When it comes to indoor cannabis growers, no matter you are an individual grower who grows for your own personal use, or you are a commercial growing company. The grow lights play a significant role of what you can get from your natural ladies.
But for commercial cannabis growers, the requirements for LED grow lights could be different due to difference in growing purposes, growing environment, and of course your budget.
So how to judge if one grow light is best for your commercial cultivation operations?
1.Must be Powerful enough
In terms of “being powerful’ for LED grow lights, it is not only about wattage, though wattage does indicates partly how powerful an LED grow light can be. But except wattage, we should pay more attention to several parameters as PPF, average PPFD, Efficacy.
PPF decides how much effective photons you can get from one grow light.
PPFD decides how effectively your plants can use the photons, generally speaking, the more averagely distributed, the better.
Efficacy, higher efficacy means you can get more photons with the same cost on electricity bill.
For commercial growers, average PPFD is better to be above 1000 μmol/m2/s, and all the way even up to 1500 or 2000, since most commercial cannabis facilities have CO2 enrichment system, plants can use much higher level of light for photosynthesis. In a small individual grow tent, higher PPFD above 1000 would be waste of energy, since most individual growers don’t have such complete system of CO2 enrichment, let alone precise control over humidity, temperature, nutrients, etc.
2.Must be built with top-quality parts with long working lifetime
Unlike individual growers, commercial growing facilities basically have to run every day for providing the year-around yield for the cannabis market. In this situation, you must have a very robust design of your LED grow lights.
And we need to understand that LED grow lights consists of several main parts which affect the durability most.
LED chips, top quality chips include brands as Samsung, Osram, Lumileds, Cree,, etc.These top LED chips can last a long life time of more than 50000 hours with 10% light loss.
LED driver, tops drivers include Meanwell, Inventronics, etc. Those best drivers usually offer warranty period up to 7 even 10 years.
Heatsink, this depends on the light manufacturer’s choice, but the larger the collective surface size is, the better the heat conduction is. The operation temperature should be no more than 60 Celsius degree in order to gain a L80 life time more than at least 5 years.
3.Spectrum
There has been no best spectrum for cannabis growing yet, though every manufacturer claims that it has the best. But we can recognize right way those spectra unsuitable for cannabis cultivation, such as too much red light, too much blue light, lack of infrared. Because cannabis requires a more balanced broad-band full spectrum for get the desired growth result.
But then how to choose the best balanced spectrum for your specific strains or specific growth stage requirement.
Try it with a small trial cultivation. There is no better way than to grow your plants with the actual light.
4.Price
Though you may be scammed to get a crappy grow light with high price. But also remember, you cannot get a decent quality LED grow lights with apparently low price.
Because too low price is not even enough to cover the basic raw material and labor cost.
As a LED grow lights factory for 10 years, we can confirm that LED grow light price below 0.5USD per watt is impossible to use high quality material.
So some manufacturers tell you that their 1000 Watt LED grow light cost only 500USD. They either fake the wattage or fake the quality.
5.Warranty
Warranty period should be at least 5 years. If the manufacturer is really confident about their quality, and their products are built with top quality material and workmanship, 5 years is safe for them to claim.
Learn more about VANQ LED grow lights for commercial cannabis cultivation:
720W Commercial LED grow lights
2160 μmol/s
3.0 μmol/J
Cultivation-proved broad-band full spectrum
