leds are constantly improving though, more like the cpu market, every few years you can buy a new set of more efficient lights. on the other side, solar power gets cheaper and cheaper, someday you'll just pay a flat rate for your power because there will be abundance of power so effciency will not be that important anymore
Eye Hortilux DE/LED hybrid system
- Thread starter Stephenj37826
- Start date
ChaosHunter
Well-Known Member
Tell that to the people in Fla
True that there will always be more efficient LED but by how much ? Diode LED vs COB LED yes but COB to COB is marginal.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz's_lawTell that to the people in Fla
Budies 101
Well-Known Member
That's how I feel, one person can have the best of everything and grow "meh" while someone else can have mid grade everything and grow the same strain amazingly. In the end, imo it comes down to strain... If I gave you a cut of some high yielding, dense high thc bud and you do a decent job growing it, it will be great... If I gave a crap cut (genetics), low yields, low thc and so on to a master grower, it would be a great grow of crap bud.
I say all this because I had mid to low-top shelf genetics and grew them bad and also grew they very well... Then I got some better genetics and I feel it's clear most people in this area can't touch my quality of buds... I'm not a great grower, I'm just not... I'm growing the same as before, just changed the genetics to better genetics. It would take a special kind of bad grow to make a 30% thc bud test out at like 18%, you would have to have a near dead plant by the end to do that. One of my first grows I had 3 Nanolux DE's over a 5x10 and the lights were too low and set too high on watts, I destroyed that plant... I mean, all 36 plants were yellow the whole grow, almost all leaves had fallen off or were always crazy drooopy and yellow. It still tested out at 19.6% THC lol. Today I grow that very same strain (the GG #12 is in a thread I have for my lm561c lights) and the buds all cured up look NOTHING like what I grew in the past, but i doubt the THC is much higher. The lights, the newts, the additives are so far beyond us that we are more likely to burn our plants to death with them than outgrow their potential with out "skills."
My point is to agree with you in that, today I have some CXA3070 builds that will grow really really good stuff if I have the genetics to do so... and in 10 years from now these lights will still grow pretty much the same quality depending on how much you used them of course and once again, the genetics.
You might disagree about the genetics part tho =)
Budies 101
Well-Known Member
I'd like to add that I build my own LED lights and while it's not a business I feel like some of the light companies working with lm561c chips in particular need to find a way to get their costs down about 50% asap.
A 1525$ light to grow in a 4x4 is R-tarded imo. I know these guys are getting boards for like 20-50 bucks, drivers for far less than we all pay and yet their costs for the lights are 3x the cost of me to build something similar... Similar as in the same fing light haha.
I don't personally like the next light mega as I find it to be far less versatile than the way I personally built my lights... not to mention its not a good profile because they attach the driver to the light for some unknown reason.
Take the driver off so people can take it out of the room/tent for less heat, less weight and better profile IMO. 2 lights VS 1 allows a lower sales cost and far more adjustability to canopy height if growing multi strains or not growing through a scrog.
A 1525$ light to grow in a 4x4 is R-tarded imo. I know these guys are getting boards for like 20-50 bucks, drivers for far less than we all pay and yet their costs for the lights are 3x the cost of me to build something similar... Similar as in the same fing light haha.
I don't personally like the next light mega as I find it to be far less versatile than the way I personally built my lights... not to mention its not a good profile because they attach the driver to the light for some unknown reason.
Take the driver off so people can take it out of the room/tent for less heat, less weight and better profile IMO. 2 lights VS 1 allows a lower sales cost and far more adjustability to canopy height if growing multi strains or not growing through a scrog.
CobKits
Well-Known Member
carbon cops say negatory
CobKits
Well-Known Member
there is actually very little margin on quality drivers like meanwell. you have to buy ~$1MM worth/year to get direct pricing from meanwell
Budies 101
Well-Known Member
I know but when a light costs 250$ to make as singles and 190$ in bulk it's pretty huge.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
You'd think so, but it's an uphill battle around here to get a hydro store to stock quality LED lighting.
After seeing the samples I left for display gathering dust in the storeroom, I gave up on it.
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ttystikk
Well-Known Member
That will never be the case unless you buy your own panels. The good news is that solar panels are already inexpensive enough to amortise their cost in just a few years, even when including interest on the money invested. This will only improve as time goes on.
Check with your local utility; some will not buy your excess power, others won't let you connect your solar to their grid at all- like fuckin' Florida Power & Light, believe it or not! Fucking power company lobbies, anyway!
Here in my city, the utility won't pay for power in excess of your total use on an annualized basis. That's still pretty asinine but at least you have the opportunity to zero out your usage.
Humple
Well-Known Member
Well I can't really see a grow store catering to the DIY crowd? And the quality pre-built units carry a lot of sticker shock; I think they're more for the informed internet shopper than for someone who's browsing the lighting section of a local B&M.
The market needs a low-cost, quality, pre-built, LED light. With good marketing.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
My MSRP both undercut the garbage available from the hydro distributors and left more margin for the retailers- all with a dramatically better product.
Go figure.
nfhiggs
Well-Known Member
Some people just can't see the forest because of all the trees in the way.
so, why are there phone and internet flatrates then? used to be pay per minute...
now you pay for a 20mbit connection, or a 100mbit connection. why shouldn't you get a 2kW flatrate? or a 100kW flatrate?
i suggest you try to think outside of the box (box = united states) and look what other, more advanced countries are doing. for example sonnen from germany (where i'm from), with their connected sonnencommunity, in which the members share their power/batteries. interconnected like the internet. i dont see any reason why something like this will have a flat rate in the future...
https://www.sonnenbatterie.de/en/sonnenCommunity
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
Data and power are rather different commodities, brother. Why aren't your groceries or gasoline a flat rate?
because with renewable power sources and economy of scale the real cost for each additionally "produced" kWh tends to be zero, as with additional costs per minute/mb/gb/tb. at some point, you just need to increase the network capacity and maintenance. and then you can offer it with a flat rate.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
Back when nuclear power was a new idea, they also promised electricity too cheap to meter. That didn't turn out so well.
While I don't think there's quite the same potential for disaster with renewable energy, I do see maintenance and replacement costs being an issue.
If you want flat rate power, bolt it to your own roof. That's the best guarantee you'll get.
mahiluana
Well-Known Member
YES - SIR !!! That`s the point of all this useless debate.
Watercooling apparently is the only way to push energy efficiency, light efficiency and longlife
a huge step forward to future and growing-costs to a minimum.
Led tec is the only lighting tecnology which is able to convert the high heat power output
(up to 80% of electr. input)
of a light into useable energy. Not only with Cree high end modules - and not only for grow light.
Even a watercooled led fixture with low quality (lm/w) chips can bea>t any high end led, air cooled system, if you realize that watercooled led light is a perfect water heater.
aircooled = 25% energy efficient
watercooled = 85% energy efficient
The few watercoolers here on riu may know, what kind of advantage that means.
The fact, that only very few companies offer watercooled led light on the market,
doesn`t mean, that this tecnology is NOT world champion in energy efficacy.
Too much debate here on riu about light (lumen,par, pfd...) output of different light systems -
o.k. - we can`get enough...
lumens out of a light...but some more discussion about the cooling (which is allways a main issue of light products)
can`t be wrong as I pretend - the right watercooling of any cheapo-chip or CREE cob can rise it`s flux ~ 10% - but collecting the heat in a heat exchanger (and use it) can easiely
triple (>300%) the energy efficiency of a light system.
@Stephenj37826 - sorry the lighting section you advertise IMO lacks the posibillity of
watercooling and therefore any modern or smart way to combate climate change.
mr lumenladen, bad advertising is YOUR expertise, that's why everyone at grower.ch just laughs about you...