide we put together explaining the different types of grow light.

All types of grow light have their own grow light bulbs which provide red and blue light:

Fluorescent grow lights have fluorescent tubes that can easily be swapped between propagating (white/ blue) and flowering bulbs (red).

HID grow lights have 2 different bulbs with drastically different colour ranges, making them excellent at producing vast amounts of light in the required range, as can be clearly seen when they are operating. For example, you can use a Metal Halide (MH) bulb for the white spectrum, like used for floodlights and a High Pressure Sodium (HPS) bulb for the red spectrum, like used for street lights.

LED grow lights simply use different coloured LED chips, either in panels of the same colour, or a mixed cluster.

Whatever grow light fixture you choose, you’ll also be able to obtain dual spectrum bulbs, which do a bit of both and are good all rounders for plant growth.

Chilli Willy has always had a strong focus on “Grow your own”, for example with our widely acclaimed “grow your own naughty looking chillies” range which make fantastic novelty chilli gifts and secret Santa presents.

Lots of searchers also come to us for our chilli growing advice, so we thought we would expand into what we know best and offer a full range of growing products, such as plant lighting, nutrients and other products designed to help you get the best out of your plants.

Some of our newly added products include the trusted Supernova reflector range, a range of HID ballasts, including the LightWave digital ballast, LightWave T5 grow lights, grow light timers and a range of bulbs and growing accessories.

We hope you enjoy our new ranges and we’re here to offer help and advice at any time. Please check back for more additions soon.