LED grow lights... input please.

[knna]

cannabis receptors reach saturation @ 1500-1800 micro-moles and will disregard any light outside the wavelength it is looking for at that particular time within it's growth cycle.

Plants, cannabis included, uses all light into PAR at similar efficiency. They dont disgregard any specific wavelenght into PAR. Thats is an absolutely well proven fact.

therefore the importance of quality and quantity of PAR light at the receptors cannot be understated. One of the things that I found LED's had difficulty achieving was, as nature would provide, photomorphogenesis wherin the spectrums, especially IR levels, would not be so narrow that the full yield inhibited by lack of enough energy in red and far red levels without having to create an LED lamp/driver combination that would rival HPS in wattage while being 4 x the price and needing 2 or 3 of them to cover the same area.

Ive found photomorphogenesis to be way better controlled with LED light than when using any other type of light.

You decide exactly how many UV, IR and far red you provide your plants, allowing you to tune the lighting to the exact requeriments of a specific plant. Of course, if you do it bad, you can get worse results, but its not a limitation of LED lamps, but people misdesigning them or growers using them the wrong way.

Using more than one point source is not a limitation at all, but a large advantage. Improves penetration in typical indoor crowded canopies, achieves even light distribution, which enhances light efficacy. Avoid hot spots and areas underlit, typical of HID growing.

any grower having compared yields between the most advanced LED and the simple HPS will attest to the compromise in yields. So while we all would like to find the holy grail of energy efficiency, lamp life, PAR spectrums there really is a much simpler way to go about it.

I would agreed if you have said "many growers" instead of "any grower" and skipped the "most advanced" lamps statement. Many crappy LED lamps out there, specially a pair years ago.

People tricked for dishonest LED sellers to believe they can get the same yield with 100W of LEDs than with 600W HPS (which is impossible) got dissapointing results.

But growers using good designed LED lamp systems are getting similar yields using near half watts, forgetting heat issues and getting way higher productivities (yield per input watts).

I have heard some horror stories about induction as well and initially only went in with an order of 1 400 and 1 100. I've heard the problems that people have had is that when they try and use these as an IP65 rated fixture which as growers we don't need that rating and the temperature within the fixture and our environments can create thermal overloads. But even so I had only heard of this occurring on the mland brand direct out of China.

Ive heard too horror stories about induction lamps reliability. Ballast heat is often underlooked by designers. And its clear than 95% induction lamp systems have a lower expected life for the ballast than for the bulb itself. Reliability stands for the whole system, and its very hard to find long term reliable induction lamps (reason of their limited market penetration).

But letting apart that topic, its true that its easier to get a good perfomance from induction lamps than from many currently on sale LED lamps. All induction lamps have similar efficiency, while LED lamps vary strongly from one to the another.

But perfomance gain of induction lamps is limited over HPS. Its a technology with very little improvement margin (except on reliability). Little spectrum advantage, similar energy efficiency, same problems with the need of using big lamps far from plants. Big bulbs that need to use big reflectors, often little efficient.

They work very well in veg. But LED lamps do it still better. Have you seen what 100W of good LEDs can achieve on veg? We are using it on 1 sq meter very sucessfully, replacing 400W MHs with 120W of LEDs or so and getting better growth rates yet