No matter what companies may say, there’s no way to sum up a growlight’s performance in a single number. Many companies try to express their lights’ performance as just an impressive intensity measurement such as PPF or lumen, but this can’t tell you the whole story. Just like how you can’t compare cars using only a single number, growlights need more than just one impressive statistic to prove itself.
Any measurement can be omitted or manipulated to make a growlight look impressive on paper, but they can’t tell you how well a light can grow plants. Did you know that a 0.005W laser pointer has a YPF and PAR comparable to some of the strongest growlights on the market? This doesn’t mean a laser pointer will grow a plant.
The spectrum of the light:
The intensity of the light over the entire grow area:
The efficiency of the light, relative to its ability to grow plants:
If they are lying to you about one thing, what else are they lying to you about? For example:
If there are supplemental side-lights for changing the spectrum that are supposed to be turned on daily for a period of time, is it possible to do this with a timer? If you have to manually flip a switch, you have to remember to turn it on and off again every day.
If the manufacturer suggests getting voltage-regulators to “protect” their light from normal household conditions, why didn’t they just build that in to the light?
For LEDs in particular, the design of the light is critical as well:
Without effective heat dissipation, LEDs can burn out within days or months. Passive cooling (without fans) works for 10-20 watts of LEDs in household settings, but running high-power LEDs in close proximity (as needed for growing plants) requires fans to keep the LEDs from degrading.
Primary lenses harvest more light from the LED, making it more efficient. The beam angle of these primary lenses should spread the light over the entire footprint.
Secondary lenses focus the light to give it an impressive PAR, YPF or other intensity measurement, but only at a single point, destroying the light’s total growing footprint and losing about 10% of the light in the process.
Reflectors are counter-productive with LED lights; if a light has a reflector built-in, the beam angle of the primary lens wasn’t chosen properly, or the primary lens is missing entirely.
Even with all these things considered, it still isn’t easy to compare growlights based on product specifications. Searching the internet for legitimate, documented grows can be useful. It’s fairly easy to hang a light above some existing plants to take a picture and make it look like the light works, so single pictures should not be trusted. There are numerous grow journals which cover the first week or two of growing with a light and then mysteriously end; this often happens when the grower gets too busy to continue documenting everything, but if you can’t find a single start-to-finish documented grow with a light, there may be a reason for it.
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