How Protective Eyewear For Cannabis Growers Makes You And Your Plants Healthier

Why are protective eyewear for cannabis growers important? To maximize cannabis yields, growers have long added tons of artificial lights to their indoor grow rooms. And these lights, including High-Pressure Sodium, CMH, Metal Halide, Blurple LED and Full Spectrum LED lights, work wonders at making your plants grow stronger and produce more buds.

However, the lights themselves have two unintended negative side effects that are both easy to overlook yet surprisingly nasty:

1. The artificial lights prevent growers from seeing their plants in their natural colors, making it harder for growers to diagnose plant problems.
2. The stronger-than-natural lights hurt growers’ eyes and add stress that weakens their own health.

To show growers how they can properly see how healthy their plants are and keep their entire grow staff healthy, Dave Lacovelli, Director of Sales @ Method Seven presented his session, “How to be a Better Grower in Seconds” on February 2, 2021, at The Grower’s Source Virtual Expo. Read on for a recap of the highlights of his session below:

1. Protective Eyewear for Cannabis Growers Helps Seeing Cannabis In Natural Light To Properly Assess Plant Health

Seeing is imperative to do the job of a grower, so eye protection is paramount. You can become a better grower in seconds just by putting on protective eyewear with special lenses that filter the unnatural light used in grow rooms, so you can actually see what your plants would look like in natural light. 

“It’s very hard to see what’s going on in your grow room with the skewed color.”

— Dave Lacovelli, Director of Sales @ Method Seven

By seeing your plants as if they were in natural light even when they are not, you’ll be able to:
• See if your plants are in trouble or not
• See your plants’ true color to tell if your plant is actually that green or not
• Not mistakenly think that your plants are yellow or calcium-deficient when grown under yellow HPS lights
• Better see pests like powdery mildew that the harsh light was making it too hard to see

As the management guru Peter Drucker said, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And in the same vein, you can’t manage your plants if you are seeing them in the wrong color.

2. Protecting Eyes From Grow Lights For Healthier Growers

It’s first apparent that your eyes and your grow room employees’ eyes can be harmed by long-term exposure to powerful indoor grow lights. With light-filtering protective eyewear for cannabis growers’, eyes can be protected from harmful UV and infrared light that is produced by HPS, CMH, and Metal Halide lights. 

But the hours and hours of harsh light can damage more than the eyes. Over time, the strong lights can also stress your employees, cause fatigue, give them headaches, and eventually lower their productivity. 

These two health effects are a strong motivation for providing your team with protective eyewear that filters out UV and Infrared light.

“If my eyes are relaxed and not stressing and watering, and I’m not getting headaches, then I also enjoy doing my job, hobby or passion.  And it just makes everything that much better for you, including your long-term vision and eyesight, which is kind of important.”

— Dave Lacovelli, Director of Sales @ Method Seven

3. Different Protective Eyewear Lenses For Different Grow Light Colors

Growers choose from a variety of different lights for their grow rooms, based on initial light fixture costs, watts produced, energy use, longevity, light color for the vegetative or flowering stage, amount of heat, and other reasons. 

You may have noticed that the last two lines on the chart are for full-spectrum lights, which still benefit from protective eyewear, even if they give off a white light that needs only a slight color balance. 

That’s because if you go without any protective eyewear at all you can get stressed by the high amount of UV and Infrared light. And if you wear regular sunglasses, those will lower the amount of light hitting your eyes, but it will be like working in the dark instead of seeing your cannabis plants clearly and with the right color as if under natural light. 

Similarly, you can better assess your plants with full-spectrum light-specific lenses when working under the sun when growing cannabis plants outdoors. 

“The diodes of those full spectrum LEDs are brutal. Like whether you’re just bopping in a room for a minute or you’re working in there for hours, if you look at those and then move your eye, I mean, it’s spot upon spot upon spot. So it’s really not fun to work. A lot of people get headaches under those; it’s disorienting.”

— Dave Lacovelli, Director of Sales @ Method Seven

4. How To Clean Your Protective Lenses From Resin

While resin is arguably the best part of the cannabis plant, it’s also the stickiest, and can smudge and smear all over your protective eyewear. To clean them, Dave Lacovelli recommends:
• Hot water
• Coconut oil (soaking for about 30 seconds)
• Dish soap
• Microfiber cloth pouch
• NOT rubbing alcohol or vinegar, which strips off the glasses’ protective coating
• NOT a t-shirt or towel, which can scratch

Healthier Plants, Healthier Workers

Light-filtering lenses in protective eyewear for cannabis growers let you and your grow room team see your cannabis plants as if under natural light, so you can properly assess the health of your plants. Eye strain, fatigue, and damage, plus stress and headaches are prevented, leaving your team cool, calm, and collected. As David Locovelli says, you can become a better grower in seconds, just by putting on protective, light-filtering eyewear.

You can watch The Grower’s Source session that inspired this article by clicking on the video shown below.

How Method Seven Invented Light-Filtering Glasses For Cannabis Growers

Not covered in this article but presented by Dave Lacovelli was the Method Seven origin story, which includes a frustrated photographer for High Times Magazine, World War II airplane cockpits, and experiments mixing minerals and molten glass. Click here to jump to time stamp 1:56 to hear Dave Lacovelli tell the tale.

Featured Image Credits: Method Seven

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