I am doing my seedlings on 2x 40 watt t12’s. But I am extremely interested in LED’s. I ordered some lamps from Yescomusa but they were incredibly faulty and I had to send them back. While they worked though, they seemed pretty impressive.
I currently have 2000 red and 500 blue leds coming in the mail and the matching proto board and power supplies for them. I will definitely try to keep you all updated with this project but the real reason I started this thread is I wanted to try to get a good discussion going about LEDs.
Most of the information that I can find is producers trying to sell their products. I’ve only found one project of a guy who grew and fruited a few pepper plants on LEDs and all the other projects never seem to be finished. I’m not sure if they fail and then are too embarassed to post or what happens.
I’ll start out with a few of the bonus’s of LEDs. Please feel free to post more, or post some cons. Just keep the discussion intelligent please ;D
LEDs have pretty high efficiency. Current LEDs that are cost effective probably fall in the 60-75 lm/watt range. This is about half the efficiency of HPS but they have two distinct advantages over HPS.
1) they are a very directional light source. This means that you don’t need to worry as much about having light reflected back at the plants. The vast majority of the light is already going straight at your plant. If it is set up correctly, mylar is hardly needed.
2) They produce a very specific wavelength of light. We can eliminate UV (which hurts the plants anyways), green, and IR wavelengths. Since we are only producing the few wavelengths we need we can eliminate all the power wasted in producing those wavelengths in HPS or other setups. There is some info pointing to IR being beneficial to plants but I haven’t found anything conclusive and if that does end up being true, it’s quite easy to add IR LED’s to a setup.
Another advantage is our ability to independently regulate blue and red light. We can turn down red during our veg to get out plants to spread out or turn it up and turn down blue if we want them taller. We can also favor power to our reds during flowering since they like red better at this time anyways. Cutting some blue light could save us even more energy.
Long life. LEDs will last for a long time and when they do fail it’s easy to replace the single failing LEDs.
Price. They are kind of expensive right now, but the pre made kits are coming down and if you buy LEDs direct from china you can get them at incredible prices. close to 250 watts worth for under a hundred bucks. Anyone with a soldering iron and half a brain can wire up their own boards. Once our project is complete I would love to post some pics and see some other people attempt a similar project.
It’s getting late but I would love to hear everyone’s feedback!
