Mohamed.
Member
Price-wise absolutely not. Light spectrum wise for the plants, yes they are better than the HLG and other strip builds.
Edit, this doesn't justify their price by any means though!
Hlg 550 vs LED strip light 480 w
- Thread starter fredthesmoker
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Edit, this doesn't justify their price by any means though!
Powertech
Well-Known Member
I am manually turning them on and off, and yes I am concerned that it could be harming the plants that could negatively impact the final product, but I also think the benefits could possibly be extremely good, so am taking the risk. I did not do any scientific research to try and calculate how much to use, I'm just winging it. Yes it SHOULD damage the plant, but only like humans getting a sunburn. Since it is not on constantly, hopefully the plant heals quickly and produces a lot of trichomes in the process
Powertech
Well-Known Member
You really think they have a better spectrum than if you build something yourself? Highly doubting that as building yourself you can make it anything you want
Mohamed.
Member
I tried to do some calculations right now and it is much harder than what I previously thought
, needs more reading and research.Anyway, please be very careful with those my friend, I assume you manually turn them off before you open your tent. 280nm is actually considered UV-C which gets completely absorbed by the atmosphere and don't reach earth surface at all and they are very dangerous to humans. So please be careful.
About trying it on the plant though, I'm very interested to see the result of this.
Mohamed.
Member
No, I think they have a better spectrum than HLG 550 and strip lights which use a full spectrum LED chip. Those LED chips, I believe, are not optimized for flowering plants and that's why they add deep red to them. Having that much green amounts to just wasted power in the green spectrum. But on the other hand, these LED chips seem to be very efficient and also having green light will make the overall light color white which makes it easier to see your plants and diagnose them.
About building my own light, sure I can match the spectrum of these Blackdog LED lights with just a fraction of the price. Yes I think their spectrum is perfect for flowering plants, here it is:
Compare this to the spectrum of the HLG 550 below (that's after they added some deep red chips):
The HLG 550 is totally lacking in the UV department, plus it has an insane amount of green light which for me is just wasted energy.
So if i'm going to build my own light, I would try to match BlackDog or KIND spectrum. If you have other thoughts, please share them with me.
Major Blazer
Well-Known Member
The Black Dog Phytomax-2 600 pulls 630w from the wall and has a total output 961 μMol/s ppf, the HLG 550 pulls 480w from the wall and has a total output of 1178.05 μMol/s ppf and you're worried about the the HLG "wasting energy" from green light emitted? Breh. At the end of the day, PAR matters significantly more than anything else and as you can see here, HLG is wasting as little energy as possible while maximizing PAR (the Black Dog LED is wasting significantly more energy (about 30% more) to create less PAR). And the HLG costs $550 less.
Here's a high level overview of green light as it relates to plant growth btw:
Mohamed.
Member
Thank you for posting this video. I watched this series of videos by Apogee a while back and this was a good refresher. Anyway, it's a big subject. If you check minute 13 of the video, this is close to what I'm talking about. I still believe that for flowering plants, the spectrum of phytomax is better, not phytomax itself as a light obviously but any light that resembles this spectrum.
Major Blazer
Well-Known Member
Right but if you listen to all of what Bruce is saying, the first thing he says there is that an ideal spectrum matches the sun - the sun's spectrum has oodles of green. The second thing he says is that adding green led's is inefficient but we're not adding monochromatic leds - white led's are just blue led's with a phosphorous coating so nothing to worry about there. Bruce then goes on to explain the benefits of green for light penetration to lower canopy.
Major Blazer
Well-Known Member
It literally all matters though, some things just matter less and some things just matter more. Will a mixed spectrum LED grow dope plants (Black Dog, Kind, etc)? Yes absolutely. So if you as a consumer want to shell out more money to buy a light that has lower PAR output (and if you don't know what PAR means or why that is important to plant growth, look that up) but will consume more electricity while producing greater heat to get the same job done; go for it - you'll get good smoke and pretty buds, that much I'm sure. I'm not trying to sell anyone on anything, I build my own shit and I have been for the last 6 years. Y'all are welcome to believe what you want, there is enough evidence based science out there for anyone willing to look.
Mohamed.
Member
Very true, the end product is what counts and for small growers, power efficiency shouldn't matter that much if at all but for large scale growing, compromises will be made in order to lower the electric bill.
HomegrownGenetics420
Well-Known Member
I am crushing it with two HLG550 V2 r-specs. Not sure why some people dislike them
Mohamed.
Member
First let me say that I agree with a lot of your statements and kudos to you for building your own lights. What I can say is this, yes green light matters and is in fact photosynthitaclly active contrary to what light manufacturers previously believed. but things should be taken into context.
For example, my next grow is going to be 12/12 from clones, I'm shooting for a very short stubby plants with each one having one big bud at the top. In my case, I could benefit very much from the blue spectrum to keep my plant height in check. I don't need green that much as I wouldn't benefit from canopy penetration for such small plants. I need much red because as I understand it's the most effective for flowering and I need UV in order to stress the plant to produce more THC and Terpenes . So in my particular case, a spectrum that resembles BlackDogs will be the optimum for me. Now if I were growing large bushy plants then I would certainly benefit from the green color penetration. Although those light strips are lacking in UV and so they need supplemental UV.
Lastly, yes it's true that these light strips with full spectrum light produce more umol/s/w than monochromatic LED lights but this figure should still be weighted against the plant spectral response to arrive at which light is actually more efficient overall for plants. I'm not a scientist, and if the scientists themselves are having a hard time determining the best light spectral distribution for plants, then for sure I wouldn't pretend that I know better.
Lastly, in a future trial, I will try using normal 4000K LEDs (not grow LEDs) and I will supplement them with UV and Red and I'm pretty sure they will work great actually.
Mohamed.
Member
Thank you bk78 for keeping laughing at my posts
I'm just glad that I'm a great entertainment for you 
bk78
Well-Known Member
It’s hard not to when you think a outdated and inefficient light is better then one of the top ones out currently.Thank you bk78 for keeping laughing at my posts
Powertech
Well-Known Member
I just normally dislike the more popular companies. HLG one of if not the most popular. I bought Spider Farmer before they were popular. Now I build my own.......but i'll test anything somebody wants me too
Major Blazer
Well-Known Member
A plant's spectral response range is from 400 to 700 nm which is represented as PAR. PPF is photosynthetic photon flux and PPF measures the total amount of PAR that is produced by a lighting system (/second). PAR = photosynthetically active radiation; it's the photons (the light energy) driving photosynthesis. In other words, when PPF goes up plants have more fuel for photosynthesis. I only brought up PPF when you went on about "wasted energy," using Black Dog as your standard for efficiency and presenting HLG as wasteful, which is just dead wrong and counter-intuitive. Photomorphogenesis is separate from photosynthesis.
Nice. Referencing an LED as "normal" is redundant but for frame of reference, my lamp consists of 3500k linear strips (intended for industrial application, i.e. "normal"), 2 660nm red strips, and a t5 UVA/UVB fixture. Good luck.
Mohamed.
Member
Well I'm not a lighting expert but I kinda understand the difference between PAR and PPF. Let me try to be technically correct as much as I can. When I say that the PPF should be weighted against the plant's spectral response, I technically meant that the PPF of incident light on a plant should be weighted against the PAR action spectrum. In McCree PAR relative action spectrum, incident blue and green light effects on photosynthesis is roughly half that of red light. So while it's true that light quantity is more important than light quality, this light quantity is only a measurement once it actually interacts with the photosynthetic compounds in the leaves but it doesn't say anything about how much of the incident light is used and at which spectrum. Once the incident light is weighted against the PAR action spectrum, it becomes more clear why predominantly red LED lights are used in agriculture, it's because red light is the one that's capable of driving the most photosynthetic reactions compared to green and blue. And in this sense I say yes, HLG is wasteful compared to other standard grow light sources. Of course there is the issue of good penetration of green light but for example one growing lettuce doesn't need that good of a light penetration. I might be wrong in all of the above though
but that's my understanding.You are correct, LED is LED. Your light setup gives me so much hope because I really don't want to pay that much money for future grow lights, thank you!
Mohamed.
Member
Well whatever the case maybe, I appreciate any reaction I get especially if it is that much entertaining to people
cheers!On the serious side though, if you know of an experiment or forum post where someone tried both types of light on clones from the same mother with identical feed and growing environment, I would be very much interested to read about that.