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HOW TO COMPARE LED GROW LIGHTS?

If you have been researching LED grow lights for your plant growth facility, you have likely been bombarded with a variety of metrics that lighting manufacturers use to market their products: watts, lumens, LUX, PAR, PPF, PPFD. In our opinion, you want to buy a lighting system that delivers the required amount of light to your plants. In order to explain the correct method for evaluating a horticulture lighting system, let’s first highlight two of the metrics used today that you need to avoid:

RULE 1: DON'T FOCUS ON THE WATTAGE OF THE LED'S. Do you use 5W, 10W, or 15W LEDs? We are asked this question on a frequent basis, but the wattage of the LED use in light does not tell you anything meaningful about the lighting system's performance since LED and fixture efficiency varies widely. Remember, the LED wattage is a system input, and growers care about the system output--PAR Output. Hence, the lighting system using 10W or 15W LED wattage doesn't deliver more light to your plants than lighting system using 5W LED wattage.

RULE 2: DON'T LOOK AT A SINGLE PPFD MEASUREMENT. 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.

Three important questions you should look to be answered when researching LED grow lights are:

Question 1: How much instantaneous PAR from the fixture is available to plants (measured as PPFD)? Question 2: How much PAR is being distributed across the entire canopy? Question 3: How much wattage is used by the fixture to make PAR available to your plants?