Changes at Timber Grow Lights

gwheels

gwheels

Well-Known Member
I will think about it. I have 3 lights in the tent to spread the light better. I might leave the reflectors on the plant is loving it so far.
 
wietefras

wietefras

Well-Known Member
gwheels said:
In a small tent would you remove the reflectors? I use them because they came with the light.
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The trick is that with bare COBs you can move the lights much closer to the plants for the same uniformity. Something like half the height which you use for 90 degree reflectors would be fine. Doing that does give you more light on the plants.

Like I said, Malocan measured this in a 4'x'4 and he saw 15% more light on average. I ran some simulations and depending on the reflectivity of the walls I also arrived at something like that.

For a smaller tent it would probably give even more of an improvement since the relative amount of wall is much larger than in a bigger tent. Imagine 4 2'x2' tents put together in the shape of a 4'x4'. An actual 4'x4' would not have all the walls in the cross in the middle. Or in another way, 4 2'x2' tents have 16 walls and a 4'x'4' only 4 walls with the total size of 8 walls of the 2'x2'.

So you lose only half the light on the walls in a 4'x4' relative to a 2'x2'. Hope I made that clear enough.
 
Yodaweed

Yodaweed

Well-Known Member
wietefras said:
Are you kidding me?
- That chart is for a COB with a 90 degree reflector!!!!!!! With a 90 degree reflector the COB would need to be at 31" to get a proper uniformity not 18" as with a bare COB, let alone 12".
- Even with a bare COB, 12" would be too close for a single COB. Or board for that matter. So that's the incorrect height anyway and of course you will get poor uniformity.
- How do you even get an elliptical spread with a single COB?

Still, here goes, a chart for a single (bare COB) at 12" over a 2'x2' (no reflection):
View attachment 4203641 View attachment 4203644

Lines are at 20% ranges. So center white is from 100% to 80% etc. I used no reflection this time for a worst case scenario.

and same for a single board:
View attachment 4203645 View attachment 4203646

It's slightly stretched, but the board is just as unusable at that height.

The only thing you wrote that makes any sense is this: "The more you spread the light the less hotspots". That's exactly why 4 COBs spread out at 12" from each other are so much better than one COB or one board in the middle of the same area:
View attachment 4203647 View attachment 4203648

Even with no reflective walls that would be a usable configuration.
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You might want to get some better charts or put some type of numbers on there that's difficult to make heads or tails of.

Bare COB's work great if you can keep your plants within a foot of your lights. They really have poor intensity when it comes to distance, after 18 inches with bare cob's the numbers really drop off quickly. Might work if your in a tight area with limited growth height...but that's not really the greatest way to grow...most quality grow rooms got ceilings 10-12 foot tall so they need lights that can broadcast 24 inches and further
 
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INF Flux

INF Flux

Well-Known Member
Yodaweed said:
You might want to get some better charts or put some type of numbers on there that's difficult to make heads or tails of.

Bare COB's work great if you can keep your plants within a foot of your lights. They really have poor intensity when it comes to distance, after 18 inches with bare cob's the numbers really drop off quickly. Might work if your in a tight area with limited growth height...but that's not really the greatest way to grow...most quality grow rooms got ceilings 10-12 foot tall so they need lights that can broadcast 24 inches and further
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Just a PSA for the new, This guy is clueless and frequently makes shit up.
 
M

mr. childs

Well-Known Member
Yodaweed said:
You might want to get some better charts or put some type of numbers on there that's difficult to make heads or tails of.

Bare COB's work great if you can keep your plants within a foot of your lights. They really have poor intensity when it comes to distance, after 18 inches with bare cob's the numbers really drop off quickly. Might work if your in a tight area with limited growth height...but that's not really the greatest way to grow...most quality grow rooms got ceilings 10-12 foot tall so they need lights that can broadcast 24 inches and further
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so cobs are better for us tent growers, not warehouse growers, unless the warehouse has 9ft ceilings, but warehouse growers can use them as side lighting ?
 
tstick

tstick

Well-Known Member
Aaaahhh...I haven't been to this section in awhile...Good to see that some things never change....like the bickering! :(

Dan has been a great asset to many growers on this forum and if he wants to go all-COBs then more power to him. I can't decide on any particular lights anymore. I've grown under them all and they all work.

Plus, Kevin Jodery (probably the most knowledgeable grower on Earth) has made it clear that most of the genetics that people grow, now, come from plants that were acclimated to grow under HID lighting -specifically HPS. So there is no "miracle" light that's going to make any kind of massive difference -even to expert growers. You would have to run seed-generations under a new lighting system for awhile and then compare those results with seed generations that were run under HPS, to see anything....And, even then, you might not see all that big of a difference.

Cost-wise, same deal....The small-time, personal grower won't see any appreciable difference. And the super-huge mega-greenhouse operations are not going to be changing from HPS lighting for the aforementioned reasons, anyway. If THEY were to convert to a new format, then THEY might see a cost difference over a period of time because of the massive amount of electricity those operations consume....but it makes little difference for the common man.

Boards have their place, too. My Nextlight is razor-thin and saves a lot of headroom in a tent, for example. The plants like it, too. It's all good.

I have been a supporter of Timber Grow Lights before they were even Timber Grow Lights so I am well-aware of Dan and Co. and I can't say enough GREAT things about them! Just based on customer service, alone, Timber Grow Lights beats the competition by a country mile!
 
D

Dave455

Well-Known Member
DET—PDX said:
Back to what Dan was saying... about the cobs.. I think it’s better for SOME to use no lenses on Cobs and go bare. The reason is simple, for me, in a 5x5 i have no reason to spread the light with 6 cobs on the Vero Redwood. Lenses will reduce overall ppfd of light being absorbed by plants because they must refract it to some degree. According to dan it’s about a 12% intensity difference, and at Timber they certainly measured that statistic. You can argue semantics about percentages versus ppfd all day but lets look at the generation of the light, and how it is being relayed to the plants. A lot of diode analysis ends up being inaccurate anyway, so long as you have a decent way to measure ppfd at ACTUAL canopy level, and you are providing the correct spectrum of light, there is no need for senseless bantering about superior lighting. It’s all superior if it’s fit for your particular grow set up, don’t ridicule people based on your assumptions of their missteps. Why not make this new thing called a suggestion instead?
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All calculated numbers at Timber. He takes no PPFD readings on any of the fixtures! No PAR maps of actual coverage. FYI
 
Prawn Connery

Prawn Connery

Well-Known Member
I love arguments about lights.

Everything pretty much comes down to time and money. More individual points of light = more even coverage. Lower driven LEDs = more efficiency. In every case, the more individual LEDs and lower you drive them, the more efficiently they will cover any given area. But do those efficiencies offset the initial cost? And over what time period? And is something even more efficient likely to come on to the market in the mean time? And honestly, if you're going to run multiple LEDs inches away from your canopy, do you have time to train that canopy evenly and raise the lights as the plants grow a couple of cm or more every day? How much is your time really worth? Would you rather be fucking around with plants and lights all the time or out enjoying yourself? Or is fucking around with plants and lights a sense of enjoyment in and of itself?

There's no straight answer for everyone. I like strips. But only when I've got enough time to fuck around with them.
 
DET—PDX

DET—PDX

Active Member
wietefras said:
The thing is when you make a suggestion, or in this case I simply gave some examples in agreement to the statement of the topic starter that COBs offer better solutions, you receive a deluge of insults from certain people who feel insecure about their board purchase.

Heck I'd rather they come up with reasoning/evidence if they don't agree with the thread topic, but posts filled with only swearing and/or an appeal to authority is what screws these threads up.

So the new thing then is to make no suggestions at all in fear of someone trying to find an insult?

In hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have been so hard on Yodaweed since he actually tried to come up with an example. Albeit that he seems to have cherry picked that example to make COBs look as worse as possible.

But yes I agree on the optics. Lenses might be less worse, but Malocan measured the difference with 90 degree reflectors in a 4'x4' tent and found 15% advantage of bare COBs over reflectors. Both fixture hung at correct heigt and therefore bare were substantially lower.
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Wait with the reflectors bare were substantially higher you mean right? I thought bare cobs produced more intense light, only ‘misguided’. I thought the whole point of the lense is to refract light in a more evenly distributed wavelength for the plants, but that must come at a cost of intensity. There is no way the same 2 lights would produce equal intensity PPFD if one had been lensed right?
 
DET—PDX

DET—PDX

Active Member
Prawn Connery said:
I love arguments about lights.

Everything pretty much comes down to time and money. More individual points of light = more even coverage. Lower driven LEDs = more efficiency. In every case, the more individual LEDs and lower you drive them, the more efficiently they will cover any given area. But do those efficiencies offset the initial cost? And over what time period? And is something even more efficient likely to come on to the market in the mean time? And honestly, if you're going to run multiple LEDs inches away from your canopy, do you have time to train that canopy evenly and raise the lights as the plants grow a couple of cm or more every day? How much is your time really worth? Would you rather be fucking around with plants and lights all the time or out enjoying yourself? Or is fucking around with plants and lights a sense of enjoyment in and of itself?

There's no straight answer for everyone. I like strips. But only when I've got enough time to fuck around with them.
Click to expand...
A lot of good points being made, time is a commodity you will never get back. On individual points of light vs efficiency of coverage, however, they’re not synonymous. I believe coverage would also depend on the magnitudes and wavelengths of light being produced from the individual points of light, and I think it also depends on the quality of coverage you’re after. If for example you wanted to use quantum boards, you will indeed have many many points of light. But considering just one of those points, the magnitude of those wavelengths is in no way comparable to say, a Vero or CREE individual point, especially driven at 50+W. As with all LED’s, magnitude quickly decreases as you move outward on spectrum radius. This is literally the only reason boards are being used over CREE, Citizen or Vero, LED Diodes basically straight shoot light, and unless spectrum radius of Larger COBs overlap, the board will more evenly cover every time, BUT AT WHAT INTENSITY COST? This also has to be factored into ‘coverage’ because who wants to cover if light is too weak?
 
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