Londoner
Well-Known Member
right i recieved my copy of urban garden magazine today and was just flicking thru wen i stumbled upon this. Please take a moment to read a few snippets from the article and say what u think. The sulphur lamp is a golf ball sized 3mm thick quartz sphere filled with argon gas and a small amount of sulphur, the lamp spins at 600rpm at the end of a glass stick driven by a fan cooled motor, as it spins it is bombarded with microwave energy focused by a magnetron,microwaves excite the sulphur in the lamp to the fourth state of matter - plasma, thus producing an extremely bright light very close to sunlight! The sulphur lamp produces a full spectrum of light with an efficiency far greater than any other light source, there are no gaps or spikes in the spectral distribution. Sp lamps produce far less IR light than any other grow lamp technology, this is immediately realisable because so much less heat means many more applications. Full and continuous spectrum is very close to sunlight so it feels like sun to all life forms including humans plants and fish. Light output and colour doesnt degrade over time and the light is also dimmable!! The lamps last ten years and because there is no electrodes to degrade or burn out the lamps efficiency drops from 100% to 95% in the first 100 hours of use, there is no degradation after this point so thats 95% efficiency for 10 years! Now for the exciting bit... In 2006, 400.000 lumens was measured from a 1340w sp lamp at the amsterdam horticulture show, in 2007, 570.000 lumens again from a 1340w sp lamp at jana university, germany. And in 2008 600.000 lumens were measured at the volkswagon factory Germany(witnessed by Roland Loosli of growbox.ch)They are available now only for carefully chosen experimental projects, but in october 2008 a commercial supply is planned to commence in the uk with the first units retailing around GBP1500. Now for the piccy's sorry if theyre not that clear im takin pics of the pics in the mag, first two pics are the lamp itself, the third pic is a diagram showin how it works forth pic u can see in the chart how close the spectrum is to the suns spectum illustrated by the red line compared with mh.... Wow. im amazed....
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