LED or not

if you already have mh/hps, and its not costing you much to run them, and your temps are fine, and you are getting good results,.. why would you invest in leds? i doubt its $7 for you a month, i would think more than that, but if its even close why even think about changing?

 

If you're going to try led I'd look into COB. 300 probably isn't going to get you anything that will compete with HID, but if you're willing to spend a little more you could DIY a COB that will be as good or better than an HID with less heat and less power draw.

 

Considering your running expenses are near nothing, I see absolutely no benefit to switching to a LED setup. Upgrading to a higher wattage HPS/MH setup would be a much more sensible option to me than dropping $1000 on a quality LED.

 

Electricity here is very inexpensive as well, and I run a 1000w HPS in a 2x4x8 closet and keep temps 65-75 year round as it is. So I'm in the same boat, upgrading to a LED makes absolutely no sense to me. In fact, my exhaust of the HPS heat is so efficient I'm not sure switching to a LED would be any easier to cool than my setup right now and may actually be more difficult considering there are very few quality LEDs with integrated air ducting systems.

 

You are way off on your electrical cost figures.
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If you pay .10 c per kilowatt hour like I do, which is pretty average your monthly cost for 900 watts at 12 hours at day is roughly $33. If you run part of it 18/6 or 24 to have a veg area then it goes up to about $50 a month. I have a grow op that is around 1000 watts and my bill has went up roughly $40-50 depending on month.

 

Part of your lowered cost going with LED is reduced heat. It won't require as much of a fan or A/C depending on what LED you are talking about. Simply saying LED as a generic term isn't very useful as they vary so much between the cheap 3 watt knock off diodes to the cree cxb cobs.

COBs are just more efficient compared to HID so they convert more of the actual watts to light and less to heat. The best cobs are now up to 197 lumens per watt. The top end hps bulbs are 144 lumens per watt. The cobs are putting out 30%+ more light per watt. Beyond that it's a better spectrum for plant growth. LED doesn't elevate leaf temps as much as HID, ect, ect....

HPS bulbs degrade quick and should probably be replaced once a year or more at the least.

The spread of light and coverage of the room is 10x better with LED's. You're not attempting to spread the light from a single hot spot. The light readings at the edge of the grow space are very close to the middle with most quality LED setups. HPS can't ever hope to get near the even spread from a single bulb.

Where you really gain is in your grams per watt. People think if you can grow 2 pounds with a single 1000 watt light you're a god. That's not even 1gram per watt. My meager amatuer efforts have made it to .7 g's per watt with platinum led's by my 5th crop. Many growers have approached and surpassed 2 grams per watt with cobs. That's where the real battle for lighting supremacy is being won.

 

2 mars 300 type lights can easily outgrow a 400 watt hps for less then 300 watts with better plant coverage.

 

The problem with LEDs is that many hobbyist growers aren't growing for profit, so what little yield difference you get just isn't that big of a factor. Their extremely high initial investment costs is what is killing widespread LED adoption in the hobbyist market. Whenever those initial investment costs drop we'll see a lot more rapid adoption of LEDs outside of the standard blurple chinese LEDs.

I don't grow for profit, and it would take more than 4 years for the LED to pay for itself in reduced electricity bills. The justification for me to switch just isn't there, although I'd use one if someone gifted a quality cob light to me.

 

A $1000 investment isn't worth it for me to get 3lbs a harvest over 2-2.5lbs a harvest. I already have more weed than I ever would know what to do with, LOL. I live in an illegal state and I actively search out medical users to donate ounces to all the time just so I don't have pounds sitting around the house all the time.

 

I agree with you psycho to a point but the cheap citizen cobs dropping on the market right now are changing the game because suddenly building a quality DIY cob fixture is in the price range of more people. I just googled some prices a little last night the citizen 1212 cobs are selling for as little as $11 each. That will change things for people who don't mind wiring a power supply to a bulb and affixing them to a heat sink. Light building is like a cake walk IMO if you've ever done construction or built gaming computers.

 

I have done some reading on the citizen 1212 cobs and I am definitely intrigued. It has gotten me interested in building my own LED again. When I started pricing what I wanted out before I had sticker shock and put the project on hold for a while.

 

I'm in the process of planning a 40x18' commercial grow space and I'm trying to talk my partner into building all citizen 1212 cobs instead of going HID. There a lot of people starting up in Alaska and if we want a competition advantage we want cheaper operating cost and higher yields. That's going to keep us in business while the other people growing with HID's drop out. That's my plan anyway. Haven't settled on grow methods and such yet. 3rd partner still has to build the space.

 

The landscape is definitely shifting towards LED as more effective and efficient cobs are released at better pricepoints. In 10 years only the old school growers will still be using HID lighting. LEDs will eventually take over the entire grow space and hopefully blurple diode LEDs will be a thing of the past.