New Grower GPW...What?

[Epic Genetics]

Am I confused or is this math off? 4x4 = 16 so he'd have 16 plants in a 4x4 if he was doing one a square foot, not 12?

my math is definately off cause i didnt notice that

but with me its , 1 + 1 = 11 , 2 + 2 = 22

are ya with me ?

peace

 

[TxOld Dude]

Sounds like that "fuzzy math" (progressive math?) thing again. You know.. The one where if little Johnny thinks that 2+2=5 it's ok cuz we don't want to hurt his feelings.

 

[flat9]

@skatterbrayne
PAR is a unit of efficency, so it matters most. Plants benefit from a higher PAR value; lights with higher PAR consume less watts for putting the right photons on the plant's leaves.
I agree you pay for watts, but the plants and your wallet benefit from a good watt usage.

Were PAR the only thing that mattered, commercial and med indoor growers would be killing it with LEDs, but by and large they still use HPS. Your typical 600 watt HPS has about 220 watts delivered to PAR, whereas an LED has almost all power drawn (save what's used for PC fans for cooling) delivered to PAR. Yet having used both, I'd take a 600 watt bare-bulb HPS over a 300 watt LED any day.

I think the difference is penetration. Typically LEDs aren't quite as efficient at penetrating the canopy, so you have to be on top of the ball with respect to canopy management. Vertically hung bare bulbs seem to be the ticket for results without high maintenance...

 

[Balarama]

I think HPSs beat leds only because of higher led prices per par(for now).
Will be interesting to see what the future will tell about this.

 

[pop22]

ohhhh my head aches!! All this MATH YUUUCK! The only numbers that matter to me is harvest weight and cost to grow on a per month basis. I've seen all these various formulas and it all seems meaningless to me. Maybe there's a formula that would be useful to a commercial grower, I don't know. Me, I want BIG hard nugs, and a liveable electric bill....lol!

:Sharing One:

 

[flat9]

Actually Balarama I take that back after some more thought. Photons are photons.... and it's not like magically photons emitted from LEDs will just disappear whereas they wouldn't for HPS. It's more that the COVERAGE, rather than the penetration, of HPS is much better. In fact the penetration of LEDs is much better.... which is kind of the problem... if you concentrate PAR in one area, you'll penetrate more but cover less.

Hydrogrowled's own graphic on the Penetrator 336x Pro (below) page illustrates this. Cannabis thrives around 1000 umol/(s x m^2) PAR. Well, if you take a closer look, basically it's a 2 x 2 area that achieves this with the 336x whereas it's closer to 3 x 3 for the HPS.

In fact, photosynthesis stops completely beyond 1500 (reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550641/), so that peak in the center of 1600+ is pretty useless anyway. However, nearly the full 4 x 4 footprint gets close to 1000 umol with the HPS.

 

[Balarama]

Spot on.
This makes me think about lenses, spacing between leds and modules to achieve a kind of near to perfect light distribution for a specific set of led emitters.
Would be awesome to have a lab for this kind of research

 

[TxOld Dude]

Flat9

Agreed, it's all about focus and footprint. Photons are not less energetic in one vs. the other. Photons are photons. That's physics. LED is highly directional, hence the listed "degree" of the lens used to construct the LED. HID is reflector dependent for focus. LED gives more photons in a specific area at a specific distance than HID at the same distance/area.

Excellent graphic Bro! Nice research!

 

[pop22]

Were PAR the only thing that mattered, commercial and med indoor growers would be killing it with LEDs, but by and large they still use HPS. Your typical 600 watt HPS has about 220 watts delivered to PAR, whereas an LED has almost all power drawn (save what's used for PC fans for cooling) delivered to PAR. Yet having used both, I'd take a 600 watt bare-bulb HPS over a 300 watt LED any day.

I think the difference is penetration. Typically LEDs aren't quite as efficient at penetrating the canopy, so you have to be on top of the ball with respect to canopy management. Vertically hung bare bulbs seem to be the ticket for results without high maintenance...

If i can find it again I'll post a link that contradicts that idea,ie, vertically hung bulbs are the least efficient wat to use HPS or MH due to the radiation patterns of these light. they are much more effiecient when used with well designed hoods and the bulb in the horizontal position

 

[Balarama]

Photons are not less energetic in one vs. the other. Photons are photons.

In fact photons are different between themselves, they can carry different amount of energy.
The manifestation of those differences are what we percieve as colors. "Blue photons" have more energy than "red photons" and the PAR is a term describing the energies(colors) needed by plants to make photosynthesys. Led lights have better efficency in terms of emission of selected wavelenghts(=colors, energy) than hids.

@pop22
If you find it, please post the link, I'm pretty sceptic about that one. Thanx