Mountain_Monkey
Member
All I know is that with the exception of less than 5 brands of which I'm aware all LEDs are Chinese made. A company in the States gives them a ratio of colours for the diodes, a certain amount of power output/usage and picks a pre-stamped LED shell usually including the heatsink and that's as far as the US or Canadian side of things go really. It's like calling to complain about your phone bill. You call a local/national company and end up speaking o someone in Mumbai. It's just outsourced manufacture as opposed to labour and it's a sign that 95% of the entire LED growlight market has been hijacked by profiteers and modern day snake oil sellers who don't care about their reputations, only the dollar signs. If a company spends a shitlaod on a flashy site and marketing like these 357 maggots your pretty much guaranteed to be funding their marketing if you buy their product when you should be funding research and development. I should have really looked at this a lot closer before spending my money. The only one's willing to risk their $ investing in developing this technology are the one's who are pass their costs on in an honest but painful on the wallet fashion, like Lumigrow. I have found through spending a couple of K over the past few years that there is no real middle ground. There's high end "real" companies willing to stake everything they have on their product and then there's low end, which is basically everyone else. In no other part of the grow market is the saying "you get what you pay for" more realistically represented tha when you invest in an LED growlight. I have learned my lesson, if you want to get a decent, well researched and developed LED with anywhere around the 300W output which should really be the minimum IMO you're going to shell out at least a grand and it's going to be US made. You should also spend at least 3-5 months watching the progress of a grower you know isn't a bullshit artist and how they are finding their light-if you can find one. The market is of course changing but as long as people are going to be sucked in to spending cash on flashy, mass produced Chinese junk that only serves to fund greed and marketing campaigns it will continue to have a high element of shadyness to it. It really is a shame as we're not all commercial growers with a few thousand to throw around on 'test' products and these pricks behind the scams are driving people away from a more earth friendly and efficient technology than the one which is most commonly used. If this weren't such a promising technology these assholes could have killed the market and the tech in their never ending cash grab but luckily there are small pockets who will keep the fires burning. Until these small fires of decency become an inferno and consume the scum in their wake I can only pray that other people who are less well off than I won't fall into the trap I did. I sincerely hope anybody thinking of purchasing an LED reads this cautionary tale. I love the technology and it's potential but despise the poeple who have taken that potential and have only sought to utilise it to fund their next luxury car purchase. The world truly is a cold and fucked up place.
