Re: Icemud's Grow 8.0 - New Intelligent-Gro LED - 2 x IGRO-228 LED - Testing And Revi
I agree with budnoob, while theyre cool lights to look at theyre way over priced. Im subd to you youtube channel ice and you do grow some beautiful plants but for the price of those lights id hope they grew plants from seed to harvest by themselves (without a human lol). Ive seen exquisite results from other leds that cost half the price for twice the wattage.
Youre a great grower dude but id never be sold on those lights.
That's the difference between wholesale and retail. When you are the manufacturing plant, of course you can undercut everyone else. But all lights are not created equal and if you're looking at nothing other than wattage vs price as if they were HIDs, then I'd say keep researching the technology or you're going to get burned.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not saying this in defense of, or against any brand, just in general, there is way more to the picture than price per watt.
The Canuck....Boscoe is right...there is much more to look at than just price and wattage.... are you aware of the crappy Umol readings that Mars II are putting out? I mean your paying about 1/2 price as other standard LED panels, and also getting about 1/2 the Umol...
And honestly, if you take Top LED out of the picture, Intelligent Gro panels are actually cheaper than any other higher end panels in the market, watt for watt, their cheaper than Lush, Advanced, Blackdog and Kind...
Comparing Intelligent Gro to Mars II is like comparing apples to oranges... not even in the same realm.
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I can agree with Boscoe on this, wattage draw could be the same for 5 different manufacturers, but the PAR Umol readings of all 5 different manufacturers can be completely different...
with this being said, more Umol typically means more available photons for the plant to use. Plants use each individual photon and when 3-8 photons are absorbed by a plant, one molecule of Co2 is fixed. So the more photon's or the higher the Umol, generally the more a light is going to drive photosynthesis.
Now with this being said, PAR and Umol are not 100% a tell tale sign of a good light or bad light. PAR represents the light between 400nm and 700nm that plants can use, but some light wavelengths are used by plants more efficiently than others. So if you made a LED panel with all white chips you could get very high PAR readings, however, being that a majority of white is made up of green, a high Umol reading would be misleading in this situation, therefor a more accurate measure of light is YPF or Yield Photon Flux, which takes the available photons, but weighs them against the plant photosynthesis curve so a more accurate measure of photon efficiency is determined. However most LED companies dont even mention YPF or know how to figure it out.... but just to make the point more detailed
Either way, if you are looking at just Umol, Intelligent Gro puts out almost double the Umol of the Mars II using the same wattage, therefor Intelligent Gro uses electricity more efficiently than Mars II.
Also, some LED companies do not use lenses or reflectors, which does not help the light carry over the same amount of distance, matter of fact without lenses it drops off pretty significantly. Using Lenses helps take the light and focus it into parallel light beams in which less spread happens and the light intensity by distance is carried further. Therefore another significant difference in LED lights.
Also if you look at the additional features of Intelligent Gro, such as the dimming schedule, there are additional savings in electricity that the intelligent gro will do, that the mars II will not..
Mars II only uses 2 red chips, 2 blue chips, IR and 2 whites... Intelligent Gro has a much better spectrum layout with 3 blue, 3 red, 2 white and UV and IR... the intelligent gro hit more photosynthetic peaks in the Photosynthesis action spectrum...
Just wanted to say that yea, they are both LED lights, but not even really comparable as far as features, test results and specs.
Basically its like comparing a yugo to a lexus..
