LED Lights

I am curious if anyone has any personal experience with growing under LED lights. I have a high times magazine that advertises for these LED lights the only use 300 watts yet produce the same amount of lumens as a 1000 watt light. They are pretty expensive and am considering investing in them if what they say is true.

LEDs are not ready yet. I do not have personal experience but I have seen some very good videos on Utube.

I've no experience with LEDs myself, but I plan on doing that later so I do a lot of reading.

One thing a lot of LED growers have mentioned is that ya need a pretty much equal wattage of LEDs to have a comparable grow using HIDs, and that's only with the current generation, more efficient super powerfull LEDs. Don't trust the 300w LED = 1000w HID claims. And stay away from any cheap setup with lots of 5mm leds. You want those big fat LEDs on mini-boards.

From my second hand knowledge, the only real advantage of LEDs is: 1) the awesomeness factor. 2) less heat, though still plenty of it. 3) Long life-span (think 10 years)

I will suggest getting the leds just for vegging and cloning. Nothing beats an agrosun 1kw metal halide with a lumatek balast for flowering. Ya if your looking to pay bills with this hobby stay away from the leds for flowering.

I have little led experience with a full grow, worked all right.

I recommend 80 watts a foot, which is not really possible considering any sort of measure of cost effectiveness.

LEDs + fluoros = some of best quality bud you'll ever smoke.

The question you ask... in terms of lumens? No, not at all. Unless it uses white LEDs... lumens aren't significant(and are just misleading). Most LED panels are red and blue. Which, compared to green appear darker to humans. So they don't score high in lumens(which is light in terms of human vision, not photosynthetic radiation).

In laboratories they've done over 150 LM/w(white LEDs) with LEDs(and are approaching 200, which LPS lamps top out at), either of which surpasses HPS. But lumen output isn't everything, or else we'd all be growing with low pressure sodium, and yes, they'll very likely support plant growth... but not very well.

Look into the Procyon, I've heard good things from those who've used them.

LED has come a looong way. Here is one with 1000 lumens... the last paragraph caught my eye.. What if they just don't have the right parts of the spectrum for our purposes??

Here is the article:

Powerful Little Light: LED With 1,000 Lumens

March 15th, 2007

Osram has developed a small light-emitting diode spotlight that achieves an output of more than 1,000 lumens for the first time. That’s brighter than a 50-watt halogen lamp, thereby making the device suitable for a broad range of general lighting applications. The Ostar Lighting LED, which will be launched on the market this summer, can provide sufficient light for a desk from a height of two meters, for example. Its small size also enables the creation of completely new lamp shapes. Source: Siemens
Osram has developed a small light-emitting diode spotlight that achieves an output of more than 1,000 lumens for the first time. That’s brighter than a 50-watt halogen lamp, thereby making the device suitable for a broad range of general lighting applications.
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The Ostar Lighting LED, which will be launched on the market this summer, can provide sufficient light for a desk from a height of two meters, for example. Its small size also enables the creation of completely new lamp shapes.
A lumen (lm) is the unit of measurement for the amount of light emitted by a light source. A 60-watt light bulb emits 730 lm, while a 50-watt halogen lamp has an output of approximately 900 lm. To achieve the 1,000 lm output for the tiny Ostar Lighting LED, the experts at Siemens’ Osram subsidiary employed a sophisticated system for high chip-packing density, whereby the researchers managed to integrate six high-performance LED lighting chips into the unit’s small housing. Each chip has an area of only one square millimeter, which makes for very concentrated overall luminosity.
Different types of LEDs are used today in various areas, for example as background lighting in cell phone displays, as well as in car turn-signal lights, brake lights, and daytime running lights. The benefits are obvious: The diodes are extremely small and consume little energy because they efficiently convert electricity into light. The Ostar Lighting LED, for example, produces 75 lumens per watt at 350 milli-amperes of operating current — much more than an incandescent lamp, which only converts a fraction of the electricity supplied into light, with the rest lost as heat energy. In addition, LEDs contain no lead or mercury, which makes them very environmentally friendly. They also last around ten times longer than halogen lamps and 50 times longer than incandescent lamps, thereby helping to significantly reduce maintenance costs.
For many years, however, LEDs were unsuited for room lighting applications because they weren’t bright enough. The Ostar Lighting LED marks a further step toward suitability for such applications. Osram has already supplied a Migros supermarket in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen with 18,000 Golden Dragon LEDs, which have a lower output than the Ostar Lighting units. These LEDs emit neither UV rays nor heat, which means they have virtually no negative impact on delicate grocery items such as milk, meat, fruit and vegetables.
Source: Siemens


http://www.physorg.com/news93198212.html

i think led's are the wave of the future.....just not yet, but in a few years there will be some that put down some fire, i was reading about this company that is working on a led that puts out 200k lumens and uses 200 watts, but so far it only lasts for a few minutes, i would bet that in about 5 years hps and mh will be obsolete