thinking of going led.

I think i've read somewhere that a 240w blackstar LED light is equivalent to a 600w HPS

 

Don't believe the hype, LED just doesn't compare to HPS at all
There is nowhere near as much penetration as a high pressure sodium bulb from the LEDs

Having said that decent results can definitely be achieved with LEDs.
they produce very little heat it makes growing indoors In the summer possible without heat stressing your plants.

They also work a treat for vegetive growth (not so much flowering) I have two 90w LED panels and love them for vegging

Hope this helps mate

 

yup yup ^^^

 

[quote name='"tobymac420"']So maybe I could use them for veg and switch to mh/hps for flower I'm just wondering cause my house OS brutal in summer and gets so hot[/quote]

Same here man... Most people I know stop growing for the summer but I figure hey even if I don't get that much bud out of it some buds better than no bud so I push on through despite the heat.

Hope you manage to sort something mate

 

600w LED will be good enough for a 4x4, just make sure you buy a well known brand and not a unbranded 90w ufo and try and put loads of plants under it, it wont work and they can penetrate just as good as hps, look at what watt diodes the panel has before you buy one

 

If your going for veg id just get a t-5 ho. Mix spectrum and i dont think you will get better results with blackstar. Plus its probably gonna run you 1/2 as much.

 

You will get pleasant results with a blackatar led. it's not trying to be a hps. it is what it is. Low heat, efficient energy consumption with little heat signature. You lose in yield i suppose but worth the tradoff. i personally use a 180w prosource led in a 3' x 3' space and get great results.

 

LED's penetrate better than HPS IMO. I am using both right now. LED may not be the best all around light but it's great for veg and if you want low power consumption and less heat it will definitely help you there. if you got the money go for a 240w or bigger blackstar and see for yourself. too many people get tied up in whats been used for a long time to truly understand it..

 

I have a blackstar 240. It has 80 3 watt led's, it draws about 130 watts of accual power because each led only draws about 1.6 watts while running. Some have compared a 250 watt led to a 400 or 600 watt system, but it's not true because of the light footprint. However if you actually compared wattage to wattage between the two, led would win everyday of the week in flower or veg. But to actually purchase a led light that actually draws 400 pr 600 watts is prohibitive because of the fantastic prices on these units. I really like mine, in an insulated 4 by 3 by 6 feet tall grow tent temps are in the mid 20 degree celcuis area. That's with a 70watt 6500k HID light in there too. Don't get me wrong, there is heat but it is significantly lower than hid cfl or hps. Plus if you get a good unit the led wavelengths are specifically chosen to be the only ones that cannabis needs so you don't waste 90% of your light in heat and wrong spectrum. It is making my plants have wicked tight internode spacing, but it just might be genetics too. Just some thoughts for ya.

 

LEDs don't have as much penetration? Well, sure, if you have a crappy LED panel. Same goes for any other type of lighting. The source of the light is irrelevant, really...as long as the light output is high enough. The problem is cheap LED panels that put out far less light than you'd expect. (E.g., those 90W UFOs. The actual draw on them tends to be more like 50W, so no, you're not going to get good penetration from those.)

I have a Pro-Grow 260 (180W actual draw) that I'm quite happy with, in a 4'x4' tent. They claim it's comparable to a 600W HPS unit, but based on yields and looking at other people's grow journals, perhaps 400 to 500W-equivalent or so?

LEDs have other upsides, such as being concentrated in the spectra that plants are happy with. Putting out a full spectrum of light results in much of it being wasted. Good LED panels concentrate the output where light absorption by chlorophyll is at its highest. With regular lighting, much of that light is unusable by your plants... (Though you do lose some spectra with LEDs that may or may not be useful...but the good panels output across a pretty wide range, even if it's just a minimal amount for some of the less-needed wavelengths.)

I think I'm going to build my own LED panel sometime soon to add extra capacity in there. (With the 14-band panel I already have, I should be able to just toss in a bunch of 660nm LEDs to get some great additional light output.)

 

I'm currently growing under 2 360w advanced LEDs and I couldnt be happier. Like mentioned above the key is to spend the money and get a quality unit.

 

The led makers hype up their product and outright lie, one has a hard time figuring out what's what...Just do some research on the led par and how they compare to hid etc
For penetration you need at least 3 watt diodes, The 5 watt are better for penetration but, put out more heat and cost a bit more.

I think when growing with led is better to do some lst and maybe a scrog to keep an even canopy for the best penetration and yield....

I bought the Blackstar HO 240 watt and am absolutely one happy camper....I'm sold on Blackstar but, just bought 2-240(china)flowering led's because the price was right...
Just hope I made the right decision...

 

Yup; a big problem is that a lot of manufacturers just add up all the LEDs in the panel...so it might be a panel with 100x 3W LEDs, but only draw 150W in normal operation. And the cheaper ones tend to omit the extra wavelengths that the better ones have. I tried growing under a cheap generic 90W UFO initially, I'm much happier with my Pro-Grow panel with actual draw listed on their website (and matches what I measured it at.)

Did you pick Blackstar over Pro-Grow for any particular reason? I like the switchable spectrums on the Pro-Grow; you can select the almost-all-660nm flowering mode (2/3 of the panel), or the blueish vegetative mode, or both. (I just use veg mode or full-on mode after vegging.) But I'm looking at getting a second panel, and Blackstar seems to get more mentions...

Light penetration should have more to do with LED spacing than whether you have 1W, 3W, or 5W diodes. Well, the 1W might be hard to space really close, but my current panel has 3W diodes and they're spaced pretty far apart...with better cooling, they could be placed far closer, which would have much more impact on luminance than just bumping those to 5W. The lower-wattage diodes are better as far as heat goes as well; there's no reason that some of these panels can't just have a big heatsink on the back and no fan.

Also keep in mind that the higher-wattage diodes tend to be less efficient...at least the ones I've seen specs on a couple years back. I don't know if they've improved on them since then...I recall it was more a heat issue, since a 3W diode would just be 3x 1W "modules" inside one shell. So they closely-spaced them for you...might be better off with 1W with no crammed modules, and tighter spacing than you could accomplish with the larger ones!

 

Oh, and where did you acquire the Chinese flowering panels from, if you don't mind me asking? I've looked on alibaba.com as far as buying another panel or two directly... I'm thinking of building my own 660nm rig, which should be good supplemental flowering light on top of my Pro-Grow panel, but it may just be cheaper to buy something prebuilt from China. (And hell, it's not like American labor is going to go into it even if I just buy the modules and drivers and all that crap...other than my own labor, it'll just be the same Chinese parts!)

 

I got one for 160.00 and the other for 192.00. One year guarantee and during that time they will send parts to repair if needed. After one year the parts are free and you pay the shipping.
You gotta love those Chinese...
New 2012 240W Lighthouse LED Grow light Flowering 3W LED's Hydroponic System | eBay

 

Awesome. Just the heatsink alone looks better than 90% of the crap out there. I looked around a bit and there's still nothing else cheaper, so I just started bidding on one of those around $150...

Almost as good (or just as good?) as my Pro-Grow 260 for less than half the price...yeah, that's hard to pass up!

At THAT price, you'd be crazy to go with HPS/MH...it's just slightly more expensive, and the lower power costs are going to make that up in a few months, probably.