LED Question?

Lumens isnt a good baseline to use for the reasons you mentioned.Plants use PAR..a fancy way of saying the part of the light spectrum plants use to grow.Better lights will generally have higher PAR values and less heat due to reduced infrareds etc.

This is were efficiency comes into play,a more efficient light will produce more PAR per watt of electricity you use.

Sorry I cant provide any info.on your new lights.

Think of it this way. PAR is what plants want. They don't really care about lumens. The number that you are looking for is the ppfd. This is the photosynthetic photon flux density. It is the measurement of PAR at the canopy and is measured in micromoles per second per meter squared. This can be a difficult number to find, but its based on your par watts and your nanometers of the light. What you need to do first is figure out the actual wattage draw for your lights, and the efficiency percentage to determine your actual par watts.

You have an entire section dedicated to LEDs and you go and buy this crap. The h 160d was a good light four years ago, which explains the price for which you got them. They will grow weed and do a rather good job there are just way better options out there. Don't expect either one to warranty either light. With that being said a lot of people on here are using old eBay junk lights and turning them into cxb killing machines since you already have the power supplies heat sinks and fans in a nifty case.

For the money you spent you could have got a diy kit from timber and killed it in a 3x3 area.

Those LEDs are scrog only lights they won't be able to penetrate to far into the canopy so your grow style may need to change as well.

As for the heat you want your grow around 82 degrees with led as there is no radiant or uv heat created. Also get some cal mag from General organics or your whole grow is doomed as well. Good luck though next time do your homework and buy quality lights. A lot of the led heads in the led and other lighting section won't even give you any advice if you bring them a thread like this they're only interested in Cree cxb 3590 nothing more fore the time being

Don't necessarily believe leds = more cool

The most efficient leds on the market definitely run cooler than hps of the same wattage.

Efficiency of a light = photons/heat so hps is only around 35% efficient and emits 65% heat, 35 PAR Watts.

With leds its possible to get 65 and even 70 percent efficiency I believe the cxb/a3570 crees are capable of this.

Growmau5 posted a video on YouTube which proves 550w of crees most efficient chips are as efficient as a gavita 1kw. Caveat: these are atleast double the price of the gav 1kw just for DIY parts but worth it in the long run.