Let There Be Light - What Lighting Options Get the Best Results in a Grow?
Let's talk about lights, there's a plethora of options out there. How do you start?
Times are a lot different than they were even just five years ago. Really, the big question is are you doing HPS or LED? Or metal halide vs HPS vs LED.
In traditional growing, you have two main categories of lights that are generally used amongst growers. In the veg cycles, there are metal halides. They give off a white blue light. In the bloom rooms, we use HPS, which is high pressure sodium, and those give off an orange glow.
If you ever see a picture of a grow and you see that bright yellow-orange color, that's because they're using HPS lights. Those are the lights that most resemble the Sun's spectrum, and they put off a ton of power.
The Gavitas that we use will put out 1150 watts, versus the metal halides in the veg room which will put out 600 watts. Watts determines your cost. If you have 100 lamps running at 1000 watts each, you’re doing 10,000 watt hours. That's how your bill gets really high really fast, because of those bloom lights.
But now LED is coming into play. People have always been interested in it because it's a much cheaper alternative from a power consumption standpoint. A lot of these LEDs still consume a lot of amps, but they’re just not as much money as the HPS or the metal halide are. They’re a much cheaper, cost effective light.
The problem is (and I'm going to put an asterisk on this) that they don't produce as much as their counter parts of the HPS. The LEDs just underperform from a yield and quality perspective that the HPS’ produce. Now I say there's an asterisk, I had to preface with that because I predict that a whole bunch of people will say that's bullshit.
There are some LED lights and companies out there that have performed as well, if not better, than HPS. There's a couple that I've worked with directly that have outperformed HPSs by far, but they're massively expensive.
One Gavita HPS light is going to cost $400. But some of these LED lights are crazy, some of them are not just lights. It's a light, and it also shoots out UV lights, it has an embedded WiFi camera in it that lets you see the plants and take time lapse photos as they grow. It has infrared sensors that can detect mold and pests, and it shoots a UV laser at the mold to kills the spores as it's growing. It’s crazy shit, it’s awesome.
But those lights are over $2,000 each, and you need two of them to cover the same footprint as one $400 HPS light. The technology is there and it's definitely going to get better. I think within the next year or two, it's definitely going to be at a very competitive price point.
It really just depends on how much your power costs are, wherever you're at. If you're somewhere where power really isn't that expensive but your build out cost is massive, you’re going to start out the HPSs. You’re going to be like wait, I still have to spend another how many hundreds of thousands on these other lights just to replace these ones? And I might get a better yield? You’re kind of stuck in your ways at that point.
As the price point comes down, those type of lights might compliment some of the data driven grows that are out there.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO