I disagree on g/w. Why is that a top priority? I would prefer to sort on g/sqft and separate short box grows from regular grows.
I'm looking for the most weed from my space, not the most weed per electron.
And do this for all lighting options together in one place.
I swear the more I talk about this the more I want to make an Android app for it.
Also from nomfatum : "I'm curious why watts is more important than sqft to you? If you have a real reason I see no reason not to use both sort orders"
Let me give it a try and then I'm going to leave this thread altogether. While I don't have experience in growing, I do have experience in designing and developing systems. Choosing the right metrics for a design is critical and often determines the success or failure of a project. By relating bud mass to input watts, g/W measures how well a grow-system converts energy to useful radiation regardless of the wavelength of light. Want to grow with blue light? Want to grow with a strain from outer Mongolia? Want to use gummy bears as a nutrient? All can be compared to using the same metric -- g/W -- and one only needs to measure yield and energy input. This metric is simple and useful because it is applicable to a range of input variables. Its not the only variable to consider for a grow system but it is important.
In an analogy, the muscle cars of the 60's went fast and had high acceleration. People bought them because they could go from 0 to 60 (and a lot more) very quickly. They also were inefficient in converting energy into motion as shown by their very low gas mileage for the number of passengers. In order to inefficiently produce high acceleration, the engines were very heavy and they had heat management issues. While they were a blast to ride in, they were not very reliable, they were expensive to maintain, passed everything on the road except a gas station and the extra weight made them unsafe at high speed and on winding roads. The Japanese placed a high value on energy efficiency in producing a good ride and they eventually ate Detroit's lunch. Today, Japanese cars sell at a premium price because a large proportion of people have become aware that in the long term, their satisfaction from the purchase will be higher and the overall cost of ownership will be lower. Not everybody understands this and they usually buy cheaper cars, which don't last as long and have higher overall cost of ownership. This is not to say that Detroit hasn't caught up to the Japanese but they did lose their edge by focusing on the wrong values.
Low grams per watt means that a lot of energy is being wasted in the production of bud. Waste can be in the form of heat or tall plants with few buds. The wasted energy has to go somewhere and scaling the inefficient system up to produce more smoke also produces more headaches. Waste must be dealt with in one manner or another. Dealing with waste usually requires additional energy, which drives efficiency further down and drives costs up. This applies to the issue with using g/sqft as a metric. A system that is an energy hog and wastefully produces a lot of bud is more costly to operate than an efficient system in the same area. Which system would you rather have?.
By minimizing waste (maximizing g/W), a lot of problems go away and the grower can more easily scale their system up to increase their yield. Because fewer factors must be considered for higher-efficiency systems, scaling a system down while maintaining quality is also easier . Of course, the purchase price of the system matters. Efficiency is an important factor to consider once the budget is met.
The metric you propose, g/sqft is to growing as "time from 0 to 60" is to cars. Its an important value to be considered when designing a system but its not the best metric to compare different systems.
OK, that's my two cents. I don't have the patience that others have. I'm going to leave this thread now.
Sadly my wife is not ready to experiment with this metric.