Led Users Unite!

Matchbox

Well-Known Member
i hear ya savage its a brutal shit storm in the led grow lighting world i was in your position a while back and i went out and bought a couple panels and thought they were ok but overpriced and not the best built units , then i came across VIPAR led's and man o man what a world of sifference i have seen , the prices are fair , the units are the best i have used both in build quality and in performance and probly most importantly i didnt feel ripped off or like i was having info hidden from me.
You and your VIPAR's :D Thanks for all the advice earlier... well months earlier but hey. Finally managed to get my shit together and do this thing! dropped £330 on a nice 270w LED from a new'ish UK company called GrowNorthern, their modular units just look immense and have adjustable optics, which was what sold it for me as I have limited space and the 90-60* spreads would be too intense with the little height I have.

As soon as my upgrades to the cab are done I'm starting a 22l DWC single plant ScrOG... will post updates mainly in my sig, probably drop a few here out of excitement lol.

Hopefully if these lights and the company turn out to be awesome I would have found a decent supplier for us UK folk!

Stay Frosty!
 

eyecandi

Well-Known Member
glad you jumped in! such a big difference in heating/cooling options for smaller spaces and much more efficient. I just chopped down another girl (hashplant this time) and they are just solid solid meds. great yields and rock solid buds for the equiv of a 400w HID power load and no extra cooling BS.

upload a few pics on here when you get it going, always good to see what others are doing in smaller spaces to maximize yield vs cost
 

Matchbox

Well-Known Member
Will do! I'm rocking a 250w HPS in a tiny space with perfect temps (and a LOT of cooling), so the LED will really be good, I've done grows with a 90w UFO and had great results :) I'm swapping out my 4" inline fan (that's hella loud) with a stupid CFM silent running muffin fan too XD
 
A while ago I decided to purchase the Prow Grow 180 after doing exhaustive research on what little info available compared to other lighting. I research by repetition and it was the light I ended up coming back to most. I have been happy with it, so I bought the 260. I am happy with model as well. These days you never know what will be a crap-shoot purchase, expensive or not. I'm ahead of the game already. Sad as that is.

The lower heat throw is what I desired most and they have certainly delivered on that account. They seem well constructed. The 3 fans on each unit perform well. Though a little on the loud side. The hanging wire is fairly hearty. Each unit is accompanied by a quick hanger. The 260 hanger was missing, but they answered my email quickly, which I appreciate, then sent it out. I'll probably have more info down the road. As it stands right now, the Pro Grow is working quite well for me and I am happy.

FYI: I veg at full spectrum. I like it better.
 

curly604

Well-Known Member
havnt heard someone mention pro grows in a while i hear they are pretty good lights let us know how it goes man :D
 

Matchbox

Well-Known Member
Well so far so good! sent them an email because paypal messed up a bit and I had 2 orders, 10 out of 10 for customer service, after hours I already heard back in like 10 mins saying yep we've cancelled the second one and the order will be with you by Wednesday! that's with FREE 2-5 day delivery as well!

If they stay true to their word I'll be recommending these guys, and if the product is good, I'll be recommending them forever lol :)

Stay frosty!
 
Starting up my first 'real' grow. Have a tent and a Blackstar 240 Veg light coming, in the mail and some little seedlings incubating under a Sunshine Systems LED right now ~ my first delving into the LED light world. Something my girlfriend recommended to look into cause they were cheap and worked great and yada yada yada. ~ and the general idea is to let them just grow up and up and up until I can get enough money for a flower light and a filter for the ducting. Then in the first twelve hours off switch the lights and bing boom, Bob's your uncle. It's a good plan.

But I'm excited.
 

PrezDickie

Well-Known Member
don't expect much from sunshine led, old underpowered tech at inflated prices, blackstar is good light for money but why a veg model? will you be flowering under something else? good luck with your first grow
 

Senseimilla

Well-Known Member
The veg model is definitely worth getting for veg rather than putting them under flower lights. If it were me I'd run them all veg through veg, veg + flower first 3-4 weeks of flower, then all flower the rest of the way. I only have 1 veg light though (5 flowers tho ;) ). I got a lot of stuff on the list before more veg lights though :)
 

Matchbox

Well-Known Member
Received my new light today, looks pretty sleek XD Very impressed with these guys so far!

270w, 3w Diodes, mixed spectrum, with warm white LED's and adjustable optics!

SAM_1442.jpgSAM_1443.jpg

Can't wait to grow some LED buddage with this beast, should be a nice addition aside my 90w UFO XD

Stay Frosty!
 

Matchbox

Well-Known Member
I'm continuing in my journal (page 12 or something : ) the links in my sig... Might start a fresh one with the LED's XD

Got it from a company in the UK called Grow Northern!
 

chandelier

Member

eyecandi

Well-Known Member
a friend of mine that has several degrees in engineering finally laid this out in terms I can understand. hopefully this will also help others better understand and explain why LEDs are more efficient and produce less heat then an HID. ready for a nerd riot?

friend A:
If you put 100W worth of fluros and a 100W heat lamp in a sealed room, they will heat it exactly the same amount. CAS even agreed with that in his last post. Because of the laws of entropy and conservation of energy, (the 2nd and 1st laws of thermodynamics, respectively), ANY spectrum of light that is not used by the plant for photosynthesis will be turned into heat.

The only thing it seems we disagree on is how much light the plant uses that DOES NOT get converted to heat, and I'm not sure how efficient photosynthesis is, or what percentage of light that strikes a leaf surface is used for photosynthesis. If we DID know these figures, we could calculate exactly how much difference there would be between a HID and a LED light's heat input to the room.


Friend B response:
First of all, sorry everyone for the long read.

D, we are certainly on the same page with the thermo. However, that explains that the total energy in the system is not changing and that unabsorbed energy essentially "degrades" upon reflection of surfaces and "decays" to heat. If electrochemical conversion of photons was not in the equation and there was a black room (emissivity = 1 = black body radiation), they certainly would produce the same heat over a long period of time (steady-state condition) since the spectrum output wouldn't matter. As (mostly) always, energy in = energy out.

What I am trying to get across (respectfully of course) is that mush more is going on than simply the 1st (energy conservation) and 2nd (entropy) law of thermo can describe. There is also physics at play via photon absorption, converting photons into "plant energy" instead of heat. The plants are absorbing energy and converting it via photosynthesis into sugars, essentially. The spectrum, efficiency, and amount of light that plants absorb for photosynthesis is well known (not only in plant books, but also in PV text books as well). The absorption spectrum is shown below (commonly referred to as the action spectrum). See how it stops absorbing wavelengths above 700 nm. So in other words, they don't absorb ANY thing in the IR (heat). You can also see that it absorbs below 400 nm. In fact, it absorbs all the way down into the UV.





Now lets examine an HID light. For fairness, lets consider a light that a favorite and claims its success on having a wide spectrum. Below is the output emission spectrum of the EYE Hortilux Blue bulb. First notice how the emission above 700 nm is quite high, and clearly cuts off at the end of the graph (750nm = IR). In fact we know it goes rather far into the IR since you can clearly feel it when the HID light is on. If I'm not running my AC hood, my tent gets CRAZY hot. I've touched the glass on LEDs (which is like 2-3" away from the diodes) and it isn't hot at all. You can also measure these temperature differences and are written abount in many articles doing tests comparing LEDs to CFLs (for home lighting). Remember, CFLs produce even LESS in the IR than HIDs (I know this also by physically measuring the temperature as a function if difference away from the bulbs). Not only can you see that the bulb DIRECTLY emits heat but it also has a peak intensity in green. Green happens to be, as shown above, where plants absorb the least (hence why plants are green). This light, as we agree on, gets reflected and also decays to heat.





Now an LED spectrum. First, they can be tuned by picking different band gap diodes so you can pick and choose what wavelengths you want to emit light at. LEDs are the reverse of a PV solar cell. The first image below is a typical flowering LED spectrum (Fertilight). The next image is another one with a company (StealthGrow) comparing their spectrum vs. the action spectrum, chlorophyll a and b absorption, and a "typical" HID. What you can clearly see is that these LEDs don't emit ANY light in the IR (it would only do so if they specifically put an IR emitting diode in it, like what is in night vision cameras). Additionally, they don't put out any (neglegible) light in the green. This is the exact reason why a 240W LED can be recommended to replace a 400W HPS setup, they deliver only a spectrum that the plant uses, not a bunch in the IR and green.






So looking back at thermo, a 400W LED vs a 400W HID would input the same amount of energy to the system. However, for the LED, a significantly larger portion of that energy will be going to the plant and converted into electrons (via photosynthesis). For the HID, more is going IMMEDIATELY into the IR (enough to make a difference between needing cooling and not as seen by many users) along with peak emissivity in the green-greenish yellow region, which eventually gets absorbed and turned into heat. If I explained anything poorly, let me know. I'm not the best explainer.


As for calculating it, it would be a bit of a pain since you would need to integrate under the curves of these graphs and normalize per coulomb/electron.


Glad to have a fellow engineer on the board :) I have my BS in Chemical Engineering (VERY thermo heavy), a MS in Materials Science, and am working on my Ph.D. Additionally I work closely with the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) with materials characterization (including photoemission spectroscopy) in addition to doing work with people from the OLED and Semiconductor (MOSFETs) industries. I was talking with a computational physicist (models multi-exition generation in solar cells) about this problem at a poster session today and he helped explain to me a bit better about why LEDs are more efficient and produce less heat. This stuff geeks me out and is my passion so I LOVE talking about it.


Light emitting plasmas are really cool technology also. I can go on for ages on the cool physics they use to make those lights have tuned emission AND higher brightness. If only LEDs and LEPs weren't so expensive :(
 

PrezDickie

Well-Known Member
It's just blue and red. I'm planning on using a cfl bulb to supplement them, though.
those led bulbs won't really cut it for growing they might help for supplemental lighting but to grow you'd be better with a few larger CFL and those to add to it than only those bulbs and one clf . what kind of space are you growing in? is this a micro grow where space is limited ? if you look back thru this thread a little you'll see lots of suggestions for companies who make good leds for decent prices. apollo, blackstar, advance, pro, etc...
 

chandelier

Member
those led bulbs won't really cut it for growing they might help for supplemental lighting but to grow you'd be better with a few larger CFL and those to add to it than only those bulbs and one clf . what kind of space are you growing in? is this a micro grow where space is limited ? if you look back thru this thread a little you'll see lots of suggestions for companies who make good leds for decent prices. apollo, blackstar, advance, pro, etc...
Yeah, I'm extremely limited on space. Only two plants, and as they get bigger it'll be even more cramped. I know these lights won't cut it on their own, I was just hoping that by using them I'd speed up the growing process since it's red and blue that plants feed off of the most.
 

Matchbox

Well-Known Member
Yeah, I'm extremely limited on space. Only two plants, and as they get bigger it'll be even more cramped. I know these lights won't cut it on their own, I was just hoping that by using them I'd speed up the growing process since it's red and blue that plants feed off of the most.
no it wont speed up the process... the only sure fire way to do that is by going some sort of hydro, that usually shaves a week or so off of a grow and that's about it... you could also do the crazy ass light schedule I used for my last grow (didn't make a journal unfortunately) but it shaved about 2.5 weeks off of total time but yielded a fair bit less than usual. And I have a very small space to work with if you fancy checking out my sig, might help, might not XD

I would have done a bit more research before buying those lights though, they'll work but they have next to no power, you might as well have stuck to CFL's (the cost of those LED's is a bit steep)... see if you can stick a few extra 2700k CFL's with them, should be a bit more adequate.

:) they'll work just top it up with some CFL goodness!
 
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