Friends and I have been having a discussion about this and I just wanted to see what all you had to say. I know for CFLs that if it is 65 watts and equivalent to 300 watts, it's still only a 65 watt bulb in the lights eyes, but is the same true for LEDs, because there are like 2 Watt bulbs with a 50 watt Equivalent and I was just curious if that on paper was a 2 watts for the plants or 50 This guy specifically: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NGKITW
Good question I'm interested to see what people's opinions are on this .. I've been wondering the same thing
The guy at my hydroshop said leds are junk .. But another guy on one of these forums said he uses solarflare 200 and his grows look awesome .. The led he uses is called solar flare 200
I think I am just going to stick with HID until LED gets a little more stable, that probably won't be for another half decade though.
its still 2watt but how many lumens is it 2w led is a good led most led lights will have many 1w leds or.fewer of the 3wcree leds which are quite good leds are good if you spend money on good.ones not them shitty 225leds that total 14w there no good leds are also awsome if your grow space gets very hot
The problem here is that wattage is completely irrelevant (except for when the power bill comes in the mail). Wattage is a unit of electricity consumed, it has nothing to do with growing or light output. Years ago, when there were very few types of bulbs good for growing, it was pretty easy to speak of "watts" when we really meant lumens or some other measure of light output, because the relationship between one and the other was pretty constant. If someone said "you need 400 watts", it was generally understood that what that person was really saying is "you need the light output that typically comes with 400 watts of bulbs good for growing." It was used as a short-hand, a convenience. With the popularity of CFLs, the relationship between wattage and light output is not the same as with HIDs. But, people mostly ignorant of what all this really meant just kept on talking about watts. But even with CFLs the ratio between light output and wattage is fairly constant, even if it is different from with HIDs (in fact it is about half of HIDs). So it still is possible to talk about "watts", but now with two different conversion ratios. (it's a separate problem from what this post is about that many people don't even know this or stop to ask about what kind of bulb, they just continue talking about "watts" generically). LEDs have a range of different light output levels per watt, there is no constant ratio. So, you can't really have a generalized conversion that allows you to talk about watts of LED and know if the light output is adequate or not. Bottom line: it is light output that matters most. Wattage has served as a convenient stand-in for years (convenient because the wattage is printed right on most bulbs and packages). But with LEDs that ability to talk about watts is even more muddied. Lumens is the most convenient measure of light output, but even lumens isn't really a great measure, it's just the one you also see printed on the package so it works pretty well for gauging if your light is in the right ballpark or not.
Baby it's always in the lumans(par) http://www.gavita-holland.com/index.php/home/item/lumens-are-for-humans.html http://www.ohmslawcalculator.com/mcd_to_lumens.php