QB 260w vs Mars Hydro SP 250: What would you get?

[Highbrixbotany2018]

Knowledge. I agree 100% with most of this. Except Large farms buy lights in bulk cost per watt vs performance slides toward money always. And nothing needs weird high tech lights like cannabis. So who buys the lights doesn’t matter to Me. If your a cannabis business with 10,000 square feet and use xyz whomever still means little. Cause I’m in a 7ft tall sealed room. I need customized to optimize. QB seem to cost less/least assembly. I have bridglux strips cheaper than Samsung. I do have cree far reds for EOD. They are great. All
Comapanies you mentioned are good. It’s really ppfd. Can your light hit big numbers. If a cheaper light can cover your grow tent with what you need your fine. It’s all details after that. I will say led grows way more than hps. I say this because of how much more cal mag your plants use.

Several companies bring something to the table. Samsung manufactures good components. Mars-Hydro offers economy-class pricing with (much) better than economy-class performance. Signify's tunable (power and frequency/spectrum) looks interesting, and is highly thought of by those who are using their new products - including a produce farm in Japan that, while it isn't growing cannabis, is set up to produce up to 3,200 kilograms (7,055 pounds) per day, so one assumes that the people in the purchasing department are making good choices, lol. And over 1,000 companies are paying Signify for the right to use some of its technology. Lumileds has had some decent horticultural lighting LEDs since 2016 and the company isn't resting on its laurels; the company also has the "math" to help others design (+/-) custom horticultural products using its components.

MaxLite offers eight products that have been tested and qualified to be on the DLC's (DesignLights Consortium's) Horticultural Qualified Products List - and those were the first eight products to make it to the list, so kudos to MaxLite. (Why is that list a significant thing? Contributors to the DLC horticultural specification included 20 lighting manufacturers, researchers from the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, researchers at the Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a multi-university consortium led by Cornell University called Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering (GLASE), the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), and the chief technology officer of vertical-farm specialist AeroFarms.)

Cree's XP-E2 stuff looks to be a winner in far-red and photo-red. This brand also has other positives. On the other hand, Ideal Industries, Inc. recently bought Cree Lighting and, as with any change in ownership, this one could ultimately turn out to be either a good thing or a bad thing. Speaking of bad things, Osram isn't... well, I sure wouldn't recommend that anyone acquire a lot of Osram stock this year, lol. Maybe next year - or maybe not. Anyway, the Cree monochromatic red LEDs are a big hit with companies like Plessey Semiconductors - which is, itself, an LED manufacturer, but one that doesn't make monochromatic red LEDs. Plessey Semiconductors' products are found in many large-scale commercial indoor gardens throughout Europe.

Lots of major players in the industry, and most of them contribute something. I saw a recent market research report that ranked the top ten packaged LED suppliers. These are some of the companies that make the LEDs in our LED products, and even a small market share is big business - the overall industry is now exceeding $16,000,000,000US (16 billion dollars!) annually. Here's the list:
1. Nichia – Japan, 14%
2. Osram Opto – Germany, 11% (I know, lol - why isn't Osram showing a tidy profit? )
3. Lumileds – US, 9%
4. Seoul Semiconductor – South Korea, 6%
5. Samsung – South Korea, 6%
6. Mulinsen (MLS) – China, 5%
7. LG Innotek – South Korea, 5%
8. Cree – US, 4%
9. Everlight – China, 3%
10. Lumens – South Korea, 3%

Fawk, now I forgot the point I was trying to make... Ohwaitaminute, lol, this: Samsung gets a lot of publicity on the cannabis forums, and it obviously manufactures good components. But it's not the only company that does. . . .

 

[Highbrixbotany2018]

And as far as cost you can do a strip
Build without controlling intensity for a 3x3 $100. It’s basic but
Grows great. That would be close in
Any of
Those
Companies strips
Just pick the cheapest and add the driver.

Several companies bring something to the table. Samsung manufactures good components. Mars-Hydro offers economy-class pricing with (much) better than economy-class performance. Signify's tunable (power and frequency/spectrum) looks interesting, and is highly thought of by those who are using their new products - including a produce farm in Japan that, while it isn't growing cannabis, is set up to produce up to 3,200 kilograms (7,055 pounds) per day, so one assumes that the people in the purchasing department are making good choices, lol. And over 1,000 companies are paying Signify for the right to use some of its technology. Lumileds has had some decent horticultural lighting LEDs since 2016 and the company isn't resting on its laurels; the company also has the "math" to help others design (+/-) custom horticultural products using its components.

MaxLite offers eight products that have been tested and qualified to be on the DLC's (DesignLights Consortium's) Horticultural Qualified Products List - and those were the first eight products to make it to the list, so kudos to MaxLite. (Why is that list a significant thing? Contributors to the DLC horticultural specification included 20 lighting manufacturers, researchers from the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, researchers at the Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a multi-university consortium led by Cornell University called Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering (GLASE), the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), and the chief technology officer of vertical-farm specialist AeroFarms.)

Cree's XP-E2 stuff looks to be a winner in far-red and photo-red. This brand also has other positives. On the other hand, Ideal Industries, Inc. recently bought Cree Lighting and, as with any change in ownership, this one could ultimately turn out to be either a good thing or a bad thing. Speaking of bad things, Osram isn't... well, I sure wouldn't recommend that anyone acquire a lot of Osram stock this year, lol. Maybe next year - or maybe not. Anyway, the Cree monochromatic red LEDs are a big hit with companies like Plessey Semiconductors - which is, itself, an LED manufacturer, but one that doesn't make monochromatic red LEDs. Plessey Semiconductors' products are found in many large-scale commercial indoor gardens throughout Europe.

Lots of major players in the industry, and most of them contribute something. I saw a recent market research report that ranked the top ten packaged LED suppliers. These are some of the companies that make the LEDs in our LED products, and even a small market share is big business - the overall industry is now exceeding $16,000,000,000US (16 billion dollars!) annually. Here's the list:

1. Nichia – Japan, 14%
2. Osram Opto – Germany, 11% (I know, lol - why isn't Osram showing a tidy profit? )
3. Lumileds – US, 9%
4. Seoul Semiconductor – South Korea, 6% (Finally managed to get Mouser Electronics to stop selling products (from Everlight LED) that infringed Seoul Semiconductor's IP and, therefore, dropped its lawsuit.)
5. Samsung – South Korea, 6%
6. Mulinsen (MLS) – China, 5%
7. LG Innotek – South Korea, 5%
8. Cree – US, 4% (Sold to Ideal Lighting, Inc.)
9. Everlight – China, 3% (Apparently likes to use other companies' technology without paying for doing so .)
10. Lumens – South Korea, 3%

Fawk, now I forgot the point I was trying to make... Ohwaitaminute, lol, this: Samsung gets a lot of publicity on the cannabis forums, and it obviously manufactures good components. But it's not the only company that does. . . .

 

[TorturedSoul]

Knowledge. I agree 100% with most of this. Except Large farms buy lights in bulk cost per watt vs performance slides toward money always.

That's a pretty simplistic view, IMHO. Businesses will absolutely pay more for a product that produces more IF the resulting increase in profit is more than enough to cover the increase in expenses. They are very familiar with the concept of amortization (at least any successful business is), because that's Economics 101. These aren't hobby farms, and they're certainly not "growing for personal use," they're large-scale businesses.

Companies that follow a strategy of penny-pinching (when it comes to equipment choice) often don't stay in business very long. Minimizing wastage and refusing to spend more on equipment that doesn't perform any better and/or have a longer working lifetime whilst providing the same level of performance, that's good business sense. Refusing to spend (a reasonable amount) more on products that are capable of doing one or both of those things? That's insane.

That Japanese produce farm I mentioned is Prime Delica, and it is NOT a shoestring budget operation. They've automated the entire process from seedling to harvest; robots carry out logistical operations, lol. Therefore, when I read that they conducted research with Tamagawa University, CCS and Signify to determine the optimal light recipe to increase vitamin levels, nutritional value, et cetera... I knew that they spent the money to do actual research instead of merely reading the same old articles, .PDFs, and forum posts that all seem to reference (if they even post sources in the first place) old research that could best be characterized by calling it "preliminary research only," like many businesses do. And that includes a lot of the businesses that manufacture and sell grow light products to the end-user (IOW, us).

And nothing needs weird high tech lights like cannabis.

LOLWAT? Is this the same cannabis that people were growing way back in the mid-'80s (and probably before then, but I would have been a little young to be paying attention ) with old-school fluorescent tube lighting? Or do you have some kind of mutant strain in your pocket that evolved on a planet that circles a red dwarf instead of our own sun?

Tube-type fluorescent bulbs of various lengths, diameters, and wattages. PL-L type fluorescent bulbs. CFL bulbs. Electrodeless fluorescent bulbs. Metal halide bulbs. High pressure sodium bulbs. Sulfur plasma lighting technology (for when your microwave oven breaks and you're looking for something else to power with the salvaged magnetron, LMAO). And about a bazillion different types/styles of LED lighting. I don't know whether you are old enough to remember the ha ha ha (sorry, I cannot even type it without laughing) Phototron, but even the sh!tty little U-shaped fluorescent tubes in that thing °were capable of producing bud, sort of.

Yep, cannabis needs weird high tech lights .

So who buys the lights doesn’t matter to Me.

Well, maybe it should.

Cause I’m in a 7ft tall sealed room. I need customized to optimize. QB seem to cost less/least assembly. I have bridglux strips cheaper than Samsung. I do have cree far reds for EOD. They are great.

One question: Did you just wake up one day knowing nothing about any of this stuff and just randomly pick your components? Or did you maybe get some help by reading about how these things perform for others? Because you stated:

So who buys the lights doesn’t matter to Me.

It’s really ppfd. Can your light hit big numbers.

Sure. But there's more to it than that. Personally, I don't have the budget to buy every product (and component) on the market and test them all, then several million more dollars to pay these companies to create custom stuff and do the research on those. Therefore, it's probably not a bad idea for me to occasionally pay attention to more than just my own grow. It doesn't cost me a penny to spend a few minutes once in a while reading industry publications like LEDs Magazine. And I'm just some clown that gets curious now and then. If I was getting ready to spend money on upgrading my lighting, I'd undoubtedly be reading a lot more.

I'd also be reading grow journal threads and reports/advice from people like yourself, of course. Finding value in the one does not mean I find no value in the other. Knowledge is a pretty "agnostic" thing, after all.

If a cheaper light can cover your grow tent with what you need your fine. It’s all details after that. I will say led grows way more than hps. I say this because of how much more cal mag your plants use.

I think that there's a potential for LED lighting to produce more (per unit of energy used) than HID lighting. But I do not believe that there is a clear winner at this point in time. Heath Robinson was routinely nailing 1.8 gram per watt harvests with HID lighting back in 2009/2010, and some of them looked like this:

He was doing this by-- well, that cat's got talent, lol. But he also was smart enough to figure out how to take advantage of the lighting, to tailor the setup, and to make sure every part of it was matched, so to speak. If I'm not mistaken, he later posted grow threads that ended up producing well over 2.0 grams per watt - years ago - with HIDs.

These weren't warehouse-sized grows. They were larger than I could ever support (poor electrical infrastructure in my home and, well, I'm poor in general ). But they were no larger than some of the grows I've seen posted as grow journal threads. They were also, each of them, works of art (IMHO).

His methods simply wouldn't work with LED lighting. LEDs only produce their output in one general direction, not 360°. And some of the setups that people who use LED lighting have, ones that work very well for them... wouldn't translate well to gardens illuminated by HID lighting. Therefore, it's not possible to do a direct comparison between the two types of lighting by using the same garden setup for each. We'd automatically be handicapping one or the other. I would like to one day see some kind of comparison that showed "the best" that both HID and LED technology was capable of, in terms of cannabis production per watt per day. Oh, and that reminds me, Heath's setups, while being different than the average cannabis grower's, weren't any kind of big secret (he was very open and happy to help others learn), nor did he use any special hard to source (or unusually expensive) equipment. I think that should be a requirement when doing comparisons, otherwise they're going to be of limited use to the average cannabis forum member.

[EDIT: I wish Heath was still active on a cannabis forum somewhere. But he seemed to go "ultra low key" when he got married. When that happened, we lost an excellent teacher.]

BtW: calcium and magnesium are separate elements (which I assume you know). Were you initially seeing deficiencies of both Ca and Mg, or just one and are giving more of both because they often come together in the same bottle? I wonder about this (not specifically in regards to your plants, but in general I mean) because there's an optimum ratio between the two elements, which means that if a plant is only deficient in one of them and the gardener uses a combined supplement, he/she is then not only addressing the deficiency, but also possibly (probably) altering that ratio.

I have not been able to ascertain whether, in situations - where LED lighting is used - where the plants end up needing more, just what exactly is causing the issue, whether it's in fact a case of needing increased levels of both, whether that optimum ratio itself changes with a change to the lighting, et cetera. Which is meat for a completely different thread, of course, but I did want to take a minute to ask your opinions on what you have personally experienced with your plants and your LED lights. And don't worry, lol, I'm not trying to start a(nother?) debate, just looking to add to my knowledge/data so that perhaps one day I'll have a pretty good idea of what's behind it (and of exactly what "it" is).

 

[Highbrixbotany2018]

You make several good points. There are unfortunately companies that budget on austerity and aren’t growers or lighting experts. Not so much simplistic as generalized that a lot of businesses are run by idiots. Businessmen with no knowledge of the product. CO has so many huge companies that have 1 or More parts of the grow ass backwards. Drying and lighting being number I would say almost anything Japanese would be optimized. Optimized isn’t required to be successful in capitolist America. Brand your product well and few notice you sell crap. That being said I do agree with you if you spend on hid and use it with knowledge it’s great. But most compare $the cheapest hid against led. So I agree if you follow lighting science and use hid you would compete or beat led. As an old grower your reference to the 80s is funny. Home grown used to be shit. It took awhile before the average person(remember no internet bac then) that cfl need lots and lots of watts (same watts as hid) to work. Home grown larf was still better than brown brick butt not by much. Hps with supplemental lights MH bulb also on for full spectrum and CO2 and apples to apples comparison would be nice. I like the that idea. Ledgradeners website does that. Most hid guys I know are too cheap to be equal to my leds. A $50 batwing and a used hps bulb can’t beat led. But will grow great cannabis. I just have found leds lack of heat and IR and custamizability to be easier to grow than hps. My grandma bought me my first 400 watt set up in 10th grade. My first hydro unit was garden plants. And the heat oh the heat. I bought blurples as soon as they were out. Cfls weren’t cheap. It was walls and ceiling tubes. Still didn’t beat hps back then. The pigtail cfl bulbs weren’t around back then. Again love the knowledge bombs. Fed not a debate. I would agree imho led is better. But that isn’t apples to apples. Since I have yet( in my 25 years as a botanist) never seen someone push the hps tech envelope. I am generalizing to my experience with grower commercial, greenhouse, indoor and all. Few do much with the lights. You can adjust hps now. It was 2004 I think before it was understood really well about the different spectrums opening and closing(lock and key theory) so science of today cant be used retrospectively comparing led to hps. 2019 led tech vs 2019 hid would be close sure. You’d have to build sealed rooms to optimize both systems. Like f1 racing they wouldn’t be the same room. But the harvest would be compared of the same clones vs money spent upfront and electrical
Cost and ease of use. That’s a comparison. I would love that. Your cap
Mag question Ian spot on. I should have been more specific. With mag def I foliar spray Epsom salt. But did calmag a lot due to the need of the ratio of them. It’s one of many reasons I switched to docbudshighbrix “thekit” the ratio is perfect and maintained throughout the grow. Please keep responding not as a debate but I learn from discussing my opinion with yours. Thank you for this. You know a lot.

That's a pretty simplistic view, IMHO. Businesses will absolutely pay more for a product that produces more IF the resulting increase in profit is more than enough to cover the increase in expenses. They are very familiar with the concept of amortization (at least any successful business is), because that's Economics 101. These aren't hobby farms, and they're certainly not "growing for personal use," they're large-scale businesses.

Companies that follow a strategy of penny-pinching (when it comes to equipment choice) often don't stay in business very long. Minimizing wastage and refusing to spend more on equipment that doesn't perform any better and/or have a longer working lifetime whilst providing the same level of performance, that's good business sense. Refusing to spend (a reasonable amount) more on products that are capable of doing one or both of those things? That's insane.

That Japanese produce farm I mentioned is Prime Delica, and it is NOT a shoestring budget operation. They've automated the entire process from seedling to harvest; robots carry out logistical operations, lol. Therefore, when I read that they conducted research with Tamagawa University, CCS and Signify to determine the optimal light recipe to increase vitamin levels, nutritional value, et cetera... I knew that they spent the money to do actual research instead of merely reading the same old articles, .PDFs, and forum posts that all seem to reference (if they even post sources in the first place) old research that could best be characterized by calling it "preliminary research only," like many businesses do. And that includes a lot of the businesses that manufacture and sell grow light products to the end-user (IOW, us).



LOLWAT? Is this the same cannabis that people were growing way back in the mid-'80s (and probably before then, but I would have been a little young to be paying attention ) with old-school fluorescent tube lighting? Or do you have some kind of mutant strain in your pocket that evolved on a planet that circles a red dwarf instead of our own sun?

Tube-type fluorescent bulbs of various lengths, diameters, and wattages. PL-L type fluorescent bulbs. CFL bulbs. Electrodeless fluorescent bulbs. Metal halide bulbs. High pressure sodium bulbs. Sulfur plasma lighting technology (for when your microwave oven breaks and you're looking for something else to power with the salvaged magnetron, LMAO). And about a bazillion different types/styles of LED lighting. I don't know whether you are old enough to remember the ha ha ha (sorry, I cannot even type it without laughing) Phototron, but even the sh!tty little U-shaped fluorescent tubes in that thing °were capable of producing bud, sort of.

Yep, cannabis needs weird high tech lights .



Well, maybe it should.



One question: Did you just wake up one day knowing nothing about any of this stuff and just randomly pick your components? Or did you maybe get some help by reading about how these things perform for others? Because you stated:





Sure. But there's more to it than that. Personally, I don't have the budget to buy every product (and component) on the market and test them all, then several million more dollars to pay these companies to create custom stuff and do the research on those. Therefore, it's probably not a bad idea for me to occasionally pay attention to more than just my own grow. It doesn't cost me a penny to spend a few minutes once in a while reading industry publications like LEDs Magazine. And I'm just some clown that gets curious now and then. If I was getting ready to spend money on upgrading my lighting, I'd undoubtedly be reading a lot more.

I'd also be reading grow journal threads and reports/advice from people like yourself, of course. Finding value in the one does not mean I find no value in the other. Knowledge is a pretty "agnostic" thing, after all.



I think that there's a potential for LED lighting to produce more (per unit of energy used) than HID lighting. But I do not believe that there is a clear winner at this point in time. Heath Robinson was routinely nailing 1.8 gram per watt harvests with HID lighting back in 2009/2010, and some of them looked like this:

He was doing this by-- well, that cat's got talent, lol. But he also was smart enough to figure out how to take advantage of the lighting, to tailor the setup, and to make sure every part of it was matched, so to speak. If I'm not mistaken, he later posted grow threads that ended up producing well over 2.0 grams per watt - years ago - with HIDs.

These weren't warehouse-sized grows. They were larger than I could ever support (poor electrical infrastructure in my home and, well, I'm poor in general ). But they were no larger than some of the grows I've seen posted as grow journal threads. They were also, each of them, works of art (IMHO).

His methods simply wouldn't work with LED lighting. LEDs only produce their output in one general direction, not 360°. And some of the setups that people who use LED lighting have, ones that work very well for them... wouldn't translate well to gardens illuminated by HID lighting. Therefore, it's not possible to do a direct comparison between the two types of lighting by using the same garden setup for each. We'd automatically be handicapping one or the other. I would like to one day see some kind of comparison that showed "the best" that both HID and LED technology was capable of, in terms of cannabis production per watt per day. Oh, and that reminds me, Heath's setups, while being different than the average cannabis grower's, weren't any kind of big secret (he was very open and happy to help others learn), nor did he use any special hard to source (or unusually expensive) equipment. I think that should be a requirement when doing comparisons, otherwise they're going to be of limited use to the average cannabis forum member.

[EDIT: I wish Heath was still active on a cannabis forum somewhere. But he seemed to go "ultra low key" when he got married. When that happened, we lost an excellent teacher.]

BtW: calcium and magnesium are separate elements (which I assume you know). Were you initially seeing deficiencies of both Ca and Mg, or just one and are giving more of both because they often come together in the same bottle? I wonder about this (not specifically in regards to your plants, but in general I mean) because there's an optimum ratio between the two elements, which means that if a plant is only deficient in one of them and the gardener uses a combined supplement, he/she is then not only addressing the deficiency, but also possibly (probably) altering that ratio.

I have not been able to ascertain whether, in situations - where LED lighting is used - where the plants end up needing more, just what exactly is causing the issue, whether it's in fact a case of needing increased levels of both, whether that optimum ratio itself changes with a change to the lighting, et cetera. Which is meat for a completely different thread, of course, but I did want to take a minute to ask your opinions on what you have personally experienced with your plants and your LED lights. And don't worry, lol, I'm not trying to start a(nother?) debate, just looking to add to my knowledge/data so that perhaps one day I'll have a pretty good idea of what's behind it (and of exactly what "it" is).

 

[BobbyZ]

That's a pretty simplistic view, IMHO. Businesses will absolutely pay more for a product that produces more IF the resulting increase in profit is more than enough to cover the increase in expenses. They are very familiar with the concept of amortization (at least any successful business is), because that's Economics 101. These aren't hobby farms, and they're certainly not "growing for personal use," they're large-scale businesses.

Companies that follow a strategy of penny-pinching (when it comes to equipment choice) often don't stay in business very long. Minimizing wastage and refusing to spend more on equipment that doesn't perform any better and/or have a longer working lifetime whilst providing the same level of performance, that's good business sense. Refusing to spend (a reasonable amount) more on products that are capable of doing one or both of those things? That's insane.

That Japanese produce farm I mentioned is Prime Delica, and it is NOT a shoestring budget operation. They've automated the entire process from seedling to harvest; robots carry out logistical operations, lol. Therefore, when I read that they conducted research with Tamagawa University, CCS and Signify to determine the optimal light recipe to increase vitamin levels, nutritional value, et cetera... I knew that they spent the money to do actual research instead of merely reading the same old articles, .PDFs, and forum posts that all seem to reference (if they even post sources in the first place) old research that could best be characterized by calling it "preliminary research only," like many businesses do. And that includes a lot of the businesses that manufacture and sell grow light products to the end-user (IOW, us).



LOLWAT? Is this the same cannabis that people were growing way back in the mid-'80s (and probably before then, but I would have been a little young to be paying attention ) with old-school fluorescent tube lighting? Or do you have some kind of mutant strain in your pocket that evolved on a planet that circles a red dwarf instead of our own sun?

Tube-type fluorescent bulbs of various lengths, diameters, and wattages. PL-L type fluorescent bulbs. CFL bulbs. Electrodeless fluorescent bulbs. Metal halide bulbs. High pressure sodium bulbs. Sulfur plasma lighting technology (for when your microwave oven breaks and you're looking for something else to power with the salvaged magnetron, LMAO). And about a bazillion different types/styles of LED lighting. I don't know whether you are old enough to remember the ha ha ha (sorry, I cannot even type it without laughing) Phototron, but even the sh!tty little U-shaped fluorescent tubes in that thing °were capable of producing bud, sort of.

Yep, cannabis needs weird high tech lights .



Well, maybe it should.



One question: Did you just wake up one day knowing nothing about any of this stuff and just randomly pick your components? Or did you maybe get some help by reading about how these things perform for others? Because you stated:





Sure. But there's more to it than that. Personally, I don't have the budget to buy every product (and component) on the market and test them all, then several million more dollars to pay these companies to create custom stuff and do the research on those. Therefore, it's probably not a bad idea for me to occasionally pay attention to more than just my own grow. It doesn't cost me a penny to spend a few minutes once in a while reading industry publications like LEDs Magazine. And I'm just some clown that gets curious now and then. If I was getting ready to spend money on upgrading my lighting, I'd undoubtedly be reading a lot more.

I'd also be reading grow journal threads and reports/advice from people like yourself, of course. Finding value in the one does not mean I find no value in the other. Knowledge is a pretty "agnostic" thing, after all.



I think that there's a potential for LED lighting to produce more (per unit of energy used) than HID lighting. But I do not believe that there is a clear winner at this point in time. Heath Robinson was routinely nailing 1.8 gram per watt harvests with HID lighting back in 2009/2010, and some of them looked like this:

He was doing this by-- well, that cat's got talent, lol. But he also was smart enough to figure out how to take advantage of the lighting, to tailor the setup, and to make sure every part of it was matched, so to speak. If I'm not mistaken, he later posted grow threads that ended up producing well over 2.0 grams per watt - years ago - with HIDs.

These weren't warehouse-sized grows. They were larger than I could ever support (poor electrical infrastructure in my home and, well, I'm poor in general ). But they were no larger than some of the grows I've seen posted as grow journal threads. They were also, each of them, works of art (IMHO).

His methods simply wouldn't work with LED lighting. LEDs only produce their output in one general direction, not 360°. And some of the setups that people who use LED lighting have, ones that work very well for them... wouldn't translate well to gardens illuminated by HID lighting. Therefore, it's not possible to do a direct comparison between the two types of lighting by using the same garden setup for each. We'd automatically be handicapping one or the other. I would like to one day see some kind of comparison that showed "the best" that both HID and LED technology was capable of, in terms of cannabis production per watt per day. Oh, and that reminds me, Heath's setups, while being different than the average cannabis grower's, weren't any kind of big secret (he was very open and happy to help others learn), nor did he use any special hard to source (or unusually expensive) equipment. I think that should be a requirement when doing comparisons, otherwise they're going to be of limited use to the average cannabis forum member.

[EDIT: I wish Heath was still active on a cannabis forum somewhere. But he seemed to go "ultra low key" when he got married. When that happened, we lost an excellent teacher.]

BtW: calcium and magnesium are separate elements (which I assume you know). Were you initially seeing deficiencies of both Ca and Mg, or just one and are giving more of both because they often come together in the same bottle? I wonder about this (not specifically in regards to your plants, but in general I mean) because there's an optimum ratio between the two elements, which means that if a plant is only deficient in one of them and the gardener uses a combined supplement, he/she is then not only addressing the deficiency, but also possibly (probably) altering that ratio.

I have not been able to ascertain whether, in situations - where LED lighting is used - where the plants end up needing more, just what exactly is causing the issue, whether it's in fact a case of needing increased levels of both, whether that optimum ratio itself changes with a change to the lighting, et cetera. Which is meat for a completely different thread, of course, but I did want to take a minute to ask your opinions on what you have personally experienced with your plants and your LED lights. And don't worry, lol, I'm not trying to start a(nother?) debate, just looking to add to my knowledge/data so that perhaps one day I'll have a pretty good idea of what's behind it (and of exactly what "it" is).

That bud! Where can I see more pictures of this tree bud?

 

[Metal Halide]

Can't believe it. Was lucky enough to get a second hand but unused Fully assembled Hlg 120h led Quantum Board Samsung 301b+ 660nm Red Diodes Grow Light & Dimmer for the equivalent of $150 USD cause the person ordered too many
I just snapped it up even though i can't afford it. Not fussed, should be fine in a couple weeks. Should help a lot with my current setup. Probs get a TSL 2000 next month aswell and test it out

 

[BobbyZ]

Can't believe it. Was lucky enough to get a second hand but unused Fully assembled Hlg 120h led Quantum Board Samsung 301b+ 660nm Red Diodes Grow Light & Dimmer for the equivalent of $150 USD cause the person ordered too many
I just snapped it up even though i can't afford it. Not fussed, should be fine in a couple weeks. Should help a lot with my current setup. Probs get a TSL 2000 next month aswell and test it out

I'll take it off your hands so you can make room for the mars light.
Nice score.

 

[Knifemaker420]

I went with the sp250 and have no regrets at all. This light is killing it in my 2x4x7 tent.

 

[Metal Halide]

I'll take it off your hands so you can make room for the mars light.
Nice score.

but then you would deprive one of the C99xBBxF of a new light. We can't have that now, can we?

 

[TorturedSoul]

That bud! Where can I see more pictures of this tree bud?

I think it came from this thread:

Heath's Latest Tree Grow

Hello 420mag and welcome to my latest tree grow, the plant is my own Chiesel = Sour Diesel x UK Cheese clone, grown from seed. The system is recirculating hydroponics I hope you like, if anyone has any questions, fire away...

www.420magazine.com

...if not, try browsing/searching Heath's images.