Numbers taken in a controlled environment do not necessarily translate to results in a real world situation. Ignoring the IR produced by HPS doesn't make it go away. Try dropping that light down to 12" above a canopy. i can do it with my QB based light. . Next according to science, running much more than 1200 uMols is just overkill, its like trying to put 6 gallons of gas in a 5 gallon tank. also, if your not running CO2, a PPF over 800 is at the point of diminishing returns, at 1000ppf you may even see negative effects as the plant can't process that much light without more CO2 and begins using light avoidance/redirecting to reduce the detrimental affects.
Numbers are interesting. Real world results, also speak for themselves. even average growers are hitting 1.5 gpw, with many top growers hitting 2.0 and higher.
Ok, drum roll please............ waiting for the HPS guys to tell me how they regularly pull 2+ grams per watt. Yeah right. Funny, EVERY time I've heard that I say pics please, prove it. NOT ONE ever has. The best I've seen in a forum was 1.2 GPW which is very respectable certainly. But then you have people like Growmau5 who hit 1.86 on his first grow with a DIY LED based light. And proved it.
There is a lot more to an indoor garden than numbers spouted for light sources. A graph doesn't grow your buds. Its the entire garden design, medium, genetics, lighting, nutrients, air quality, RH, PH, reflectivity of the space, and the grower's ability to read his/her plants. You, can put 500 horsepower engine in a VW beetle and you still won't beat a BMW with 200 horsepower, its not designed for that.
Even Gavita has seen the writing on the wall, they are selling off or have already sold, their HPS division to concentrate on LED. LED hasn't taken over the commercial market quite yet, but it is finally making inroads. I don't blame those guys for being cautious, they got burned by the bullshit of the early LED garden lights. But there are large scale ops using LED and other converting in stages.
For me, I reduced my 1800 watts of HPS to 950 watts of LED and still have the same and often better results. And the buds are better too!
I'm not knocking HPS, its been a fine tool and ones that really sparked the indoor growing phenomenon. DE etc, are just the last gasps of a dying industrty. They'll never eliminate the IR and they'll never match the efficiency. Efficiency is really something everyone should be concerned with, when you have states like CA, which tells yoo you must grow your legal weed indoors, then bitches about how much power potheads are using to grow their weed. Mark my words, they are going to eventually meter your growroom and charge you extra for your "wasteful" practices.......
And for those that think HLG lights are expensive, to get an equal or better light you'd need to buy Fluence or similar high end light if your comparing to and other commercial tech. DIY QB lights are a bargin IMO. A COB light in the end will cost as much or more, unless you use low end cobs like the Citi 1212 etc, and even then, your only saving money on the cobs. My 4 board QB light weighs only a few pounds, probably less than 5! How much does a 16 COB light weigh? How much to build? How much work to assemble? To wire? If you can't figure out how to wire 2-4 QB boards, how are you going to manage 16 cobs?
And so now, you can buy and number of copycat boards. Have at it!
Lastly, you are all forgetting how these guys started. They didn't borrow 10 million dollars and build a factory. They started like us in their homes and basements, pouring their limited funds into R&D, spent months designing the best chip layout, choosing a board that met their needs and quality requirements, figuring out what chips to use. I believe, though on this I could be wrong, they built the first board to use these mid power chips.
Patents. Did they? Probably not, you have NO idea how expensive and complicated that process is. Its a shame really because any lowlife theif and make an exact copy, or more likely, use lower quality parts and call it a QB.
I for one know fairly well what these guys put into designing and building these boards. I'm even willing to bet they are only now making a profit. How fast have the borads sold out? Why was stock so limited? THEY DID THIS ON A BUDGET. Poured probably all their income into more product. You know I'm right, you can tell by their posting about how many boards were ordered in the early days. These guys deserve respect. They gave US first crack at their product and gave us good proices too. Yes prices went up, but they said it would have to. Don't they deserve after all this time to make some money on their product?
As I've said, i KNOW what I'm buying when I order from these guys. I've no idea what I'm getting when I buy from Alibaba sources. I use to run a computer business. I remember clearly the response I got when I called a Chinese supplier about a product: "Sure Sure, you get best price" then he hung up....Needless to say, that ended our business with them!
