loftygoals
Well-Known Member
I agree the LED sub forum is filled with little diamonds but also has some ego mixed in. If you're critical of everything you read you can still get a lot out of it. There's nowhere else on the net with as much technical info on grow lighting IMO.There is definitely a lot of ego driven poo-poo to wade through in the LED sub forum but also some really helpful and innovative folks as well. Over time you learn who to listen to and who to ignore.
I knew nothing about COBs last year and now I can not stop making them. If Timber or the Cutter kits were around when I started looking into COBs I would have went with them because they provide almost everything you need to build your first light.
There are cheaper COB options if you just wanted to dip your toe in the efficiency waters. Something like a DIY veg light with CXA2530 would not cost all that much and still blow t5 out of the water. My first build replaced a 215w T5 veg light with a 150w dimmable LED that produces more photons per watt and no regular bulb changes.
Cheers,
Will
A 100% efficient 3500k LED would emit 324 lumens/watt of light.You have explained it in laymans terms for me to understand.
When you talk about efficiency, what are you referring to?
I have spent hours over the last few day reading about cobs and it's very confusing and a little off putting as there are a heap of RIU advertisers ( Manufacturers ) that are just arguing back and forth about design and output and who's idea it was originally.
Lol
You have explained it better than all of them could alltogether.
A 50% efficient 3500k LED would emit half that amount of light... so 162 lumens/watt.
You can measure the amount of power going through an LED and the amount of light it emits to discover how efficient it runs. The more efficient your light is the less heat it emits. In an ideal world we'd all be running 100% efficient lights which emit just light and no heat. In the real world
Lumens are a measure of light available to human eyes to see, PAR measured in umol is a measure of light available to plants to photosynthesise. Plants don't take up light in the same way as human eyes which is why PAR is a better measure of grow light brightness than lumens. Having said that if you only have lumen data available then you can get a rough idea of how different lights might compare for growing.