Hello everyone, I am starting an indoor garden over the summer. This is my first time growing bud, but I have some good experience with plants outside and I have some basic knowledge of Botany. My main concern of course is the lighting. I am very attracted to LED lighting for many reasons. No need for a cooling system, compactness, more efficient lighting (all light has known wavelengths that our plants love!), and of course less wattage. All of these reasons favor me economically, make security/stealthfulness much easier, and most importantly it is safer. My problem is that everyone says different things about different LED lights, mainly the square footage. I have a 7x7 foot room to grow in, and about a 4 or 5 foot square designated for plant space, so what is the optimum lighting system for me? I am inclined to get Illuminator's 90W UFO system (not an ebay knockoff), but I do not want to invest my money and time in something that will not work. I have heard many people discuss on various forums about LED lighting, and I see some people are using hundreds of watts in replacement of an HID HPS/MH system. To me this seems crazy, because isn't the point of LED lighting power efficiency? If I use multiple LED lights and end up using 200-400 W of electrical power, then what is the point (in terms of efficiency) of choosing that over a good 400W HPS system that I know can cover the space I need. I know this has been a long post, but please, anybody with experience using LED grow lights, share your experiences. As I mentioned earlier, I really want to invest in quality LED lighting over HID lighting, but of course cost is important to me, so I really want to make the right investment. Thank you very much, Keep on vaping and eating that ganja,
i have 2 90 watt ufos as supplemental lighting and they do ok at that job, for main flowering lights go with the hps, seriously either that or get very pricey leds that have 3 watt diodes, 1 watt, sadly just doesnt seem sufficent as main plant lighting, at least for me this is only imho
400 watt hps is not enough for your grow space as you mentioned. You'll need 600 watts at minimum. If you decide to go LED and with UFOs you'll need at least 5. I have ufos but use a 600w hps. The only LED to match the results of a 600w hps is a 600w LED.