PAR Meter

[Hammerhead]

OK Guys I need some sugestion on a good Par meter for some light tests.. is this one good

Hydrofarm LG17010 Digital Light Meter

 

[seeingthings]

Check your phone's appstore. Not exactly the most accurate, but I found a few light meter apps that use the phones built in light sensor.

 

[Hammerhead]

no that wont work..

Any other sugestions. need s to be a LUx meter Par meters are to expensive.

 

[lucky14]

The hydrofarm meter you mentioned just seems to be a re-branded Chinese special, numerous available on fleabay without the hydrofarm label markup.

 

[foomar]

Its worth the extra if at all possible , will be replaceing my stolen licor with this arrangement as soon as i can find a sensor going cheap.

This sounds like an accurate DIY Licor


http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/blog.php?b=519

Instead of paying hundreds of dollars on a PAR meter, I bought an Apogee SQ-110 sensor (click on "Order Sensors" on left) and borrowed the digital multimeter (DMM) from work. As long as your DMM reads in millivolts (mV), or thousandths of a volt, then you can use it with the SQ-110 quantum sensor to get PAR readings.

There are a lot of cheap DMMs available that will work just fine. You simply multiply the mV reading (or thousandths of a volt) by 5 to get the PAR value.
As a bonus, you have a DMM that can be used to test for stray voltages, grounded circuits, live wire and many more things, too, instead of just a more expensive meter that only reads PAR.

The gain/output on the Apogee SQ-110 is 5.00 µmol m-2 s-1 (or written as µmol*m2*sec) per mV, so if you get a mV reading of 20mV (0.020 V) that's 100 PAR. Since I have LEDs, I then multiply it by 1.2 for 120 PAR.

(20 mV) * (5 µmol*m2*sec/mV) * 1.2 = 120 PAR

or

(0.020 V) * (5000 µmol*m2*sec/V) * 1.2 = 120 PAR

 

[Hammerhead]

I found 1 for 40$

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HYDROFARM-M...896?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item51b057f340

I also found another one for 123$.This is the one I ordered

http://www.hydroponics.net/i/131859

 

[BCNeil]

This is one of those items, it would be great in hydro shops rented.

 

[habeeb]

li-cor


buy once be done. also needs calibrating every couple years I believe.





remember, par meters read any light wavelength.. so honestly it's really only good for comparing a lamp to itself. as any different bulb is going to give you a different number, also seen by the charts, there not perfected yet, so going from lamp to lamp would yield different results as some of the color bands under read, and some of the color bands over read



nevermind.. just read closely, you want a lux