All 3 of those lights are blurple. Dead end technology.
How many growers have been sucked into the "alternative facts" advertising that always goes hand-in-hand with these blurple lights? Golden Ring 800W - actual consumption 150W. Vipar 600W - actual 276W. Oooh, the Dominator 800, that sounds intimidating, actual consumption 190W.
Wattage is, as we all know, just about the poorest metric for comparison. But let's talk about wattage for a sec. A watt is a measure of work. Horsepower can be expressed in watts. 745 watts equals 1 horsepower.
Wattage tells you how much work is going on, not how many buds you're gonna get. Wattage tells you what you're gonna pay your utility at the end of the month for the work that was provided, whether your plants are thriving or despondent.
These boxes use cheap LEDs, and perhaps worse, they use cheap drivers, fans, etc. Whatever amount of power these cheap lights consume, most of it is wasted as heat due to the multiple inefficiencies built into them.
Let's give these boxes the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Let's say that they actually produce useful light. The boxes are only about 12 to 15 inches on a side! So what you have is a very small box that puts out enough light (and heat) to peel paint right underneath them, but minimal coverage outside their own footprint. This is not about the quality of the parts. It's about the plain old physical properties of light. It doesn't matter what's in the box - if you've ever used 'em you know that useful light falls off very quickly at the perimeters. So stuffing four COBs into a space that ideally should have maybe one COB doesn't make any sense.
A spindly-looking DIY frame makes much more sense. Gaius was on the right track when he built the
Battlestar Ganjatica.
