You can add a reptile light and you'll get some UVB from it but from what I've read it's very little of the correct spectrum and the purpose built grow bulbs are far superior. Like I posted earlier though, all the personal experimentation I've seen with UVB didn't go that well. The good go to schedule for amounts and time of UV and when is yet to be perfected for sure. One of the problems with it is UV limits growth. The plant responds by shielding itself and making more THC but there is that limiting growth factor of the spectrum and when to introduce it is tricky. If you wait till the very end the plant isn't used to it at all and hates it. I've seen the results of that. You're better off introducing UV slowly but not sure the correct timings and wattages. It's like feeding the plant poison when the tradeoff is more potency and less size.
the T5's i found was 24 watts HO i posted vid in the post before there are some good uvb lights bulbs uvb is used during the last few weeks only for few hours mimicking the sun.
A grower by the name of RM3 has been experimenting with UV for awhile. I havent checked out his thread in awhile but if anyone is interested Your Grandpa's Weed or is UV supplementation really needed? He also has a private forum but i dont have a link for that.
Hmm I don't know what I prefer as of right now. I have a 4 cob setup ran at 1050ma for I guess 220w with another a days away from going in...... But compared to my 400w HPS I could turn the HPS off and not even notice the drop in light vs the cob lol. And ,ime, compared to the HPS the cobs make the trichomes sparkle But I still see HPS being beneficial for its inefficiency.... Aka it's 360 spread. So I'm now finding it better to cram the HPS in the lower part of the canopy without the reflector on for superior side lighting side lighting, while still in the cool tube. But in the end for efficiency sake I will probably make some led strip lights to replace that HPS since I could get a better spread using multiple strips at a far lower combined wattage. As to the "guys" that change out their hardware every generation I'm sort of thinking it's just like building a computer albeit costly but sometimes addicting
Here's a link to my dimmable 230w 154lm/w led strip journal for anyone who wants to watch. I have UVa 365nm to 395n and red flower initiators 660nm and 730nm. I just flipped to flower today. Its a plant from seed and a topped monstercrop each at around one month of veg time. Bokashi journal
A few guys doing this, trellising the plant and having the lamp in the centre (usually bare) and growing 360 degrees around the light.. Like a vertical scrog.
I'm going to try just two. If I don't like it I'll run 3. I have been vegging with 180 watts and it's been working great. The increased output efficiency of the quantums is going to allow me to drop it to 120 I'm pretty sure. They also spread and fill the corners better. The footprint it has when I took that picture is a little crazy for how small it is. It looks like it could fill a 3x3 with the wide spot it casts on the floor. I was telling someone else I may be vegging successfully with one of the lowest watt per square foot totals ever. 7.5 watts per square once I put the QB120's in there. I'll do it today. I got the other one built last night. I'm currently running a little over 11 watts per square. It's doing great.
I need to shorten it up for my monster veg plants to get headroom. The 2nd one looks much better. Now I'm going to have to redo the first and double up the wires.
Cannainsider just did a podcast on led vs hid lights. They had blackdog led come in and talk about their products and led grow lights in general. Being an led producing company of coarse they're going to favor led lights over hid, but they did make some very valid points. Some people I feel just don't like change. I've never grown with hid lights so I can't say which I prefer more but I've had great results with led lights myself. "Listen to Growing Cannabis with LEDs vs Traditional Grow Lights with Kevin Frender and Noah Miller (Summer Encore 2 of 5) on TuneIn" Listen on TuneIn #NowPlaying Listen to CannaInsider on TuneIn Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G935A using Tapatalk
For me it's not that I don't want to change but I don't have the $ to switch over and just lose the money I've invested in my hoods and fans and ballasts. Those lights T-bone posted look awesome but it would take a lot of them to fill a 5x5 flower tent and by the time I built it they'd be the mars leds of the world and I'd be able to purchase it all for 1/4 of the price.
I could veg the crap out of a 5x5 with 4 of those QB120 boards. At approx $70 total each depending on part choices. That's about $280 to veg that space with about 240 watts. Not exactly breaking the bank. You'd be very happy when the electric bill showed up too. It's not about always having the best stuff out and trying to keep up with the Jones's. It's about taking advantage in advancements in tech when they allow significant savings in efficiency. Current LED tech is definitely doing that and not for the kind of costs that it used to a short time ago. Horticultural Lighting Group really broke the mold and finally offered a world class product that is close to $1 a watt depending on how you build or buy them. That watt of his quantum board lighting isn't a normal watt either it's worth near 2 normal hps watts. That means speaking in HPS terms it's 50 cents a watt because a watt goes twice as far. Of course a bloom setup for a 5x5 would be way more. I wouldn't want to try with those 4k qb120's it's not the right spectrum. You could fill a 5x5 with 3 of the xl250 or the qb260 lights in 3k or 3500 though for not that much and have a good bloom coverage. It would be under $1000.
We run several large gardens, which have been in service for us for over a decade. I promise you, it is exponentially cheaper to run MH/CMH-HPS than LED. To get a quality LED unit (No cheapo China lights, I.E. Mars, Vipar, etc..) that will actually replace a 600-1000 watt HID, you will be looking north of a grand per light. We run both, and our start up cost was infinitely higher for the LED gardens. Not to mention when you have an LED pulling 700-1200watts at the wall the heat it no different than a 1000 watt HPS in and aircooled hood.