Quote Originally Posted by Alaric
all the way through------last time I researched led techonology the INTENSITY is very lacking.

Intensity of natural sunlight is around 10,000 fc (foot candles), clear summer day at noon.

A 1K hortilux produces that intensity about 18" directly below the fixture----another 18" is only 2500 fc (in the shade relative to sunlight).

Alaric
I will try to explain what I know (since I'm a physics person). If I'm wrong, anyone can correct me - I certainly wonâ??t take offence.

Basically, an LED is potentially the most efficient way of making light (pn-junction); itâ??s a diode. As some people on here are rightly pointing out, although light radiation can be given in intensity, it doesnâ??t mean anything to talk about the whole intensity of a source like the sun, if your including wavelengths that are unusable - one must concentrate on those particular colours that are (whatâ??s the intensity of blue and red in the white sunlight you mentioned?). Eg - take the sun, for example, say itâ??s about 1000w per M squared (power per unit area) on a good clear day. But plants are GREEN, which means that they reflect all that green light (they arenâ??t going to use it so we canâ??t compare it to the LEDs intensity). The suns spectrum is made of loads of colours.

So, now you have to take away all that green light (green and yellow and others, because plants only use red and blue right?) from the total intensity donâ??t you, because itâ??s meaningless to your plant to include things like yellow light intensity. But hey - itâ??s great to us humans because our eyes are really sensitive to that colour/wavelength (with me so far?).

So in order to make ANY comparisons to do with intensity, one must determine the intensities of the particular wavelengths of light (in a spectrum of emitted light from a source eg fluorescent/LED/sun) that our plants need.

With this in mind, I could see it is highly likely that a low intensity of 7W of LED's light (just the stuff our plants like) could outperform a 100W HID (because the HID gives out loads of light that the plant isnâ??t going to use).

It would be great if there were more reviews of this product online. I'm not saying itâ??s definitely brilliant, but it could be.