Lumen maintenance on LEDs is < 3 years

I didn't know this when I got the quantum boards. No way will I replace them with anything other than screw ins now. Are we sure this is all true though? I mean this is the first I've read this.

Well I only veg with led anyway I guess I'm not too affected anyway thankfully. Sucks for the guys with like thousands spent on LED because they were trying to save on costs.

Philips horticulture case reports are interesting. A few tomato growers have done video's. It seems most are happy to try leds, and adopt them as interlighting. But for top lighting they still prefer sodium.

I have been pondering over why hids. Footprint blocking natural light seems unlikely, as light bars chip to uni-strut that's taking services around anyway. Cost is a balancing act. Radiant heat seems an advantage for hids though. It's a greenhouse in winter, so evenly spread heaters is a good thing. The warmth from interlighting is seen as a good thing, because it simplifies heating arrangements. This is another balancing act, where older leds might trade light for heat output, but if that reduces the bill associated with heating the place, it's not a total loss.

Indoors, the economics of greenhouse lighting are are little use to most of us.


I'm also looking at the efficiency of supplementary red. I don't use interlighting because it gets covered in resin. I do use lights below the plants though. It seems wrong, but it's out of harms way and watt for watt I see more yield from the led uplighters, than I do the sodium top lighting. I must point out these uplights also have an effect on my air distribution though. As it's a PC fan picking up air from the floor and pushing it upwards in a scrog system. Where the general idea is supplying the grow with air around the pots, that comes up, through the plants, past the lights, and out. It all works together, so the individual elements are hard to quantify exactly. The lights work, but they're fans.

I would like some red light bars around the perimeter, just as a test. I note philips using 1 blue, 4 red, 1 blue, 5 red, repeat. So 1 blue per 4.5 reds. Making bars 2.3 - 3.0 mol. It appears the 3.0 mol units are aimed at Japan where they must meet some specification.


I would like to revisit Burple, as I kind of missed it's hayday. My mind tells me white, but I have good Burple on my cuttings, and it works well. I also had some cheap Burple, and it's output was very low on the Lumen scale. For a while the shift to white was seen everywhere, but the physics seem to of won the battle against desire, if we look to the professionals. Truth is, red looks maybe 25% better than blue for weight, and blue seems to be making things taste better. The rest is hard to support. Or we would all be using UV and extended reds.

I believe that a token amount of blue is needed, but then I should be nailing them with red. 4:1? I don't know. My sodiums have the blue requirement about covered though. I just want some decent reds that I can work with. Not 3030 smd's.

Sign said:

I didn't know this when I got the quantum boards. No way will I replace them with anything other than screw ins now. Are we sure this is all true though? I mean this is the first I've read this.

Well I only veg with led anyway I guess I'm not too affected anyway thankfully. Sucks for the guys with like thousands spent on LED because they were trying to save on costs.

Click to expand...

Did you only read the headline and not the thread? The headline isn't *completely* untrue because there are some 10 year old LEDs still sitting on shelves waiting to be sold and those really did lose brightness after three years, but I'd say the headline is very misleading at best because modern LEDs last more than 10 years. You should probably go back and read the thread.

The very best screw-ins sometimes *match* the efficiency of a normal HID light, but the majority of screw-ins are less efficient than HID and none are actually *better* than HID so what would be the point of that?

The first time I powered up my HLG 550 in a 4x4 tent I thought I blinded myself.

-Funk

LED have come a far way since they stared ive integrate them next to hps with great results