LED grow lights have rapidly come down in price and home growers everywhere are starting to make the switch to solely using them as their lighting option.These lighting systems produce extremely low heat, come ready to plug-and-play, and can produce high yields with incredible energy efficiency.Whereas HIDs require a reflector and ballast for operation, LED lights do not.
But except wattage, we should pay more attention to several parameters as PPF, average PPFD, Efficacy.PPF decides how much effective photons you can get from one grow light.PPFD decides how effectively your plants can use the photons, generally speaking, the more averagely distributed, the better.Efficacy, higher efficacy means you can get more photons with the same cost on electricity bill.For commercial growers, average PPFD is better to be above 1000 μmol/m2/s, and all the way even up to 1500 or 2000, since most commercial cannabis facilities have CO2 enrichment system, plants can use much higher level of light for photosynthesis.
In a small individual grow tent, higher PPFD above 1000 would be waste of energy, since most individual growers don’t have such complete system of CO2 enrichment, let alone precise control over humidity, temperature, nutrients, etc.2.Must be built with top-quality parts with long working lifetimeUnlike individual growers, commercial growing facilities basically have to run every day for providing the year-around yield for the cannabis market.
In this situation, you must have a very robust design of your LED grow lights.And we need to understand that LED grow lights consists of several main parts which affect the durability most.LED chips, top quality chips include brands as Samsung, Osram, Lumileds, Cree,, etc.These top LED chips can last a long life time of more than 50000 hours with 10% light loss.LED driver, tops drivers include Meanwell, Inventronics, etc.
Those best drivers usually offer warranty period up to 7 even 10 years.Heatsink, this depends on the light manufacturer’s choice, but the larger the collective surface size is, the better the heat conduction is.
But we can recognize right way those spectra unsuitable for cannabis cultivation, such as too much red light, too much blue light, lack of infrared.