Anyone here have led grow lights and prefer them over regular compact flouros or HIDs? I have about 200 dollars and right now I am growing with a couple CFLs, I am wondering if I could get a good LED setup for around 200 dollars, how much will that be able to grow and how long will the bulbs last, close to ten years? Thanks a bunch.
In all honesty the $200 wont get you much for your money, maybe enough for one plant if you build the system yourself. In terms of prefabd LED arrays, there are only a few companies that offer such arrays and they charge a great deal for what doesnt really work well. I have designed an array myself (which works quite well) but costs a considerable amount of money!
GrowDesigns said it well. I honestly wouldn't bother with LED growing unless you're on a limited power source (e.g. off the grid). High-intensity LEDs don't have as long a life as regular LEDs. Longer than any CFL or HID light to be sure, but you'll immediately start kicking yourself when one LED goes bad and you have to take a few hours to closely examine each LED in the array, like when one christmas light on a string goes out.
For 200 bux you can buy 600+ watts of red and blue grow LEDs of ebay. SmknVTEC http://forum.grasscity.com/general-indoor-growing/93801-led-lights-pics-21.html got good results comparable to CFLs using just a 100W LED setup with 3 plants. Sure, not everything with LEDs have been worked out. There still needs to be some experimentation with wavelengths and mixing for ideal yields. But the bottom line is that todays LEDs have proven to be more capable than CFLs of the same wattage. On a side note I have read mixing 20% CFLs when growing with LEDs will give the best results. I say go for it! You can build a very nice 6-18 plant setup with LEDs for that kind of money. Come back to this forum in 5 years and we'll all be growing with LEDs. People are just resistant to change. =)
Thanks for all the info, just to be more clear, I meant ~$200 for the materials and I would put them together. I have only seen one person on this forum with home made LED light arrays and they came out very nice.
Check out this site... http://www.dabblings.net/subpage2.html I made an array that has 100 blue HID LED's for one seedling growth. There is also another seedling under CFL's. I have noticed on my seedlings that the one that is under the LED's is growing about 1.5x as fast as the one under CFL's only. Seeds came from same sack.
ok i can get 500 3mm blue LEDs for 45 bucks, 200 could get you over 2000! im thikning of geting a shitload of the little things and stringing up some plants like christmas trees. that would work. is it worth the investment though?
no, the LED's that you are looking at are not high intensity. They are about 30mw LED's your gunna need about 5000 of those to even make it worth your while, with the current prices of hi intensity LED's going with a MH or HPS bulb is going to be worth your money.
yes... the biggest problem with LEDs is that they're disgustingly expensive. an LED setup costs something like 4-5 times what an HID system does, but i'm still trying to go that way anyways. the power use and heat output are soooooooo much lower than HIDs. it's alot safer to grow with LEDs because they're so much stealthier than HIDs. i dread the idea of having to vent outdoors. it gets really hot sometimes in the summer where i am and i have no A/C either. i'd have to vent outdoors. i know that just a single shoplight 24/24 would heat my 4X4 walk in a good 10-20 degrees with the door closed. the reason i'm stopping in here is i'm wondering about putting LEDs on light movers to stretch their output. if it works for HIDs, why wouldn't it work for LEDs too? a $200 lighmover is alot cheaper than half a dozen $300 arrays. i thought i saw an LED mover on a garden commercial a while back. whatever it was, it was X shaped and spinning fast. what about lowering the water instead of raising the bridge so to speak? if the companies really want to catch on, they need to bring their prices down. i tried looking into the DIY approach myself, and even parts are pretty expensive. i also tried looking at surplus arrays of standard LEDs but that would end up expensive too with something like a 4"X6" red array selling for $8. anyone know anything about LED light movers? it would seem to be a great way to stretch one's BUD-get.
pokernaut. I have a 250w hps cooltube in a 20" X 24" X 48" space and I run 1.5F over room temp from the canopy. If you hook things up right heat is not an issue for a small grow. if you are still hellbent on LED, check out these: www dot nemalux dot com the red and the royal blue are the way to go.
i'm not married to a particular technology and LEDs aren't exactly an easy sell because they're so freakin' expensive, but like i said, it can get quite hot in there with just 80 watts of shoplight on 24/7, so i imagine a 400w halide and 250w HPS would be like a furnace in the summer, but great in the winter. cost is a major issue for sure. back when i was at overgrow, before i got banned for telling one too many trolls to rotate on it, i had considered using nothing but shoplights because i will be scrogging, so light penetration isn't an issue, but everyone seemed to be saying that it would be impossible to do. i don't agree, some of the best weed i've smoked after thai disappeared was a mix of all my bagseed with a good deal of mexican commercial (read sativa) grown under a pair of shoplights. i was growing them up to nearly a foot in height and taking daily leaflet trim from everything. even with a couple definate hybrids and at least one straight up skunk, i wasn't getting couchlocked at all. i liked what i was getting from that better than the 'properly grown" indica crap that was all i could ever buy the last 20 years. i was getting about a gram a day out of my 4 X 1.5 for practically free so i was happy until a couple months later everything finally stressed out and died. i lost alot of awesome genetics when that happened. i figure if i were to scrog, i could put the lights even closer as there would be no vertical growth. i really think that another reason the leaflet trim was so good was that i was using two 24" blue actinic fishtank tubes for side lighting. those lights made alot of artificial pigments floresce so i'm guessing that they might have put out some THC inducing UV too. i like the ide of flouros because you can get pink beauty lights for flowering and blue actinic or even white UV tubes for growth and THC production. at one point, i wanted to set out on the flouro path just to show that it could be done. 6" from a flouro tube sure looks alot brighter than 4 feet from a 400w HPS to me. regarding my space, it's about a 4.5' X 4.5' closet that i planned on either using as about a 4.5" X 2.5" space with half a dozen small scrog tables on wheels that i could rotate daily as a tie down for a light mover effect (if i went the high pressure route) or possibly use the entire space if i could reverse the damn door to swing outwards instead of in.
sure... cooltubes keep heat out of a growroom, but the heat has to go somewhere... you have to dump it either into your apartment which becomes unbearable when you hit a 100 degree plus day, or dump it outdoors which police copters with infrared scanners love. i couldn't get by with just 250 watts. i could for just my personal use for sure, but i'm looking to breed ALL of my strains with a C99 splash male first then kali mist male next. i have 9 strains i want to test and breed... C99 splash kali mist (A11g X lien huanh) X A11g haze skunk pure power plant bubblegum california orange & durban skunk if any of THIS batch of freebies are viable and i'd also like to test my troublemaker freebies for kicks that's 8-9 scrog tables and about 4 1/2' X 2 1/2' space. 250W would be hard pressed to cover that even with a light mover i think.
they have assemble yourself 14 watt growlights. By far the most economical per watt that I've seen. I bought twenty of them but I can't start my grow until I return from a business trip in about 3 months.
hey... great link thanks! i'll add that one to the bargain equipment sticky! maybe i WON'T do HID now