I use half the power, easily... I start my LED PCB builds at around 120 watts and slowly raise them over 2 months, ending around 280 or so watts and it out grows my nanolux. That is my experience, that does not make it fact and I realize that. To me, HPS is garbage and anyone growing with them only does so because they don't know any better IMO.
It's simple, there is no question of "do led grow as good as HPS" it's a simple answer of "LED can grow almost 2x as good as HPS because if I used the same watts as HPS I'd literally be able to grow 2x as much as HPS." I can build a LED that is vert tight, uses lenses and really old tech to where the foot print is piss poor and the efficiency of the light is well under what a HPS can do... That being said I can also build a 200lm/w LED with an amazing footprint and use an actual HALF power consumption that of what we see the best HPS use.
Imagine 2 race cars, one uses 10 gallons of gas to finish a lap around a track at top speeds all the way, finishing in 5 min lets say... Then the second race car also runs the same course at the same top speeds and finishes at the same time... but uses 5 gallons of gas. What race car is better?
With growing we can't double our grow in the same space when it's already maximized, 4 pounds in a 4x8 with 2x 1000watt DE's... But if I could grow with half the watts, and do a whole other grow right next to my LED setup with lights being very close to the plants VS very far away like with HPS then that means I can stack grows. Once you stack a grow we see that in the same footprint LED can literally grow 2 times as much as HPS with the same watts, in the same area.
LED are imo 2x as good as HPS, if you have good LED... Oddly I can build the best LED in the world (or in that range) for almost nothing compared to buying crap led's... I can also build my LED's for right around HPS DE's costs but I lose heat issues, AC costs, bulb costs and half my energy costs. Also LED spectrum isn't that great so if you want to compare to quality grown under full spectrum your gonna need to rethink your setup.
A real side by side would be 2k of led VS 2k of HPS, and see what one grows more... LEDs win by almost 2x the volume of bud. Or we can use 1k LED watts vs 500 HPS watts and lolz at HPS for doing piss poor. The problem is we accept that LED is so much better than HPS that we allow LED to run a 50% disadvantage when comparing the 2 lights. Basically, if we raced the 2 cars but limited the gas allowed to just 5... one car would finish and the other would be sitting half way through the course, and that's where HPS is, sitting half way to the finish line.
