400 watt hps suggestions?

[cheeselips]

or stores that sell them? im new to growing and dont know any stores except htg supply.

 

[Ca++]

Put up a wanted advert, a few towns over where you know nobody. You will probably be given one. I have given away a fair few HPS units, since the world went LED. I was offered shopping trolleys full of Gavita's that were being replaced. There are a lot more lights than needed out there, and disposal brings about it's own problems. People will be happy you took them.

Or look on ebay/marketplace. People sell complete grows for the price of a new 400

 

[Ca++]

VIVOSUN Hydroponic 400 Watt HPS MH Grow Light Wing Reflector Kit-No Bulbs/Timer | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for VIVOSUN Hydroponic 400 Watt HPS MH Grow Light Wing Reflector Kit-No Bulbs/Timer at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

$30, 2 hours left, no bids. Typical.
No lamp, and that's how you want it. Get your own new Phillips/Osram in there.
I would hold out for a magnetic ballast tbh, but it's there..

 

[goingrey]

Every hydro store sells them.

 

[cheeselips]

VIVOSUN Hydroponic 400 Watt HPS MH Grow Light Wing Reflector Kit-No Bulbs/Timer | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for VIVOSUN Hydroponic 400 Watt HPS MH Grow Light Wing Reflector Kit-No Bulbs/Timer at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

$30, 2 hours left, no bids. Typical.
No lamp, and that's how you want it. Get your own new Phillips/Osram in there.
I would hold out for a magnetic ballast tbh, but it's there..

thanks for the info, is there a reason everyone is switching to led? i heard it doesnt give as good results..

 

[goingrey]

thanks for the info, is there a reason everyone is switching to led? i heard it doesnt give as good results..

More yield with less electricity used.

 

[Cactus Squatter]

thanks for the info, is there a reason everyone is switching to led? i heard it doesnt give as good results..

Usually the people saying that haven’t figured out how to grow under LED properly. I’m sure one of them will be along shortly.
My yields, potency and terps are all better with LED and I’m still just learning how to be perfectly dialed using them.
You have to have your feeding and environment dialed for it but when you do they just flat out perform better.

Also, not all leds are created equal. Some people do everything right aside from buying a poorly designed/built light, have poor results and go back to HPS or CMH.

If you don’t want to do LED, CMH is a better way to go over HPS. HPS is phasing out for a reason. I’ll be swapping my last CMH to LED sometime this year.

 

[Hiddenjems]

VIVOSUN Hydroponic 400 Watt HPS MH Grow Light Wing Reflector Kit-No Bulbs/Timer | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for VIVOSUN Hydroponic 400 Watt HPS MH Grow Light Wing Reflector Kit-No Bulbs/Timer at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

$30, 2 hours left, no bids. Typical.
No lamp, and that's how you want it. Get your own new Phillips/Osram in there.
I would hold out for a magnetic ballast tbh, but it's there..

My 1000w digital ballasts on the 1000w setting put out around 15% more light than my mag ballasts. Measured with a light meter.

 

[Ca++]

CMH vs LED vs HPS

I wanted to get input on the results you guys are getting with these in the finished product. I've had great results in the past with HPS supplemented with additional UVB from a zoologist mega ray bulb. I'm wondering if the CMH provides enough UVB on it's own if used in bloom?

www.icmag.com

 

[Ringodoggie]

Amazon

I bought 4 Spider Farmer LED lights and 3 Vivosun grow tents and after about 2 years I am very happy with both brands. And, got them in a day or 2. Gotta love Amazon.

Lights start at about 100 bux and tents about 50.

Shit, I used to pay 100 bux for a single Hortilux bulb. And, it was barely good for a year.

That makes me ask..... do LED lights loose luminance as they age like HID lights did?

 

[Ca++]

My 1000w digital ballasts on the 1000w setting put out around 15% more light than my mag ballasts. Measured with a light meter.

That might be greater efficiency from the much higher frequency. Some earlier lamps have had the insides distort when run on electronics. Other things to consider are if the driver manufacturer actually got it right, which is why I gave them away first. Or if the flicker frequency has a harmonic that's putting the light meter off. Not least, the mag could be defective. I have had them diminish until we actually saw it. Took them out, and after long term storage they worked again. Though just two from a batch, and others have got so old, they used a starter from a fluorescent light. Purely random fault, on two. Suggesting the shellac was badly applied to the lamination's.

If you repeated that a few times with different kit, I think you would find a part responsible. Or did the manufacturers punt electronics as 15% more light, even without the viagra switch.


For me, HPS is cheap. People still set up with it, to bankroll LED as soon as possible. I would expect a mag set to be the cheapest option there. It's heavy and bulky, and the notion electronic is better, plays well for getting one cheap.
Personal preference though, I like mag because electronic is like a beacon announcing your presence. 12/12 patterns of radio interference, meant I used the 250/400/600 settings through veg, but kept mag 6s for bloom. I used many brands, and non were satisfactory. A mag runs on the mains transmission frequency, so you just can't see it, as that noise is everywhere. To just buy the first random brand light that comes up for sale, mag is the safe option.

 

[cheeselips]

hmm i guess maybe i should go the led route then too haha im reading that thread ca++ linked to and trying to ignore the spam haha thanks guys for the inputs!

 

[goingrey]

That makes me ask..... do LED lights loose luminance as they age like HID lights did?

Yes but much slower. Commonly current ones give lifespan of about 50000 hours which I'm not mistaken is based on the L70 value or when output will be 70% of the original. That's 5 years 24/0 or 10 years 12/12.

 

[Ca++]

That makes me ask..... do LED lights loose luminance as they age like HID lights did?

Yes. There is colour shift and output depreciation over time. How soon, is heavily temperature dependent. Typically the 0.2w lm301 package is over driven with 0.5w and the charts don't look good for them, used that way. The driver might make it 8 years, but if you can change the boards at 4 years, that's not a bad plan. It depends if the boards are still made though. It's why I use the 288QB

 

[Hiddenjems]

That might be greater efficiency from the much higher frequency. Some earlier lamps have had the insides distort when run on electronics. Other things to consider are if the driver manufacturer actually got it right, which is why I gave them away first. Or if the flicker frequency has a harmonic that's putting the light meter off. Not least, the mag could be defective. I have had them diminish until we actually saw it. Took them out, and after long term storage they worked again. Though just two from a batch, and others have got so old, they used a starter from a fluorescent light. Purely random fault, on two. Suggesting the shellac was badly applied to the lamination's.

If you repeated that a few times with different kit, I think you would find a part responsible. Or did the manufacturers punt electronics as 15% more light, even without the viagra switch.


For me, HPS is cheap. People still set up with it, to bankroll LED as soon as possible. I would expect a mag set to be the cheapest option there. It's heavy and bulky, and the notion electronic is better, plays well for getting one cheap.
Personal preference though, I like mag because electronic is like a beacon announcing your presence. 12/12 patterns of radio interference, meant I used the 250/400/600 settings through veg, but kept mag 6s for bloom. I used many brands, and non were satisfactory. A mag runs on the mains transmission frequency, so you just can't see it, as that noise is everywhere. To just buy the first random brand light that comes up for sale, mag is the safe option.

I run big vacuum tube amps and audiophile stereo equipment off the same box that powers 8 -10 hid ballasts without issue.

I think some people probably have really dirty power exacerbating the possible noise issue. Standard fluorescent lights and ballasts are more of a problem for me. Anything feeding into the 60 cycle hum comes out of the amps.

 

[Ca++]

It's RF noise. Many are literally an AM broadcast on long wave, if you have an older tuner. Cables a few hundred meters long will pick it up like an antenna. Anything up to about 7Km. A full wave at 200khz.
The switching frequency of early stuff was as low as 20khz but it got faster with better designs. Making the actual frequency of your kit unknown. This the wire lengths it will oscillate happily are hit and miss. Plus multiple, as harmonics of the initial transmission frequency are usually the problem. With FM radio's often wiped out with hash. The transmitting element of these lights is the cable to the lamp, and the lamp itself. Manufacturers that wanted to meet legal criteria, would build the driver into the same shielded box as the lamp. With only the lamp exposed. This small exposure is such a small fraction of the transmission wavelength that it's an ineffective antenna. Concurrently, demand for drivers and shades as separate units, drove the market to keep making poor kit. Some played about with shielded cables, but 1000w on longwave can transmit around the world.

Submarines in deep ocean trenches, had to work 12 hour shifts, when I used electronics. My car radio would go off when I reached my drive. My clock radio was useless 12 hours of the day. It made comforting white noise. At least 2 of these facts are true

 

[Hiddenjems]

Beside the shitty design and parts of the boxes you probably weren’t getting a consistent sine wave from your power box.

The cable from the box to the bulb base should be shielded. If it’s not, or if the shielding is breached, it’ll spit out the signal you’re describing, just like a bad plug wire on automotive ignition.


Either way, I can understand not wanting to sleep on a radio antenna. Even the chunk of iron and winding boxes spit out transients if everything isn’t shielded properly.

 

[Ca++]

The power supplied to the driver is rectified and smoothed before use. Common mode chokes should be in even the worst drivers, but in reality, We still find LED drivers that are poorly made. They will skip any parts they can. Still, the incoming supply is converted to DC, which is hard to get wrong. It's switching this DC as a form of power regulation, where the noise is created. If they try and chop at the AC, like a lighting dimmer, they can't switch at zero cross. They can't let a single wave through, and must instead chop it thousands of times. Each time it gets though, it's a different amplitude as the wave moves. Giving the AC transmitter, a 50/60hz modulation. This causes further discrimination problems at the receiving end, so the signal is more varied.

It's really quite a minefield. I went through lots of cheap LED drivers in the 3-100w range, selling under $20. Only one was satisfactory. It was an exposed board. If it's in a box, and cheap, it's missing everything they can get away with.

It doesn't have to be rubbish. As you say, a shielded cable is a good start. It shows they care. While most just provide an iec socket, and the same shade you always had. The one I linked to, in hindsight, uses a normal shade, and the box is physically too small to be particularly good. You know about filter networks in speaks I'm guessing. Where the coils must be spaced apart, and mounted in different physical planes, to avoid interaction. You couldn't get a filter in that box. Like with class D amps, you really want some decent torroids in the output stages, but many commercial chips are in boom boxes without any low pass filtering at all. These drivers are little different. They want it, but probably won't get it. This is why I just buy big brand drivers. Their papers are real.

This is all really quite trivial though. What I really want to know is... what valve gear you got?