Grow room upgrade (HELP)

Story of my life, I have been growing 2 years, have had a few good runs and few bad runs. I am upgrading from the HPS to the LED and wanted to hear reviews and yield Tales from the Gavita 1700e LED lights. Also throw in the area size and medium, C02 or NO and so on. Looking for ideas to add to my set up and upgrade.

Im willing to change mediums and add hydroponics, and switching to Gavita 1700e LEDs. What else to have them big yields in a 10x10 room.

My area is a 10x10 room. 3 DL 1000 Watters (Generic brand I'm sure) 1 Gavita pr DE 1000. CoCo soil. No co2 added

My goal is to get to 10 lbs per run but so far haven't came close to that with generic HPS lamps, just a high light bill.

Of all the elements in the equation, the most reliable indicator of bud output is power input to your lights.
If you have efficient lights, you could try aiming at 1 gram per Watt. If you can get close to that when cooling with fan extraction only, that would be a good time to seal the room, add refrigerated cooling, a dehumidifier and CO2.
10 pounds is roughly 4,500 grams, so you'll need 4.5Kw of lights. You should check that your electricity supply can cope with that current draw (which will be higher if you only have access to 110v)
Good luck with your grow.

Mullumbimby said:

If you have efficient lights, you could try aiming at 1 gram per Watt.

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Thats a fairly good metric for HPS lighting however since LED requires less watts to light a given area one should expect more than 1 gram per watt with LED. The best metric to compare yields with various lighting tech is yield per sqft. With HPS 1 gram per watt puts you at about 2 ounces per sqft. If you switch to a different light and get less then it's not performing as well. Yield per sqft is the metric I prefer to use.

If you have a 10x10 room and IF you used every sqft and only used the "top canopy" (no side lighting) then I would expect 12.5 pounds to be achievable. Of course utilizing 100% of the space in the room is often not possible.

As to lighting, wattage per sqft will vary depending on the light. HPS 50 - 60 watts per sqft. LED 30 - 35 watts per sqft. It is important to remember that LED lacks the abundance of IR wavelength that HPS provides. IR heats up surfaces it hits. Without the IR we need a warmer air temperature to achieve optimal leaf surface temperatures. Failure to achieve warm enough leaf surface temps (LST) will cause slow growth and reduced yields. If you target 79F with HPS you may find that you need 84 - 86F with LED.

Renfro said:

Thats a fairly good metric for HPS lighting however since LED requires less watts to light a given area one should expect more than 1 gram per watt with LED. The best metric to compare yields with various lighting tech is yield per sqft. With HPS 1 gram per watt puts you at about 2 ounces per sqft. If you switch to a different light and get less then it's not performing as well. Yield per sqft is the metric I prefer to use.

If you have a 10x10 room and IF you used every sqft and only used the "top canopy" (no side lighting) then I would expect 12.5 pounds to be achievable. Of course utilizing 100% of the space in the room is often not possible.

As to lighting, wattage per sqft will vary depending on the light. HPS 50 - 60 watts per sqft. LED 30 - 35 watts per sqft. It is important to remember that LED lacks the abundance of IR wavelength that HPS provides. IR heats up surfaces it hits. Without the IR we need a warmer air temperature to achieve optimal leaf surface temperatures. Failure to achieve warm enough leaf surface temps (LST) will cause slow growth and reduced yields. If you target 79F with HPS you may find that you need 84 - 86F with LED.

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Renfro always good to hear from you. So are those Gavita 1700e LEDs going to achieve least 10?? Also when you say 12.5 is that soil, hydro, coco. As of right now I can maintain optimal temperature and humidity. I just feel that the hps are to expensive on light bill. And different groups claim the Gavita leds can get up to 3 per light. I have thought about the DWC switch but h heard people say weed taste bad. What’s the direction I should be going.

When we made the change from HPS to LED, it was a long road full of lots of research. SO much so, I ended up purchasing a PAR meter and started hitting up the light displays from any grow shop I could find, comparing reading from our baseline-1000 watt HPS single ended lights.
Without mentioning names, the ONLY LED that caught my eye through the lens of a PAR meter were the HLG Quantum boards. SO much so, I began digging into "why" they performed so well. What due diligence led me to indicated it wasn't HLG that performed so well, it was the Samsung LM-301 LED diodes that did the trick. I then purchased a watt meter and went to see what I was drawing at the plug, because aside all fanciful claims, a watt is a watt...or is it?
Anyway, we needed 32 of their "1000 watt replacements" and I could neither reach them by phone or by email, so I went to work. Surely HLG isn't the only one using a Samsung chip for their lighting, right?
After much internet searching, I came across a company called Atreum Lighting that used the Samsung LM301's and begin digging into their offerings. First thing that impressed me was not so much their boards...but the frame they used to hold each of the four "Quantum" boards. It reminds me of an adult Erector Set, and does a few things the competition didn't think about.
1. I can move all four boards around on the frame for a perfect lighting footprint. Each plant gets it's own board, and each board is driven at 137.5 watts or 550 watts at the plug for each light, PLENTY of 3k lighting to exceed 1 gram per watt. I don't even need to argue about it. We've proven it several times.
2. Unlike HLG who basically screws four Quantum boards to a 1/4" thick piece of aluminum plate. This "plate" or heatsink is just a piece of flat aluminum with no heat dissipation fins. Worse still is the LED driver is surface bolted to that very same plate, and when the light is on, there is a LOT of heat from the Quantum boards being transferred directly into the driver, something sure to shorten the life. IF I had HLG's, I'd at least put standoffs between the driver and the heatsink.
Since I needed 32 of them, price was taken into account and NOBODY came close, though we did have to assemble them ourselves.
In closing, carefully chosen, you can't go wrong with LED, and when we were able to PROVE they performed as well (they perform BETTER) than 1000 watt HPS, they not only saved a chunk in electrical costs, but reduced our cooling requirements to 6 tons per 40'x22'x10' room running 32 lights per room with large Anden dehumidifier, fan and pumps and Co2.

Good Luck!