Anyone Thinking of Dumping LEDS and going back to Halides

[dz6t]

I always thought the Cree XPG v2 was pretty efficient. These low wattage cheap by the dozen Chinese leds are ahead of Cree ? Ai and radions are a waste of money? I would have thought with all their special lenses and top shelf led chips would be way ahead ? If not we are all being taken for a ride. Now I feel like getting one of these low wattage super lights

Low power led chips put out more light per watt than high power chips, it has nothing to do with brands.
The high cost of some led fixtures are due to low production volume and higher profit margin. The cost of led chips themselves has little to do with the cost of a fixture.


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[dz6t]

Looks like it's all for micro greens from what I am seeing local shops are selling lights for those that want to hide the hooch plants indoors , looks like LED still can't grow hooch like halide / hps

Led has been proven for growing medical plants, and good for people who want to hide them. Metal halide in a tent is a disaster waiting to happen.
Led for horticulture is a proven technology, metal halide is long gone for horticulture outside of US.


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[Pslreefer]

Led has been proven for growing medical plants, and good for people who want to hide them. Metal halide in a tent is a disaster waiting to happen.
Led for horticulture is a proven technology, metal halide is long gone for horticulture outside of US.


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Leds work great for cheato

 

[jda]

I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe last year while adopting two kids. Metal Halide is still all over the place in every mall, store, shop and everywhere that they were a few decades ago in the US... they have no money to replace fixtures, no environmental codes, cheap power and absolutely no issues with just throwing tubes or bulbs in the trash on a mass scale. Don't underestimate dogma in places outside the US that do not have money to retrofit.

I think that I posted a few pages back about a very large medical weed place that I appraised recently. It, and all of the comps that I talked to, use MH and MV to enhance the sunlight. None will use T5s when real money is on the line... and LED is a joke to them. They do not care how much electricity costs (they almost print money) and the heat from a 5500k bulb is really nice for a tropical plant.

 

[m14socom]

Something I have noticed in most LED setups is they are under powered and overrated. I've seen 2000w lights that only pull 550w. They're are a few company's that list actual wattage. But, then you have to take efficiency into account. The same LED light with a 80% eff driver will only put out 83% of the light a 96% efficiency driver will.

 

[jestronix]

I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe last year while adopting two kids. Metal Halide is still all over the place in every mall, store, shop and everywhere that they were a few decades ago in the US... they have no money to replace fixtures, no environmental codes, cheap power and absolutely no issues with just throwing tubes or bulbs in the trash on a mass scale. Don't underestimate dogma in places outside the US that do not have money to retrofit.

I think that I posted a few pages back about a very large medical weed place that I appraised recently. It, and all of the comps that I talked to, use MH and MV to enhance the sunlight. None will use T5s when real money is on the line... and LED is a joke to them. They do not care how much electricity costs (they almost print money) and the heat from a 5500k bulb is really nice for a tropical plant.

This is interesting to see they see LED as a joke, i wonder if they are seeing spectrum issues ? over coverage issues with the different plant size, did you see any using led for microgreens and that sort ?

 

[jda]

Performance is the only thing that matters to them. The send out hundreds of thousands of dollars in product all of the time. Be honest... if you had many hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales every month dependent on your choice in lighting, would you use MH/MV or LED? There is only one answer here... especially when you consider an electric bill at 2-3% of the sales dollars... no brainer.

This is really no different from reef keepers who are only interested in pure performance... the vast majority of these think that LED are a joke too. Plants are kinda like corals, except they can grow seedlings into plants whereas most reefers rarely see full tanks of colonies. If the growth is 30-40% more with MH, and it compounds, then who does not want more product to trade or sell? 30-40% more of compounding interest adds up over a few periods.

Of course there are spectrum issues. The only way to cut down the wattage is to cut spectrum.

They grew hippie lettuce for sale. That is all. All of them have a few orchids, tomatoes and other houseplants lying around, but The Chronic was all that I was interested in since it was my assignment.

 

[Tripod1404]

I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe last year while adopting two kids. Metal Halide is still all over the place in every mall, store, shop and everywhere that they were a few decades ago in the US... they have no money to replace fixtures, no environmental codes, cheap power and absolutely no issues with just throwing tubes or bulbs in the trash on a mass scale. Don't underestimate dogma in places outside the US that do not have money to retrofit.

I think that I posted a few pages back about a very large medical weed place that I appraised recently. It, and all of the comps that I talked to, use MH and MV to enhance the sunlight. None will use T5s when real money is on the line... and LED is a joke to them. They do not care how much electricity costs (they almost print money) and the heat from a 5500k bulb is really nice for a tropical plant.

To be clear which eastern European country we are talking about here? Russia? Ukraine? Because my parents are from Bosnia and I have been Bosnia, to almost all former Yugoslavian nations, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Romania. I dont think non of those nations are big MH users. What makes you think a nation that doesnt have money for bulbs or fixtures have money to pay for much more expensive electricity (electricity is not cheap in any of these nations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing, prices in US is cheaper than almost every country there).

cents per KW/h

US; 8 to 17 (except Hawaii)

Serbia; 7.9

Croatia;17.5

Turkey; 11.2

Greece; 24

Bulgaria; 13.4

Romania; 18.4

Hungary; 23

Non of them have major fossil fuel sources so basically electricity they generate is produced by imported coal or natural gas. Plus it is very easy to get funds from European union for infrastructure development projects that improve overall energy efficiency and/or environmental friendliness.

For Russia and other former soviet nations that have cheap nuclear energy, huge fossil fuel deposits, and a large stockpile of MH bulbs from some factory that produced them for 40 years, maybe? but that is a very small fraction of entire Eastern Europe population and is not a market to start with since they are going through the bulbs they already produced over the years.

 

[jda]

We were in Bulgaria. These cities lack curbs, sidewalks and other things that we call basic in the US. I have no idea how somebody in a wheelchair would get around. I would be shocked if they could afford new fixtures in the next two decades in some of the medium-sized towns that we were in. The building occupied by the Ministry of Justice was an old soviet building from 1968 and I would say that it probably had not even had a coat of paint or any kind of maintenance in the last thirty years with granite stairs missing chunks, trim gone, wood rotting.

It is one thing to keep on budgeting what is in the budget. It is yet another to find capital-funding for improvements.

On the other hand, Sofia was a wonderful and modern city... and the rest of the country was totally different even five miles from the city center.

The streetlights had the hammer and sickle stamped into them like a lot of the infrastructure from the 1950s until the 1980s. Of course, Bulgaria was an old Soviet Bloc nation.

Your chart has electricity around 9 cents at night, which is not awful for them. ...gonna be hard to try and replace lights when so much more is needed first. Not all of these countries are in the EU... and some are only partially in.

 

[oreo57]

https://www.nema.org/news/Pages/HID-Lamp-Indexes-Close-out-2015-Down-From-2014.aspx

People are slow to change, even regardless of economics.. That is just psychology..

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171221005630/en/LEDs-Billion-Tons-Carbon-Dioxide-Sky-2017

The use of LEDs to illuminate buildings and outdoor spaces reduced the total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of lighting by an estimated 570 million tons in 2017. This reduction is roughly equivalent to shutting down 162 coal-fired power plants, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solution
IHS Markit figures are only based on the lighting market. They do not include energy saved by LEDs that replaced other technologies in other sectors, such as automotive and consumer technology.

Tic tok tik tok...

https://globenewswire.com/news-rele...3-5bn-by-2024-Global-Market-Insights-Inc.html

EESL to replace nearly 50K street lights with LEDs in Gurugram At present, the street light system prevailing in MCG consists of conventional lighting systems such as high pressure sodium vapour lamps, metal halide lamps and fluorescent tube lights.

The installation of LED-based street lighting system is essential, since LED lighting offer higher efficiency, better illumination and life expectancy apart from being environmentally sustainable. The EESL will be implementing the Centralised Control and Monitoring System (CCMS) as a replacement of existing conventional streetlight fixtures besides providing minimum guarantee of savings of 45-55 percent to MCG.

https://www.financialexpress.com/ec...k-street-lights-with-leds-in-gurugram/890233/

Bulgaria vs India.. hmmm..

 

[alton]

It is amazing this thread is still going. But oh well as I said a year ago if you think when you switch from MH to led your electric bill will go down a bunch, keep wishing. Our AC, clothes dryer, washer, stove/ oven, along with water heater uses so much more. The difference for me was when I ran my MH in the summer I would cut down on the length of time versus my LED's today so not to build up the heat in my home. I turned them up in the winter to heat my home and tank, now I use a heater on my tank and my house heater runs more. The biggest question is why is it so much easier to grow coral with MH than LED? Because MH is idiot proof, buy a Radium lamp (which is not 20K) or a Phoenix 14K (which looks like a Radium) run them for 4 hours a day with supplemental lighting for 10 and you have a coral growing machine. The problem with LED is too much tinkering, with running blues at 80%, and whites at 40%, and UV at 10%. Oh yea and do not forget the reds and greens. At the end of the day most LED users have no idea what spectrum their coral is getting, only that it looks good to their eyes. Build my led when they built leds for aquariums sold lights based on kelvin very similar to T5’s. The best light they built and I have four of them was a mixtures of leds that mimicked the Radium lamps. Your only option was to regulate the amount of PAR your corals needed by using a dimmer.
LEDS are saving energy like no other lighting source can. But for all the savings and cutting down of using fossil fuels for energy, on the weekends we Americans will jump on our Harleys, or get into our sports cars, take our ski boats, jet skis to the water and burn 10 times more fossil fuels than our led savings. What happened to when all we had to do was grow a garden, take kid out and play ball in the backyard for entertainment?

On with your arguments, I will check back in with this thread next year.

 

[markalot]

What's amazing about this thread is the desire for proof is never ever answered.

http://reefkeeping.com/joomla/index.php/current-issue/article/155-tank-of-the-month

This was a TOTM using 13 AquaIllumination Sol Blues, which would total aprox. 975 watts (mfg rating is 75 watts per fixture). It looks like the fixtures sold for about $400, so that's $5200 in fixtures. The overall wattage used will be lower than 975 (see snippet below) but I have no idea how to calculate exactly what that would be.

Main Display: 10' x 4' x 3' 900 US-gallon Acrylic Aquarium

AI sol blues and I'm very happy with them. There are 13 over the display tank and 2 over the coral QT trays. The intensities have been set at 40% white and 85% blue from the beginning. Each time I've tried to increase intensities my coral suffer, so I've stopped trying. I believe the difficulties many have had with LEDs are due to excessive intensities, especially with the latest more powerful fixtures.


There's nothing new there. Obviously you can grow acros under LED, and some acros do better than others. Suffice to say I think he's got the spread down. This was mentioned way way earlier in the thread, and like before will be quickly ignored by those not wanting to hear it.

The colors of many of the acros have that LED look. This is where some people think we are making things up. I don't blame them one bit, I think those who prefer tube amps are crazy as well, but I don't argue with them because maybe I just can't hear it. :lmao:

For those with Halide experience, how many lamps and what total wattage would be needed to light that tank?

 

[Tripod1404]

LEDS are saving energy like no other lighting source can. But for all the savings and cutting down of using fossil fuels for energy, on the weekends we Americans will jump on our Harleys, or get into our sports cars, take our ski boats, jet skis to the water and burn 10 times more fossil fuels than our led savings. What happened to when all we had to do was grow a garden, take kid out and play ball in the backyard for entertainment?

So if you have MH bulbs, you dont do those in weekends?

A reduction is a reduction, doenst matter how much CO2 other parts of your life puts up. 10 times more CO2 than LEDs plus CO2 from LEDs is still better than 10 times more CO2 than LEDs plus CO2 from MH. If energy residential, industrial and outdoor application switches to LEDs, saving become large, like the data [MENTION=296038]oreo57[/MENTION] showed.

 

[Tripod1404]

For those with Halide experience, how many lamps and what total wattage would be needed to light that tank?

It has been years since I used MHs. But Imo one 150W bulb for every 2 feet of tank is enough(so for a 6 feet tank 3 bulbs). But this is kinda tank dependent, if your tank is too deep, or too wide, or if you want to have SPS corals all the way to the bottom, you might want 250Ws.

I use to have two 150Ws at the sides and one 250W in the center for a 6ft tank.

Things might have changed though.

 

[shred5]

What funny it is just like politics when it comes to this stuff. The company I work for does all this stuff and their is so much bias in this thread it is not funny. It just like politics picking and choosing your data to support your ideas when it is not the whole picture. Also just because it is on the internet does not mean it is true. You pick your data from a led manufacture it is bias towards led and vise versa. Some of the data is not even true. I bet there is info on the internet that says the moon is made of cheese or we have not been to the moon if someone looks hard enough. this is the whole thread in general not just the last posts, it is not really aimed at anyone. some of the info is actually good and in a few cases I have learned something... Who is going to light fair tomorrow? I will be there?

Honestly we specify fixtures for pretty much everything so we know what goes in. We do work all around the world too even though about 99 percent of it is here in the United states. We do street lighting, we even have done a handful of grow facilities for pot.

In some cases the client tells us what they want or like some high end retail has a interior designer.

I am going to put it this way halides are not going away anytime soon. There are too many current installation even if leds are being installed in new installations more than halides. Then again there are some halides still going in. Right now I am designing a highbay installation that is led for a truck maintenance building and yes this would have been halides 5 years ago.

I mean they still make PC/compact fluorescent lamps in all flavors for reef aquariums and they never really were in.

 

[Pslreefer]

What funny it is just like politics when it comes to this stuff. The company I work for does all this stuff and their is so much bias in this thread it is not funny. It just like politics picking and choosing your data to support your ideas when it is not the whole picture. Also just because it is on the internet does not mean it is true. You pick your data from a led manufacture it is bias towards led and vise versa. Some of the data is not even true. I bet there is info on the internet that says the moon is made of cheese or we have not been to the moon if someone looks hard enough. this is the whole thread in general not just the last posts, it is not really aimed at anyone. some of the info is actually good and in a few cases I have learned something... Who is going to light fair tomorrow? I will be there?

Honestly we specify fixtures for pretty much everything so we know what goes in. We do work all around the world too even though about 99 percent of it is here in the United states. We do street lighting, we even have done a handful of grow facilities for pot.

In some cases the client tells us what they want or like some high end retail has a interior designer.

I am going to put it this way halides are not going away anytime soon. There are too many current installation even if leds are being installed in new installations more than halides. Then again there are some halides still going in. Right now I am designing a highbay installation that is led for a truck maintenance building and yes this would have been halides 5 years ago.

I mean they still make PC/compact fluorescent lamps in all flavors for reef aquariums and they never really were in.

Well they do teach the differences between bias and non biased sources in college, and how to use credible vs non credible sources, so the bias rests squarely on those that either don't know any better or don't care about anything but their own biased opinion.

 

[alton]

In commercial, residential, and industrial applications LEDS save a ton of money and energy. But not on my tank, I use half the watts, but run the fixtures twice the time as I did with my old Halides in the summer. Something I learned last year when my first electric bill came and there was no savings.
What I was trying to get with my statement was no matter what technology we invent to save energy, Americans will still find a way to waste it on something else. I will use my family as an example, my three kids grew up in a 2,000 sqft home with one tv and one computer. My sons family lives in a 3500 sqft home twice as efficient but has two ac units and two heaters. They have his and her computers, along with each child has a notebook and a smart phone. Their two cars get twice the mileage as mine and my wife's did years ago, but one kid is in select soccer and travels, the second is in dance class and travels, lucky the third one only plays sports locally.
Colleges and biased opinions, most have plenty.

 

[oreo57]

If the growth is 30-40% more with MH, and it compounds, then who does not want more product to trade or sell? 30-40% more of compounding interest adds up over a few periods.

Of course there are spectrum issues. The only way to cut down the wattage is to cut spectrum.

They grew hippie lettuce for sale. That is all. All of them have a few orchids, tomatoes and other houseplants lying around, but The Chronic was all that I was interested in since it was my assignment.

The Strategies Unlimited team studied the global market starting in 2016 to understand where traditional lighting has been used in horticulture and how applications such as vertical farms might add to that to project the potential market. In 2016, the global market for horticultural lighting was about $3B and was dominated by high-pressure sodium (HPS) lighting. LEDs represented a $100M (million) slice of that market in 2016. By 2022, Smallwood projects that the total market will grow to around $7B with LEDs representing $2B.

But the potential in the total market may be far greater as growers better understand the technology. Moreover, the aforementioned numbers did not include legalized recreational or medicinal cannabis. LED-based products have much higher initial costs and payback periods can be lengthy in horticulture. Smallwood, however, said that even relatively small yield improvements attributable to LEDs in a high-value crop like cannabis can slash payback times. He stated that a 5% yield increase can bring payback to under a year, and that LEDs will dominate the cannabis market to deliver more than $350M in revenue by 2022.

Overall, the market presentations at SIL 2018 were more positive than we have seen since at least 2015. That said, the market remains volatile and the remainder of 2018 is sure to be exciting.

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/article...sl-opportunity.html?eid=327187166&bid=2093990

Just for fun:

So what is the secret sauce that Philips and the 30 partners came up with? Philips is not saying. “The recipe is part of the knowledge that we have built over time, and cannot openly be shared,” a Philips spokesperson told LEDs Magazine.

The recipe appears to be in the 400–700-nm range of light (the PAR or photosynthetically active range, which more or less corresponds with visible light). Philips said the recipe is available with the newest generation of GreenPower LED toplighting, which it says delivers 500 or 600 micromoles per second (µmol/s) per light module. In horticultural lighting, micromoles represent the number of photons in the PAR range that hit a surface. Philips claimed the new toplights are very energy efficient, delivering 3 micromoles per joule (µmol/J). Philips guarantees the lights to last 35,000 hours.

Philips' rose recipe is yet another example of how the horticultural industry is using tunable LED lighting to optimize crops, including the use of the ultraviolet spectrum (not part of the PAR range) to enhance the appearance, potency, smell, and taste of plants, as LEDs has covered many times, including in its Horticultural Lighting Conference post-event report.

While Philips can now claim that its toplighting improves rose yields and size, it told LEDs that its research to date has not included rose fragrance. Whether a more aromatic rose is to be or not to be remains to be seen under the LED lights.

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2018/04/philips-says-leds-make-a-rosier-rose.html

If photons coming out of the fixture at all downward angles are considered (180°), the capital cost of the most efficient 400-W LED fixtures we tested is five to seven times more per photon than the 1000-W, double-ended, electronic ballast HPS fixtures (Gavita, ePapillion, Table 3). The high capital cost of LEDs makes the five year cost per mole of photons more than twice that of HPS fixtures (Table 3 and Figure 5A).
Conclusions

The most efficient HPS and LED fixtures have equal efficiencies, but the initial capital cost per photon delivered from LED fixtures is five to ten times higher than HPS fixtures. The high capital cost means that the five-year cost of LED fixtures is more than double that of HPS fixtures. If widely spaced benches are a necessary part of a production system, LED fixtures can provide precision delivery of photons and our data indicate that they can be a more cost effective option for supplemental greenhouse lighting.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0099010

2014.. Will update it if I can...

mogul-base HPS fixtures (i.e. Sunlight Supply, 1.02 µmol per joule).

From previous:

toplights are very energy efficient, delivering 3 micromoles per joule (µmol/J)

One thing though, AFAICT most growers use HPS not MH..

 

[jda]

Would you expect any other statement from a LED insider magazine? Consider the source on this... I can only really tell you what I found while doing a job... not a single grow house within 100 miles of me used LED. The laughed when I asked. About 1/4 of the homes that I got into grow some kind of weed. Most set the plants outside from May until Sept when growth goes crazy and there are all kinds of lights used for these 1-4 plant setups... T5s, T8, T12 HO and VHO, MV, HPS, MH, LED... it is all over the place. Most of these people spend more on ventilation hoods than lights.

 

[jda]

For those with Halide experience, how many lamps and what total wattage would be needed to light that tank?

With sinularia, lobos and euhphilia at the bottom, probably 5x 150w HQI on a good reflector.... so 750 watts. Maybe 1250 watts of 250s if you wanted a bunch more output and punch down deeper. The acros are all up near the top, which is smart.

The wattage would be the same to light it the same way... there are no efficiencies unless you cut spectrum or output.

This is not a high light tank, so the 750w of running SOLs could be replaced by 750w of Halides or T5s.