LEDs are cool, right

james of tucson

james of tucson

Active Member
I stopped growing a while back for a bunch of reasons, but I do want to thank RIU for all the help.
Anyway I'm going to have a place to start growing again and I plan to.

I see that LEDs have arrived -- they really weren't quite there at the time, and of course I used HIDs.

My biggest problem by far was heat. I went through a lot trying to keep my grow tent below 80 degrees through the AZ summer, and it was a terrible experience having to both cool my lighting and ventilate my room. Just way more expense and pressure on my poor AC unit. I had okay results but man was it awful.

Before I do this again, are LED lights going to be any better? I'm not too worried about the price of the lights (I see that Spider Farmer and Mars have decent reputations and are easy to get, and I'll listen to all sorts of recommendations) and I don't even really care about the cost to operate the lights per se, but if it gets into $500-600 air conditioning bills again I'm going to lose interest (and yeah, that's seriously what my HID grow was costing!)

In any case if all goes well I'll have a nice space, planning on a casual grow with a 2X4 tent and a SF-2000 or whatever. I'm solid on most aspects of the botany and horticulture, just need guidances on the state of the art for lighting and cooling/ventilation these days. I also have something I never had before: unlimited sunlight and a legal privilege to grow outdoors. Gonna be talking about daylight veg and ornamental cannabis as well, if this deal goes through for me!
 
VincenzioVonHook

VincenzioVonHook

Well-Known Member
With LEDs you can safely go up to 85 no probs due to the lack of IR increasing leaf temps compared to HID.

That said, you'll only get less heat if your using less wattage than the equivalent HID. 250w of LED will put out the same heat as a 250w HID. However, a 250w LED will offer a better spectrum and more intensity.

For a 2x4 I would be looking for around 240w-300w worth or LED.
 
jcdws602

jcdws602

Well-Known Member
I'm from Phoenix and ended up switching from hid to led for a few reasons but mainly for the purpose of heat reduction. While it is true that watt for watt both lights produce similar heat. The advantage of led is that you don't need as many watts as hid. Another advantage is that in order to achieve optimum leaf surface temperature you need to run higher temperatures resulting in less cooling costs. I myself ended up going with kingbrites qb style boards which have worked well and are a decent price.
 
B

Bookush34

Well-Known Member
Like stated above. LED will cover the same area as hid using less watts. Less watts= less heat.

ball park. You need 60-70% the watts of HID when using quality LED. So 600-700watts will replace a 1000watt HID.

then you get to run your room at 80-84F.

works very well. I can grow year round without AC. In the winter I have to move some ducting around to keep enough heat in the room to keep the temps up.
 
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