[QUOTE="Merkle420, post: 23658426, member: 1013845" that w/w of heat is bs, I make commercial light boxes as a job Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk[/QUOTE] Remember photons degrade into heat, they heat up the walls of the tent when they strike it, they heat up your plants when they hit them, no matter the efficiency, if you put 1000 watts into a light, it's going to produce 1000 watts worth of heat. whether its an h.i.d. light, or the best top bin cob. period. end of the story. the savings (in heat and money) come from getting more photons per watt, so you can use less watts to get the same result. The above is a taken nearly word for word from the thread i posted earlier. Its worth a read.
There's no way that 315 watts of CMH covers a 4x4 well for bloom. It might be okay but you could easily run a 630 watt cmh in a 4x4. I think you're really stretching your coverage with only 315 watts for 16 square feet, that's under 20 watts per square. Sun System® LEC® Brand 315 Watt Fixture | Sunlight Supply Plug the sun system 315 watt LEC into the lighting layout calculator under tools at the link. It says you need 2 315 watt LEC's for a 4x4. They're only 33-36,000 lumens. Many people will bloom a 4x4 with a vented hood 1000 watt hps that's 140,000 lumens. Sun systems makes one of the better models as well. They don't usually sell for $267. More like around 3-$400. Two of them to outfit a 4x4 for real is around the price range of led.
Thats been one of my concerns on them (im in a 4 x 4). Are they only good for vegging in that size tent?
I'm sure you can do okay flowering with it in a 4x4 but you won't get good light to the edges. If you do your light distance will be too much. You're better off concentrating the footprint on that light to 3x3 at the most for bloom. That's even pushing it. Veg is a different story. I veg with 180 watts in my 4x4. This is 2 90 watt CLW vegmaster 110's. I bet you the 60 watt QB120 boards I'm building outperform them. I'm vegging with a little over 11 watts per square right now. Bloom is a different story. 30 watts per square is pretty minimal. With hps 50-65 is ideal. I'm blooming with 47 watts per square right now but once I replace my other platinum panel with another QB260 that will drop way down to the 35 range. I bet you I actually grow more bud with the reduced wattage. That's how much better these new lights are. More production dropping down 25-30% in power input.
im using 600w HID. I was thinking of a 315 but as only a veg light. Im not handy enough to build my own cobs or QBs so im stuck with what i can buy to reduce my electricity costs. Its winter here so running a "cooler" light is counterproductive as id have to run a heater. In summer though it will be the opposite so ill be looking for a summer and winter solution/s setup/s or i go indoor over winter and out door over summer..I love out door growing (nothing beats having to look up at plants) but it can all turn to chit fast.
Great for veg in fact you can get away with less power then that for veg like I was saying. I'm currently vegging a 4x4 well with 180 watts and I'm going to experiment with upgrading the quality of the leds and reducing the wattage to 120. I wasn't necessarily planning on doing it but when the qb120 boards came out last week at $29 I couldn't resist experimenting with a few. I got everything I need to set up 2 lights for $125. Meanwell drivers and samsung 561 c bin6 diodes. The CLW's are Osram leds so they aren't junk but they are much older design and there isn't 120 diodes on each light.
What I'm meaning is...I care more about quality. Quantity will come later. Fem Auto (Amnesia Haze) Come on in and share your auto grow! This is my first Bag seed grow journal (Flowering)
I'm on the list for one of the 3.5k QB lights.. same as this one but 3.5k for both veg and flower! Fem Auto (Amnesia Haze) Come on in and share your auto grow! This is my first Bag seed grow journal (Flowering)
Mine is a Prism lighting ballast with a Philips 4100 k bulb and a sunsystem reflector. It is for my 4x4 veg tent. I run a 1100 watt hyper arc HPS bulb in my 5x5 flower tent at 2380 Umols and 177,000 lumens.
I'm only running mine in Veg because the vented hoods for a cmh are kinda spendy since they say not to blow cool air directly over cmh bulbs and they would just get to hot un-vented. for my flower setup.
315 watts in a 4x4 is plenty of power for veg. The longer you veg the lower you can run your power and still get big plants. I keep my veg tent always going. It takes an average of about 10 weeks to empty the bud side. I'll have plants in there vegging at least 10 weeks before they get their chance. 10+ week veg with 180 watts of quality led can make some pretty monsterous plants. I had to go down to flowering 2 in the bud side. I was originally going to upgrade to about 280 watts for veg and add 100 watt cob but after growing a while there is really no way I could do that. I didn't think 180 watts of led to veg a 4x4 would be enough but it is if the leds are good quality. I think you can get away with less power and veg better plants with higher end led then anything else. The plants I'm currently budding are as large as I can fit in the bloom tent. I simply don't want them vegging any bigger unless I'm going to upgrade my bud setup. With 315 in there my electric bill would be higher, there's more heat in the grow space total, and it would veg so fast I'd probably have to stagger my veg and do a 6-8 week. Being that it's only 2 90 watt lights there's almost no heat. I use a 10" desktop fan to cool the veg tent. The lights themselves have single 80mm computer fans in them and are barely warm to the touch. This is my latest plant before I put it in flower. Crystal (northern lights x white widow) Vegged 11 weeks under a 90 watt light. The other light is on the other side of the tent. Not bad for 90 watts. You think it would veg like this under 90 watts of CMH? It's in promix/perlite 7 gallon smart pot fed with GH nutrients. I had just transplanted it.
I don't know, 11 week veg is a long time. I'm working towards a 2 week cycle of 2 in 2 out. Some will grow longer some won't I just take the biggest 2 in veg an throw them in flower. I pay for my license to grow so I'm just wasting time and money if I don't keep my flower tent full at all times. Even if a smaller one goes it that's fine with me I can't spend 3 months out of the year vegging. Luckily they just passed laws that remove my veg plant count limit so next year I'll most likely just veg outside during the summer and just have 30 or so plants going and be able to throw monsters into flower all summer long. that's the plan anyhow.
When you have two rooms you have the whole bud cycle to veg. I'm just always waiting for bud plants to get done. With photos thats minimally 8-10 weeks. Might as well veg if the veg room is sitting right next to it and I'm only using two 90 watt lights. I do the same thing. I select my best two or so veg plants to bud and either clone or give away the others I can't fit each crop. I'm actually way under my limit right now. Only have 8 plants when I can have 12.
No, I am not wrong, in a 4x4 you have more lights because each cob only runs on about 25-50 watts, it's actually not like that. It doesn't matter about numbers of cob lights, it matters at what amperage you decide to run your lights, higher amps, means more wattage, but lower amperage means increased efficiency. HID is inefficient, 35% of the energy used goes to producing an absurd amount of heat, another 10% goes to creating an unusable light spectrum, meaning no PAR! That's already 50% efficiency, a COB is about 80-85% efficient at creating lumens per watt of electricity. Again you are talking without any experience, so how can I be the one confusing myself when I have worked with every type of light imaginable? I can run my cobs 12" away from my canopy, even closer with quantum boards/EB strips. Try doing that with an HPS, you'll fry your crop/ Commercial growers use HPS because of insurance purposes(too expensive to buy and insurance does not cover DIY lights lol) and it will take awhile for the main public to switch over, that is true but to say HID is better for a small grow is just not accurate. LOL! You had a 600 watt cob and your T5 was out penetrating the LED? Either your COB led was just some china knockoff or you are seriously trolling. A t5 penetrates maybe 2"-5" of a canopy.....LOL
I'm not trolling anything at all. Its a 600watt morsen COB light. AGain, thats why I switched to HPS. Just did my first harvest from under the HID light and the results are night and day.
Again, I said it was a china knockoff (which it is) or you are trolling, obviously it was a cheap light. It doesn't even run close to 600 real watts either, nor is it a real chip on board led, just soldered .5w diodes in series. Of course a HID will blow that thing away man, that's not even a fair comparison, you might as well compare a candle to a HID
A good example of the reason I have mentioned that led does not equal led. You can't use it as a generic term. You can't compare cheaper versions to top end equipment anywhere near the way you can with HPS. There's so many different styles, types, power levels, and marketing hype that goes into led grow lights you have to know exactly what you're really working with to know that it is capable of in the grow room. You can throw 1000 watt hps around and know about what lumen range you're working with. Somone says 600w led you have no idea what that thing really is. It could be ran as low as 250watts or less then you try to compare it to an HPS that's 2 1/2-4 times the power level. Many of the lower end stuff hides the actual watt total in the fine print and has a ridiculously high rated wattage. This is one reason that LED has got a bad rep from some people. There's a huge gap in the performance of knock off versions compared to the real deal when you're talking cobs especially. What is the actual watt total of the cob light you had? What cobs did they use specifically? How many cobs? What area did you cover with it? If you look at those things you'll probably find out why your HPS outperforms your cob light. I guarantee you're paying way more for electric bill.
Yeah, I can only have 10 in flower right now but I can have an unlimited amount of plants in veg. You don't have to prove to me that they are better I know they can be but the tech is constantly changing and if I'd gone with LED 2 years ago i'd spent 2 grand on lights and be kicking myself in the ass getting ready to spend another 2 grand on the the newest models because they sucked 2 years ago. so I'll wait because in 2years all these drivers and lights that you are talking about will be obsolete