Thanks to everyone for the kind words
@grotbags love your spectrum mate!
Totally agree. But I think that gets complicated as well because in my experience plants that finish early don't yield as much as those that go a couple weeks longers. So I wonder if you avg'd your yield/week spent or per kwhr how different a 7 week finish would be vs a 10 week finish.
also can you really make a plant finish 3 weeks later or earlier with just spectrum? Very curious about this.
I can answer this. From very early on we discovered that adding far red light accelerated flowering and increased yields. In most cases we saw flowering times reduced by about 10% with the same yield, and in some cases we saw the same reduction in flowering times with a slight increase in yields.
@Prawn Connery was the first to notice this with HLG's old QB304 boards that used Nichia CRI90 LEDs that have more red and far red than typical Samsung CRI80s. He based his first High Light design on this knowledge and observations of local growers yielded the same results. Then came the
@Or_Gro trials and he saw the same thing: a 77-day sativa strain finished in 70 days under the original High Lights and yielded the same as the other side-by-side test grows that lacked the same amount of far red.
We took this knowledge a step further by increasing the amount of far red light in the High Light 420 boards from 5% (original High Lights) to over 9% (420 boards). Flowering times reduced again by a smaller amount and yields remained the same. In one case a local grower reported not only 5 days faster finishing of his 56-day strain, but he yielded the best he ever has under the new 420 boards – 58oz in a 4.5' x 4.5' tent under 900W. That is over 1.8gpw which is outstanding!
I don't want to hype our products any more than I already have but working with
@Prawn Connery and LED Teknik we believe far red is the key to faster flowering times and better yields with the important point that you also need to balance far red with violet and UVA to prevent excessive stretch.
Typical 3000K CRI80 LEDs have a Red:Far Red ratio of almost 10:1.
The original High Light UV boards have a R:FR ratio of 6.8:1
The High Light 420 boards have a R:FR ratio of 4.2:1
Sunlight has an average R:FR ratio of 1.3:1.
We can all decide for ourselves what this means, but it is clear that horticultural LEDs have a long way to go to equalling the typical sunlight spectrum when it comes to far red.
