Lights of America 50 Watt HPS Wall Light, Bronze - 9050 at The Home Depot I was looking for some stuff totally unrelated to growing and stumbled upon this. Obviously it's not optimal and it's only 50W, but for 40 bucks, wouldn't this be pretty neat for a low cost single plant grow? You'd only have to mod it a little, heat probably wouldn't be too bad, and I did a little research and it puts out 4050 lumens. PS- I'm not looking to use it, I have 250W and 400W Lumatek ballasts, but for someone just starting off that wants to do a modest grow, I feel like this could be a good suggestion. No?
Why would you even recommend a highcost alternative to HPS when someone is trying to recommend the exact opposite?? I'm not sure if 2x 50w HPS lights would have the same foliage penetration as say 1x 100 watt, but it could more than likely be modded and used for growing a small plant, ignoring the 100 watts/plant rule.
$50=£40 approx... I can buy a lot more LED for that amount of money in the UK than equivant hps, therefore it's not higher cost.
Check this out.. note the free bulbs thrown in as an extra... https://www.epayments.co.uk/epages/.../Shops/es108873_es120127304033/Products/90RED You gotta remember LED's don't need a ballast/starter so that is a cost gain to start with. Gotta be cfl/led combo grows in future imo, a big factor is also the lack of heat produced compared to lps/halides.
Those lights use low quality LEDs. An easy way to tell is that it uses 90 LEDs and only produces 8 - 10W, it actually isn't even accurately measured. I wouldn't even try to grow anything past beansprouts with those. If you look, any proper LED lights have 30 to 60 LEDs and produce 90W. 1/3rd of the amount of LEDs and 9 times the power, see? These numbers vary but you can see how it doesn't take 90 LEDs to produce 10 watts!!! However, when you get high quality lights you pay the price. The difference between an HPS system and high quality LED will be $600 if not more. I thought the same thing as you when I first started learning. You'd be better off with CFL or HPS unless you can actually afford the high quality LED. Any cheap LED will produce CRAPPY results.
Sure but it depends how many you use plus they last 50000 hours. You cant forget the heat issue in stealth grows, I'm not advocating these for anything over 4 plants but imo a mix of these leds's and cfl's will work nicely and cheaply over the long term.
You can add them to CFLs and maybe see better growth, but I wouldn't go cutting back on the number of CFLs just because you are adding those LEDs!
The penetration would be too poor for it to have much effect at all, particularly for flowering. It would be a better use of your money and power to just add additional CFL bulbs.
Yeah I have yet to see proof that LEDs are good. Every LED grow I have seen makes for scraggly, light starved plants. If LEDs were super cheap maybe, but they're not. I was looking at this as an alternative to CFLs for someone. I think you could get away with using just one of the light I posted above for a single LST'd plant, and it includes a fixture, bulb, and ballast. If I wasn't doing as large a grow as I am, I would consider getting it.
Honestly, I don't think it's going to do what you want. I've seen someone use a 70 watt HPS for a single plant, and it just wasn't enough light. Until you get up to at least 150 watts, it seems that you will be better off just using CFLs or T5s. You just don't get the advantages of a HID light before that, and you still have to deal with the drawbacks.
Alright, looks like I was wrong. That's why I asked! Thought it was kinda cool. Either way, as I said in my first post, I wasn't planning on buying it, I just thought it might be useful to someone else.