Understanding COB vs HID

Olive Drab Green

Olive Drab Green

Well-Known Member
Watts and electrical energy is a form of input. It’s what the light uses, not the plant. The photons are the output energy.

The reason a 200-250w COB will perform like a 600w HPS is because HIDs are incandescent, meaning they use heat to create light by design. Everyone should easily recognize that heating an element up consumes and wastes quite a bit of electricity. It’s why we are switching from normal enhanced incandescent house lights to LED lights. COBs use electroluminescence, whereby a current is passed over/through a phosphor chip creating light in a spectrum correlated to the elements in the chip face. This is how COBs can put out the power of HIDs with less than half the wattage and minimal heat without breaking the Four Laws of Thermodynamics.

Are we all in agreement with this information?
 
nfhiggs

nfhiggs

Well-Known Member
Olive Drab Green said:
Watts and electrical energy is a form of input. It’s what the light uses, not the plant. The photons are the output energy.

The reason a 200-250w COB will perform like a 600w HPS is because HIDs are incandescent, meaning they use heat to create light by design. Everyone should easily recognize that heating an element up consumes and wastes quite a bit of electricity. It’s why we are switching from normal enhanced incandescent house lights to LED lights. COBs use electroluminescence, whereby a current is passed over/through a phosphor chip creating light in a spectrum correlated to the elements in the chip face. This is how COBs can put out the power of HIDs with less than half the wattage and minimal heat without breaking the Four Laws of Thermodynamics.

Are we all in agreement with this information?
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HIDs are not incandescent. HIDs are electric arc lights. They discharge an electric arc through a gas, that ionizes and emits light. They do not have a "heating element". They are actually more closely related to fluorescent lights than incandescent lights.

LEDs pass current through a semi-conductor PN junction, which emits light at around 465 nm into a semi-transparent phosphor coating, which shifts the frequency of the photons, spreading the spectrum out.

HID lights are 100 to 150 l/w efficient. LEDs are anywhere from 90 to 210 l/w efficient. Flouro is something like 40-60, and incandescent is 10-20.
 
Olive Drab Green

Olive Drab Green

Well-Known Member
CobKits said:
that post means nothing to me.

what are *you* talking about? if those are PPFD numbers they are meaningless without the area over which they are applied. ill listen to your argument if you can back it up. Otherwise i have to assume you are a victim of clever marketing
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PPFD typically refers to a square meter.
 
Olive Drab Green

Olive Drab Green

Well-Known Member
CobKits said:
sounds like you are assuming a spot reading of 1013 umol/m/s^2 from your 200W light means that is applicable over a square meter which isnt the case
most LEDs are at best 40% more efficient than HPS. thats just reality from many many different approaches of measurement
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It isn’t a spot reading. 1 of my Cree CXB3590s (36v @ 2150mA) was about 860 PPFD in an 18x18. The Vero29C from Tasty at 1670mA was 920 in an 18x18. Those were under 100w each and I had 3. Now I’m using 2 Vero29Cs at 200w.
 
CobKits

CobKits

Well-Known Member
Olive Drab Green said:
It isn’t a spot reading. 1 of my Cree CXB3590s (36v @ 2150mA) was about 860 PPFD in an 18x18. The Vero29C from Tasty at 1670mA was 920 in an 18x18. Those were under 100w each and I had 3. Now I’m using 2 Vero29Cs at 200w.
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thats fine. your small areas dont extrapolate to a square meter. yous need 5 of each of those rigs to uniformly cover a square meter and extrapolate approximate ppf numbers to compare technologies
 
CobKits

CobKits

Well-Known Member
Olive Drab Green said:
It isn’t a spot reading. 1 of my Cree CXB3590s (36v @ 2150mA) was about 860 PPFD in an 18x18.
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oh and it is a spot reading by definition.

get the math under your belt and we can talk about your pretty buds which could be very easily grown in an 18x18 space with 150W of HPS. 250-400W of HID would be way too much for that space
 
Olive Drab Green

Olive Drab Green

Well-Known Member
CobKits said:
thats fine. your small areas dont extrapolate to a square meter. yous need 5 of each of those rigs to uniformly cover a square meter and extrapolate approximate ppf numbers to compare technologies
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I definitely don’t need anything at all. Like I said, 2 4-foot tall plants in a 4x2.
 
Olive Drab Green

Olive Drab Green

Well-Known Member
CobKits said:
oh and it is a spot reading by definition.

get the math under your belt and we can talk about your pretty buds which could be very easily grown in an 18x18 space with 150W of HPS
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Bullshit. No way. 150w in an 18x18? You should close shop if you seriously believe that.
 
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