Plasma Lighting doesn't seem to be as great as they tout it to be...

Ok, so I see all these people touting Plasma lighting as the wave of the future. I check out Monster Gardens website and look over their Gavita and Stray lighting products. They are all 300W and put out 18,000 lumens, a comparable HPS (310W) will put out 38,000 lumens and a MH (330W) will put out 24,000 lumens.

I don't see why you would put out the money for such a product, they say they get around 140 lm/W, but it doesn't look that way from the numbers they are using. It is closer to 60 lm/W, what gives? Does anyone know? I would go and buy some plasmas right now, but at $1200 and the numbers making it sound like it is on par with old-tech LEDs or even HPS, I can't see it being this amazing new thing.

Granted, the extremely low heat output is enticing, especially for micro-grows.

Maybe I am missing something?

...* thought not tout.

I meant tout,

tout - To solicit customers, votes, or patronage, especially in a brazen way.

... ooOOOOps sorry....I'm pretty medicated

I think the next big thing in lighting will be those nanocoated LEDs. They supposedly got 300lm/W in testing.

Are you serious $1200 for a fuckin gimmick light? and it doesnt really work? . You could buy 4 cooltubed 1000w HPS for that and harvest 50x more.
That advertisement is bullshit, it wouldnt even equal a 50w hps.

Well, it works. It just doesn't work as well as they make it sound. They put out very little heat, supposedly you could touch the glass shield (to protect from UVC light) and it wouldn't burn you. I will wait to see what kind of lumen output a 1000W plasma light puts out before I totally put down plasma technology, but as it stands right now, it seems very shitty.

I thought he big draw (aside from heat) was the near perfect spectrum of almost 100% PAR light compared to the HPS which is a much much lower percentage. Weird that they produce lower lumen/w but who knows, maybe the 18,000 lumen actually produces more PAR than the 38,000 lumen HPS. Keep in mind that plants don't see lumen.

That very well might be, in fact it is probably true as the products from Monster Gardens all use LiFi 40-02 bulbs which have a 94 CRI, but the way they push these lights is suspect. I mean, on the Monster Gardens website, they tout the Stray as being comparable to a 600W HPS in lumen output, which would have to be upwards of 70k to 90k lumens, but they never mention the output from the lighting. If this was true, I would buy one, but without even basic manufacturer specs showing the lumen output, and considering it uses the same "bulb" as the other 2 products which only output at 18k, I think they are straight up lying.

*On their website it says their 300W PlasmaGrow light will replace a 400W Metal Halide or HPS. It has to be simply in CRI, as a 400W HPS would put out close to 40k Lumens.

Lumens and usable light are different. If the HPS was putting out mostly yellow light (and they do) it doesn't matter how bright that yellow light is. I don't know if plasma lighting is worth it, but comparing lumens is pointless.

Lumens are visable light to the human eye, and the human eye is most sensitive to green, or 555nm and as we both know green light is basically useless to plants. 38,000 lumens with 20% usable light vs 18,000 lumens with 90% usable light.

38000
x 0.20
_______
7600 usable lumens


vs.


18000
x0.90
______
16200 usable lumens

So, the HPS's 7,600 usable lumens for photosynthesis doesn't touch the 16,200 usable lumens of the plasma, even thought the HPS looks brighter to us (humans). Same goes with high quality LED systems.... they look less bright to us, but much brighter to plants.

But the HPS outputs in mostly the 1800k-2200k temperature range, which is completely usable by plants, it is in fact in the range most used by plants during Flowering. Whereas the Plasma outputs all across the spectrum, with higher outputs in green/yellow, lower in blue, and lowest in red (in terms of usability for plants).

In fact it seems that a lot of Plasma companies are suggesting these lights only for Veg, and to use HPS as well for Flowering.

Give Plasma and LEDS a few more years of development and HIDS will become dinosaurs...using lumens to compare lights, funny.......
Closest thing HID has right now to full spectral output is CMH. Word has it in 2012 Phillips will offer a 1000 watt version....

Atarijedi said:

But the HPS outputs in mostly the 1800k-2200k temperature range, which is completely usable by plants, it is in fact in the range most used by plants during Flowering. Whereas the Plasma outputs all across the spectrum, with higher outputs in green/yellow, lower in blue, and lowest in red (in terms of usability for plants).

In fact it seems that a lot of Plasma companies are suggesting these lights only for Veg, and to use HPS as well for Flowering.

Click to expand...

Mostly, yellow light.... While flowering MJ wants mostly 620-680nm light... which as you can see, there is very little of in HPS....

And not all plasma lighting is full spectrum either;



http://www.progrowlights.com/

HPS Spectrum, my bad, you are right, they are slightly out of range.

As for those progrowlights, they are induction lights, not plasma. Almost the same as CFL/Fluoro, except there is no internal electrode, and the gas on the inside is excited by inducing eddy currents from the outside with coils, you can see those 2 black rings, they are the coils.

Atarijedi said:

HPS Spectrum, my bad, you are right, they are slightly out of range.

As for those progrowlights, they are induction lights, not plasma. Almost the same as CFL/Fluoro, except there is no internal electrode, and the gas on the inside is excited by inducing eddy currents from the outside with coils, you can see those 2 black rings, they are the coils.

Click to expand...

DERP!

Sorry, my bad I wasn't thinking clearly lol.

Induction lights look sick... I've very interested in seeing an actual grow done start to finish with them. Although MH and HPS are full spectrum too, so I'm not sure if the "full spectrum" analogy works in your favor.

Beefbisquit said:

Lumens and usable light are different. If the HPS was putting out mostly yellow light (and they do) it doesn't matter how bright that yellow light is. I don't know if plasma lighting is worth it, but comparing lumens is pointless.

Lumens are visable light to the human eye, and the human eye is most sensitive to green, or 555nm and as we both know green light is basically useless to plants. 38,000 lumens with 20% usable light vs 18,000 lumens with 90% usable light.

38000
x 0.20
_______
7600 usable lumens


vs.


18000
x0.90
______
16200 usable lumens

So, the HPS's 7,600 usable lumens for photosynthesis doesn't touch the 16,200 usable lumens of the plasma, even thought the HPS looks brighter to us (humans). Same goes with high quality LED systems.... they look less bright to us, but much brighter to plants.

Click to expand...

Just to put my 2 pence in here. I was reading the led without led grow here and decided to buy some aquarium bulbs for my veg tray. Got the bulbs and put them in and thought, gee these things arn't as bright as the fixture right next to them with standard bulbs. Hmmm.

So yesterday I put the clones in for veg and lowered the light to 1 foot as I always do and check for heat from the lamp and all looked good. So i went in a coupe of hours later and the a lot of the plants were bent over and turning away from the light, so I raise it to 2 feet. So today they are much better. The point I am making is that even though the light did not seem that bright to me and I did everything the same as I always do with t5s. The plants sure did complain about the light being too strong. This is all with the only change being, replacing the regular old t5s out to spectrum matched t5s per the thread on this forum.

Speaking of Spectrum--here's a little example of spectrum and my Budding 500w LED Blackstar.

Basically, the light is so purple that when im checking the trichs I have to shut it off.

So I use my jeweler's loupe, and a white basic led flashlight--its bright as heck.

So after my check I turned the lights back on and look into my flash light---and with my Flowering lights on--what colour do you suppose the light from the flashlight was?

It was green.

Because my led give of zero green spectrum (useless for a plant).

Kind of a cool thing.

there was a testrun of plasma over at gardenscure.

its a pretty good veg light, but fairly useless flowering light (they added some red led´s later, dunno how that went.)

so, basically its a 1200$ Mh with some improvements (sorta, the grow didnt look much better than mh grows, if at all, the one thing that did amaze people was the distance he kept the bulb from the plants (2x the normal distance(he did it because of the uv, protecting the plants, (it basically harms them if its too much) and the thing that made people most curious was all that uv output, but i seriously doubt many people bought plasma after seeing that thread..)

Tee Five said:

Speaking of Spectrum--here's a little example of spectrum and my Budding 500w LED Blackstar.

Basically, the light is so purple that when im checking the trichs I have to shut it off.

So I use my jeweler's loupe, and a white basic led flashlight--its bright as heck.

So after my check I turned the lights back on and look into my flash light---and with my Flowering lights on--what colour do you suppose the light from the flashlight was?

It was green.

Because my led give of zero green spectrum (useless for a plant).

Kind of a cool thing.

Click to expand...

Red and green are inversions of each other, as far as colors are concerned. If you look at really bright green, when you look away you'll prob see red spots... the reverse is the same as well.

Fuckin' stoner

Beefbisquit said:

Lumens and usable light are different. If the HPS was putting out mostly yellow light (and they do) it doesn't matter how bright that yellow light is. I don't know if plasma lighting is worth it, but comparing lumens is pointless.

Lumens are visable light to the human eye, and the human eye is most sensitive to green, or 555nm and as we both know green light is basically useless to plants. 38,000 lumens with 20% usable light vs 18,000 lumens with 90% usable light.

38000
x 0.20
_______
7600 usable lumens


vs.


18000
x0.90
______
16200 usable lumens

So, the HPS's 7,600 usable lumens for photosynthesis doesn't touch the 16,200 usable lumens of the plasma, even thought the HPS looks brighter to us (humans). Same goes with high quality LED systems.... they look less bright to us, but much brighter to plants.

Click to expand...