Driver Matching Chart

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Effects of Dimming
Dimming your household lights is a common practice. Many indoor growers look at dimming their grow lights as the same thing. But, this could not be further from the truth. Many growers dim their lights to reduce the amount of heat inside the grow room during various stages of plant growth. Dimming HID grow lights can be done but understand this will change the quality of the light coming from the grow lamp.

Below are examples of what happens to a klamp’s spectral distribution when the lamp is dimmed. You can see how the spectrum changes; it shrinks and portions of it may actually disappear. This change in spectral energy will have a negative effect on the quality of your plant growth. We understand the need to dim your grow lights. But understand you can get better quality plant growth from a 600W lamp running at 100% than you can from a 1000W lamp running at 75%.
The effects of dimming on spectrum and grow lamp performance

 

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UV Light
UV light is broken up into three sections. When looking at a HORTILUX grow lamp’s spectral distribution chart, you can see the nanometers (nm) of light below the graph. UV light is on the far left section of the spectral charts. UV consists of three sections within the electromagnetic spectrum.

UVA = 400nm-315nm
UVB = 315nm-280nm
UVC = 280nm-100nm

Natural sunlight produces these three sections of UV. However, UVC is not naturally present on earth because the Earth’s atmosphere blocks the extremely harmful light from reaching the Earth’s surface.

Lighting sources can artificially produce all three types of UV, however the components used to construct the light source, such as glass, will generally block UV emitted from the light. Check the spectral distribution chart on your grow lamps packaging to see if your light is producing any UV.

 

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Kelvin vs Spectrum
Kelvin temperature is the unit of measure used to describe what color a lamp appears to be when it is lighted. Kelvin temperature is a lighting term used to relate the color appearance of a lit lamp to the color appearance of a glowing hot piece of metal. An example is hot steel which glows bright yellow when heated to 1200 degrees Kelvin. A lamp may be called 1200K if it looks like that same shade of yellow when lit.

Kelvin temperature has no relation to light spectrum, light quality or plant growth. It is used only to describe color appearance. The examples below show the spectral distribution charts of two lamps with the same Kelvin temperature but very different spectral outputs. So never purchase a grow lamp based upon its Kelvin temperature, especially if there is no spectral distribution chart to display the quality of the light emitted by the lamp. If you choose a lamp based on its Kelvin temperature alone, you may be depriving your plants of the wavelengths they need to reach their maximum potential. Always choose a grow lamp based on its spectrum, not its color temperature.
Kelvin has no impact on plant growth!

 

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Ultra Violet (UV) light plays a significant role in all aspects of plant growth. Plants, in their natural environments, are exposed to natural sunlight which includes UVA and UVB light. Many of the lights used for indoor plant growth produce very small amounts of UV and some produce none at all.

 

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How to compare row lights
As a refresher, PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) is a region of the electromagnetic spectrum (400 to 700 nm) that promotes photosynthesis. PPF (Photosynthetic Photon Flux) is a critical metric that tells us how much PAR a light-source emits. PPF does not measure PAR at a specific location (e.g. your crop canopy), but it tells you how many photons within the PAR region are coming out of the light-source every second. PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density) measures the amount of photons within the PAR region at a specific location (e.g. the amount of light delivered to your canopy) every second. If you have a PAR meter, it is reporting PPFD (μmol/m2/s) measurements. You must understand the differences in these metrics before you can compare various horticulture lighting systems. Many manufacturers realize this can be a confusing topic, so it is very easy for companies to mislead potential customers with exaggerated marketing claims, misleading information, and by showing a limited set of (or using blatantly wrong) metrics. However, once you understand the differences in these metrics, you will be able to cut through all the ‘marketing’ and ‘hype’ and simply ask manufacturers to provide the data you need to successfully compare lighting fixtures.

In order to explain the correct method for evaluating a horticulture lighting system, let’s first highlight some of the metrics used today that you need to avoid:

RULE NUMBER 1: Don’t use electrical watts to compare grow lights
RULE NUMBER 2: Don’t use lumens to compare grow lights
RULE NUMBER 3: Don’t be fooled by a company that claims to have a magical growth spectrum
RULE NUMBER 4: Don’t just look at a single PPFD measurement directly under the fixture
RULE NUMBER 5: Don’t focus on the wattage of the LEDs used in the fixture (1W, 3W, 5W, etc.)

 

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Rule No. 1: Don’t use electrical watts to compare grow lights

Many people use total electrical watts, dollar/watt or watts/square foot to compare horticulture lighting systems, but these metrics are 100% useless and will most likely lead a consumer to make a poor purchase decision. Why? Simple. Electricity doesn’t grow plants. Furthermore, radiometric efficiency (how much light a fixture emits per watt of electricity) can vary by up to 200% amongst the popular LED fixtures on the market today. Hence, since light (not electricity) grows plants, you need to ask how much light a fixture emits. It sounds simple, but 99.9% of horticulture lighting companies do not advertise this metric. Instead, they focus on electrical watts. Why? Because it is very hard to design an efficient lighting system (measured in μmol/J) that delivers high light levels, but it is very easy to build an inefficient lighting system that consumes a lot of electricity. High efficiency LEDs, power supplies and optics cost more than less efficient components, and many manufacturers use lower quality components to increase profit margins

Remember…You are not buying watts. You are buying a system that delivers light to grow your plants, so a quantitative measurement of light output and the efficiency in which the system produces that light is the critical metric you should use to compare the performance of horticulture lighting solutions.
Rule No. 2: Don’t use lumens to compare grow lights

This one’s easy to explain. A lumen is a rating of how bright a light appears to the human eye. However, since human vision is not correlated to photosynthetic grow rates, total lumens is a dead metric. As a rule, if someone is trying to promote lumens for a horticulture lighting system, they should not be selling horticulture lighting systems.
Rule No. 3: Don’t be fooled by “magical growth spectrums”

Many scientific papers have confirmed that all wavelengths from 400 to 700 nm (the typical PAR range) will grow plants. However, there is a myth that is widely propagated on the Internet that claims plants do not use green light. Many companies promote their magical growth spectrum by publishing the commonly-referenced Chlorophyll A and B absorption spectrum chart. Armed with this chart, they mention that plants are green, so plants reflect green light from the full-spectrum light source. Have you heard this one before? Without going any deeper into this topic, it is important to note that there is no magical spectrum that is going to allow a 50W fixture to replace a 1000W fixture because it only uses the “wavelengths that plants need.” While plants certainly have numerous pigments and photoreceptors across the PAR range, nothing will trump the need for delivering the required levels of light (PPFD) to your plants. Spectrum has a very real effect on plant development, but be cautious of a company that spends too much time talking about their special spectrum (especially if they do not spend equal effort in publishing their delivered PAR measurements). There is a short list of companies who manufacture commercial-grade LED fixtures for the professional horticulture industry, and none of them market the number of LED ‘bands’ in their fixture.
Rule No. 4: Don’t look at a single PPFD measurement

Let’s take a quick look at Rule 4. Unless you are growing a small plant directly under your light, a single PPFD measurement doesn’t tell you much. By clustering the LEDs closely together and using narrow beam optics, it is very easy for a manufacturer to show an extremely high PAR measurement directly under the fixture. However, unless you are only growing one plant in this exact location, you need to know how much PAR is being distributed across the entire canopy. Since most LED lighting systems centralize the LEDs into a small fixture footprint, these systems naturally produce very high PPFD levels directly under the fixture. However, these light levels will drop significantly as you move the PAR sensor just a small distance from the main fixture housing. If you are growing over a 4’ x 4’ area, you need to review the PPFD levels over the entire area to calculate the average light level the lighting system is providing. If you only had a center point measurement you may assume a fixture is extremely powerful. However, you would need multiple measurements across the 4×4 grow area to calculate the average amount of PAR that is provided by the fixture. Light uniformity across the grow area varies greatly from fixture to fixture, and unfortunately, most manufacturers do not publish complete PAR maps. It is easy to produce high PPFD numbers directly under the fixture, but it takes a very powerful and well-designed light to deliver high (and uniform) PPFD values across an entire canopy.
Rule No. 5: Don’t focus on the wattage of the LED’s

Do you use 1W, 3W, 5W or 10W LEDs? We are asked this question on a frequent basis, but the wattage of the LED does not tell you anything meaningful about the lighting system’s performance. Since LED and fixture efficiency varies widely, the wattage of the LED is not a meaningful metric. Remember, the LED wattage is a system input, and growers care about the system output. Hence, the LED wattage doesn’t tell us anything about the system’s ability to deliver light to your plants.

 

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Horticulture Lighting Meyrics
If you have been researching LED horticulture lighting systems for your plant growth facility, you have likely been bombarded with a variety of metrics that lighting manufacturers use to market their products. Some terms and acronyms you are likely to see include: watts, lumens, LUX, foot candles, PAR, PPF, PPFD, and photon efficiency. While all of these terms do relate to lighting, only a select few really tell you the important metrics of a horticulture lighting system. The purpose of this article is to define these terms and acronyms, correct some common misunderstandings, and help growers understand which metrics are applicable to horticulture lighting systems, and which ones are not.
PAR

Figure 1: Photosynthetic light response curves
Humans use Lumens

Plants and people perceive light very differently from one another. Humans and many other animals use something called photopic vision in well-lit conditions to perceive color and light. Lumens are a unit of measurement based on a model of human eye sensitivity in well-lit conditions, which is why the model is called the photopic response curve (Figure 1). As you can see, the photopic response curve is bell shaped and shows how humans are much more sensitive to green light, than blue or red light. LUX, and foot candle meters measure the intensity of light (using lumens) for commercial and residential lighting applications, with the only difference between the two being the unit of area they are measured over (LUX uses lumen/m2 and foot candle uses lumen/ft2).

Using LUX or foot candle meters to measure the light intensity of horticulture lighting systems will give you varying measurements depending on the spectrum of the light source, even if you are measuring the same intensity of PAR.

The fundamental problem with using LUX or foot candle meters when measuring the light intensity of horticulture lighting systems is the underrepresentation of blue (400 – 500 nm) and red (600 – 700 nm) light in the visible spectrum. Humans may not be efficient at perceiving light in these regions, but plants are highly efficient at using red and blue light to drive photosynthesis. This is why lumens, LUX, and foot candles should never be used as metrics for horticulture lighting.


Plants Use PAR

Plants primarily use wavelengths of light within the visible range of 400 to 700 nanometers (nm) to drive photosynthesis (Figure 1), which is why this range is also called photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). PAR is a much used (and often misused) term related to horticulture lighting. PAR is NOT a measurement or “metric” like feet, inches or kilos. Rather, it defines the type of light needed to support photosynthesis. The amount and spectral light quality of PAR light are the important metrics to focus on. (To find out more about spectral light quality click here). Quantum sensors are the primary instrument used to quantify the light intensity of horticulture lighting systems. These sensors work by using an optical filter to create a uniform sensitivity to PAR light (Figure 1), and can be used in combination with a light meter to measure instantaneous light intensity or a data logger to measure cumulative light intensity.

Three important questions you should look to be answered when researching horticulture lighting systems are:

How much PAR the fixture produces (measured as Photosynthetic Photon Flux)?
How much instantaneous PAR from the fixture is available to plants (measured as Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density)?
How much energy is used by the fixture to make PAR available to your plants (measured as Photon Efficiency).

The three key metrics used to answer these questions are:
Photosynthetic Photon Flux (PPF)

PPF measures the total amount of PAR that is produced by a lighting system each second. This measurement is taken using a specialized instrument called an integrating sphere that captures and measures essentially all photons emitted by a lighting system. The unit used to express PPF is micromoles per second (μmol/s). This is probably the second most important way of measuring a horticulture lighting system, but, for whatever reason, 99.9% of lighting companies don’t list this metric. It is important to note that PPF does not tell you how much of the measured light actually lands on the plants, but is an important metric if you want to calculate how efficient a lighting system is at creating PAR.
Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density (PPFD)

PPFD measures the amount of PAR that actually arrives at the plant, or as a scientist might say: “the number of photosynthetically active photons that fall on a given surface each second”. PPFD is a ‘spot’ measurement of a specific location on your plant canopy, and it is measured in micromoles per square meter per second (μmol/m2/s). If you want to find out the true light intensity of a lamp over a designated growing area (e.g. 4’ x 4’), it is important that the average of several PPFD measurements at a defined height are taken. Lighting companies that only publish the PPFD at the center point of a coverage area grossly overestimate the true light intensity of a fixture. A single measurement does not tell you much, since horticulture lights are generally brightest in the center, with light levels decreasing as measurements are taken towards the edges of the coverage area. (Caveat Emptor: Lighting manufacturers can easily manipulate PPFD data. To ensure you are getting actual PPFD values over a defined growing area, the following needs to be published by the manufacturer: measurement distance from light source (vertical and horizontal), number of measurements included in the average, and the min/max ratio). Fluence always publishes the average PPFD over a defined growing area at a recommended mounting height for all of our lighting systems.
Photon Efficiency

Photon Efficiency refers to how efficient a horticulture lighting system is at converting electrical energy into photons of PAR. Many horticulture lighting manufacturers use total electrical watts or watts per square foot as a metric to describe light intensity. However, these metrics really don’t tell you anything since watts are a measurement describing electrical input, not light output. If the PPF of the light is known along with the input wattage, you can calculate how efficient a horticulture lighting system is at converting electrical energy into PAR. As a reminder, the unit for PPF is μmol/s, and the unit to measure watts is Joule per second (J/s), therefore, the seconds in the numerator and denominator cancel out, and the unit becomes µmol/J. The higher this number is, the more efficient a lighting system is at converting electrical energy into photons of PAR.

 

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[Justwannagrow]

 

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My new the three panel chilledled 100w boards for 300w at the wall with a 120h-C1050B and a 185H-C1050B driver two boards wired in series.

 

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A little something new. .

 

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a new 200w board 100w 3500k 100w 5000k

 

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I decided to make another board with 5000k 80cri on one channel and 3000k 80cri on the second channel for a total of 200w

 

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Updates

800w in a 2x8 stacked. Two 200w GrowGreen boards on the bottom two 200w flexible Samsung strips for a total of 800w no heat issues. Plants grow thru the shelving to the next light no problems no burns no wilting from heat from lights just fruit flowers and micro greens

 

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A few shots of the two channel 200w board using a meanwell hlg-185h-c1050b driver low power high output low heat