Dr.J20
Well-Known Member
some really hard to parse claims here. the only one I'd be interested in fleshing out is how you propose to make direct comparisons between lights in a given grow without the kind of laboratory setup required for control groups etc. Also, to be fair, seems like you'd need to do such a test with clones rooted under a third light. Anyhow, i'd be careful about knocking the performance of a light based on a presumption that because you need expensive "digital" equipment to quantitatively assess performance differences, and you don't have said equipment, that the differences won't affect harvest--quality or quantity. Anyhow, in my time at RIU i've found the most solid community members approach growing with a scholar's curiosity and thirst for scientific accuracy. If your apollos and mars leds from amazon kick ass, people will want to hear that as much as they'll want to hear negative reports. Its all in the spirit of finding the ways to grow the best plants--whatever that means to you (biggest yield, strongest, best flavors, all of the above etc.,). So, thanks for taking the plunge and testing out the mars 400! let us know how it stacks up!A fellow grower friend just received his Mars II 900 and I can't wait to get up to OC and see it. He's already reported that the light seems solidly built and there are no signs of metal shavings in the unit. To be honest, I wonder about these claims of metal shavings anyways. The member who claimed this seems to have been banned already for having multiple accounts. Is it possible he was a plant by a competitor? Sounds completely paranoid, but you'd be surprised how many prospective LED customers come to these types of forums before making their purchasing decisions. Please don't hesitate to correct me if my information is inaccurate.
I writing this to alert anyone in the market for an LED light that they should be careful to fully vet any recommendations given out in this thread with multiple information sources prior to their purchase.
Don't make your purchase decision solely based off what someone in this thread recommends you do. Use multiple information sources!
I should state that I believe RIU to be the best canna forums out there, but that doesn't mean this place is completely free of guerrilla marketing. I haven't read every post on the forum, so there is also a high possibility that I am still missing information which could change my view entirely. Call me paranoid, call me an asshole. I don't care really. What I do care about is accurate information. Every single canna forum out there seems to be infiltrated by LED marketing folks, or people who may be receiving perks to help with marketing. There's also certainly some fanboy-ism going on. Either way, you can't truly trust anything you read on the internet anyways.
Why am I so skeptical about this thread you ask? Well the same 2 or 3 people always seem to chime in (usually within minutes) when asked for an LED recommendation here, and they almost always recommend Area 51 panels. This seems a bit fishy to me--especially since these same people don't seem to have any really good grow journals of their own to back their claims. In fact, I've noticed the same people can also be found throughout the site chumming it up with the owner of A51. I'm not making any accusations, but perhaps there is more going on here...
This thread is jock-full of recommendations that regularly trash LED panels as being "Chinese", when in fact there are almost zero LED panels that are 100% USA-made. Almost everything you buy is made or assembled in China these days. Panels aren't automatically bad just because they are Chinese made, ship from China, or don't have "Top-bin" CREE-brand LEDs anyhow. A lot of this is pure marketing BS directly from LED manufacturers. Performance gains from supposed "Top-bin" LEDS are usually only significant enough to be noticed with some sort of digital measuring device, and will not have a huge impact on your harvest results. To be clear: Some really good stuff can and does come out of China, and USA-made doean't always mean best-made either.
Anyhow I'm disregarding earlier recommendations and am purchasing a Mars II 400 for myself today. I'll be putting it up against the XGS-190 with some measuring equipment and a small grow-off of sorts (they'll unfortunately have to be in the same room together). To me the $200 is totally worth risking to settle this issue, and find out definitively if you can grow good canna with a light at HALF the price of these 'Tesla-quality' lights.
Truth has a way of surfacing eventually.
Peace.
Be easy,
Dr.J