Wanna know what burns my ass? Other than a three foot tall flame?
It's walking into a hydro store, or opening an online webpage, and seeing watts equivalent. WTF is watts equivalent? A grow store squirt tried to argue with me that LED's are so much more efficient that I can replace a bazillion watt HID with a 5 watt LED. I told him to grow up and go back to school before I became violent
When I started indoor growing about 18 years ago, the only option available was HID. You used metal halide bulbs for veg and high pressure sodium for bloom. And there were a few well established parameters for comparison shopping. Side comment, I felt fortunate to have purchased Greg Green's "The Cannabis Grow Bible"; it actually rated HID bulbs of various manufacturers by a few parameters that were mostly understandable for laymen (and red-eyed stoners whose eyes were bleeding on their shirt):
Watts told me how much it would cost to run the light, and how big the electrical circuit needed to be.
Lumens told me, in simple terms most could understand, how "much" light was being put out; i.e. some were more efficient than others.
PAR watts - this was going borderline to the lighting engineers, but still I could understand that was a measure of usable light as seen by the plant.
CCT was the color spectrum of the light, in degrees Kelvin. You needed to remember that 2900K was warm for bloom and 5500K was daytime for veg. About as technical, but still manageable, as your typical grower needed to get.
Now since then LED's have come along and granted, seem to be an improvement. But there's so much f%$#I#@ bullshit with LED's, how's a non-lighting engineer supposed to make heads or tales out of it???
The starting argument was that LED's are so much better than HID because LED's can be tailored to provide the specific light spectrum that's most usable by the plant. Sounds good, huh? There were even some rather impressive color rendering charts showing what the plant liked the most. But the plant never told me that - just the guy trying to sell me a new lighting technology. And how did the LED manufacturers apply this magic sauce of how to tailor a light spectrum to fit a light? They put red and blue LED's in their products. That's really scientific. Then some LED manufacturers started using only white LED's - the argument being that a white light is a full spectrum and is most efficient. Somebody's lying. Or everyone is telling the truth?????
Then they said this is a 700 watt LED. It used a 5 watt LED. And sure enough, if you counted all the LED's there were 140 of them. Only when you plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt it measured 325 watts.
Then there were the claims that LED's are cooler (that's true, they are more efficient too), but they didn't tell you how much cooler, i.e. how much heat would this light generate? Where's the BTU rating? Tell me something I can use.
What I'm trying to say is, the majority of growers can't interpret what it means for the lens angle of an LED or the spectrum of the LED's in nanometers. I shouldn't have to give a shit. There should be a measurable equivalent to the "old" ways of measuring light. LED's did not change what light is. It didn't change the color spectrum that plants need. It didn't change heat generated (yes, LED's do still put out heat). I should be able to apply the same standards to LED lighting as I used to do to HID. The technical specifications absolutely need to be there so the smart people can tell us how this light performs in comparison to the other light I might be thinking of buying.
These parameters are important to how a light is made and what it will deliver for us. But the average layman will not know how to interpret the technical fine print. So please, let's have our lighting engineers and scientists dumb this down for us to a level we can all understand. Tell me why a Cree is better than an Epistar; if I believe you then I can make that a search criteria. But if Cree is really better, why is Epistar still in business? (Price point, I know). But let's get back to basics rather than trying to make all of us lighting engineers. And if you are a lighting engineer, I love you, Man (or more if you're a Woman ): ), and I need all the help you can give me. Just don't tell me how to build the light, make me smart enough to compare one and make the manufacturers adhere to a common set of standards. Like watts, lumens, PAR watts, CCT/CRI/or whatever parameter ends up measuring how effective their light is at growing weed.
Oh... one other thing... if the life expectancy of an LED is 50,000 hours, why do they fail at 2,000 hours? Or 200? Smells like someone stepped in the bullshit.
OK, I'm gonna shut up now, but I feel better
in. I'm late so forgive any duplicates....
