Quote Originally Posted by SnSstealth
how is an engineer not growing pot gonna tell anyone if its a perfect spectrum? perfect for what? anyone can have an IDEA what would be the perfect spectrum.
well honestly I've been thinking about what the "perfect" spectrum should be. and i have a couple of ideas. first, by best do we mean efficiency? or actual absorption? on the high times chart there shows to be pretty much 100% absorption at 425nm and 660nm. thinking about this i started thinking...if we provide only 425 and 660 then most of our light we supply in those two wavelengths, and if the charts are correct, will be absorbed almost 100% , meaning almost almost all of all the light energy we put out will be absorbed by the plants, making the LEDs about 100% PAR (right?). isnt that what we want??? do we really need to hit these other peaks (440,470,642,etc.) or can we just supply these two wavelengths, 425 and 660nm? having more LEDs and colors will reduce efficiency but also increase absorption by the individual pigments. as of now i don't think i could answer these questions. but with some testing i think i can. i will perform a test with 425 and 660 on one or two plants and on another ill try all the peaks, and form there we can compare the results, and hopefully that will tell us if supplying just 425nm and 660nm is just as good (and even more efficient) than providing all the peak wavelengths. as of now 425nm high-power LEDs are not commercially available, so this is one limiting factor. also 660nm high-power LEDs are a new development and still have some improvement. also blue light has more energy than red light, so providing more blue light in the array would mean more PAR or umol/s/m^2. but we still want to keep the light ratio of red to blue right at about 2:1 B:R for veg and 7:2 R:B (something like this) for flowering. I'm starting to think about this whole "peak" wavelength we've been talking about for a while. do the peaks even matter? at 470nm there is about 81% absorption for all pigments and about 77% for chlorophyll b. im just tossing ideas around here. :rastasmoke:

oh fuck wrong thread...sorry SnS!!!