getogrow
Well-Known Member
I see lots of folks who would never switch from DE bulbs but my experience shows otherwise. Sure, for the price you cannot beat hps, period but for a little more overhead you can destroy them DE with 650 led watts per 1k de. On paper it may be a close battle but in real life the spread of the leds make up for everything.I had planned on building a 1k led fixture to run this summer. I’m a couple months behind on my current grow so I’m going to be into summer before I’m done. I bought a new 1k DE bulb for this round, 2100k/2100umol, I have the 600w strips on the walls and another SE mh bulb overhead.
I have 26 4K fstrips and 26 3500k L09 (i think, 96 diode) available for the build but I’m kinda wanting some far red and uv strips yet before I think about it that much.
HPS feels right but all these guys who grew with hps never looked back. The grey area for me is running 1150 watt de ballasts on good bulbs. Nobody comments comparisons on de, before they ditched, I know se bulbs are old news, so is de. I don’t know, so many opinions based on reading and not experiences. Like at the time, I could not really see a difference flowering in the 4K range, I have too much invested now to experiment again though haha.
Single style bulbs are just not worth it but im not going to say "old news" because i would be wrong. Most of the best growers in the world are still using hps. In my opinion ,the QB boards were "old news" before i even ran leds. (fixtures are too small , cramming way too much heat on one tiny board)