LED vs CMH grow total

[rdvideo]

I see Nebula your latest grow between LED and LEC you like to use. According to a HT article the best light to use is following what mother nature does, white light. I do not know who says that HPS should be used for flowering so I decided to proof it wrong. And LED lights are way overpriced. For the price of one LED light that's suppose to give up to 1000w, I built three CMH using Phillips CMH bulbs that look light MH bulbs and using their ballasts to run them from 220v which uses less electricity too. Being my first time at this site, I will attach pictures of my lights which anybody can make if you know how to.

There is one thing that you have to keep in mind is eventhough you are using the same strain for each light, is knowing that each plant will not grow the same. One plant will grow bigger than another one, I know from experience. So your experiment is not complete by no means. As said LED lights are overpriced because the price of an LED is in pennies, even high power ones. I have pictures from my last grow of autoflower plants that I will post as a grow journal when I have the time because this is the third grow I've done in my 4x4x7 ft grow tent using Bubbleponics which is the best that I see in all of my decades growing pot. My last grow was of four plants and got 1.3 pounds of tight ass buds with a lot of trim not added.

[rdvideo]

Here's a pic of my total from my last grow of Extrem White Widow, 2x Extrem Northern Lights and LSD 25 buds. Little and big bottles.

[Obi-Wan]

That’s pretty cool, I’ve never seen anyone diy a cmh fixture before. Did you build the parabolic fixtures or were they repurposed HPS fixtures? How much did it cost to build all 3 fixtures? How much do the bulbs cost? Are you running all 3 fixtures in your 4x4 tent? Are they dimmable?

[rdvideo]

Hi Obi-Wan. I built everything 4 years ago. As mentioned, I am a retired EE Engineer so this was easy to do. I just Googled the parts I needed separately and then ordered them. The reflectors were 2'x2' that you would use with MH or HPS lights because they had the large sockets and found them online cheap. The same thing was done with the bulbs and ballasts to run them. All together I spent about $700 - $800 for everything needed for three CMH lights plus my labor. The 4'x4'x7' tent was $100 online. My last grow I only used two bulbs with one Bubbleponics container. They are only one wattage because there is no need to dim them. These CMH bulbs are better than 600w HPS bulb. Each grow I do will tell me more and the next grow will start in about a week. Takes a bit of time to clean container for the next grow. The price of the bulbs when I got them was about $50 each. The bulbs will last a while. I like looking at my plants without an orange glow; just need to take pictures better.

I am attaching some pics of the Northern Lights eXtrem from AMS around at harvest time, the plants occupied atleast half of the tent. These plants grew light bushes with each node another major branch started. This plant went nuts! My first time growing this strain and really freaked me out how much you can get out of just one plant. The description of the plant was made using 11 different strains and the high shows it too.

More pics later...

[Obi-Wan]

Ok, 2 of them at 630 watts total in a 4x4 makes a little more sense. It also makes sense that you did this 4 years ago when the cost of a plug and play cmh fixture was much more expensive. I know that current cmh bulbs are rated for 30,000 hours of run time but it’s my understanding that even the high quality bulbs can degrade up to 15% in the first year. Even at 10% degradation it’s enough to warrant changing the bulbs annually.

I’m a little confused because you keep comparing your setup to HPS but your thread title is LED vs. CMH. While I won’t disagree that purchasing a high quality plug and play LED is expensive, they can easily be DIY’d at a reasonable cost. I built a 500 watt dimmable fixture for my 3x3 for a little under $500 using HLG quantum boards. It will cover a 4x4 easily and could give a single ended 1000 HPS a run for its money at 1/2 the wattage. Realistically it’s output is more comparable to 750 watts of HPS or 2-315 watt CMH. Pacific Light Concepts has a reference build using its light strips that can go head to head with a 1000 watt double ended HPS at about 2/3 the wattage and a $700-800 build cost.

[smoorman]

Right today I can light a 4x4 tent with kick ass LED's for $4-$500. I may not know what I'm missing but I can tell you that at a minimum it will match 1.3Lbs of bud with that much light. Just did it. Mine were some Seedsman WW and NL. Both of which turned out very well. Some of my plants were under QB's and some under ONEO 1000w (200watts from the wall minus fan wattage).

[FunkyButtLovin]

Congrats on the fat harvest! Everyone does it differently and as long as you're filling jars, you're doing it right in my opinion and I certainly won't bash someone for their choice in equipment to get there. I also applaud you for building your own, that's always cool.

That being said, I just pulled almost the same amount from a 4x4 using soil with a single $14 600w hps bulb and half of the plants limped across the finish line. Total cost for lighting was $210 for a simple and cheap 600w digital MH/HPS wing reflector kit and a Secret Jardin Daisy parabolic reflector. It's extremely simple to hook up as well. All plug and play, no engineering required (not that it's hard and I do enjoy building things myself). I do envy the use of 220V. I plan to build a fixture sometime this year but it will be led strips and/or quantum boards.

[rdvideo]

I have one of those $200 600w digital MH/HPS fixtures too. Just collecting dust now. My house had 220v already for kitchen stove and hot water tank. Got rid of hot water tank and put in a small tankless hot water system and saves lots of $$$ by doing that. No more heating a tank of water just to keep the hot water. Not hard to add 220v to a house, snaking the wire is the fun part. I only grow autoflower plants indoors in the tent instead of using the whole bedroom as I did early on, then the bedroom was a jungle and a nightmare when one plant went hermie. Come to think about it, looking at the receipts, I built the CMH lights in 2013 when LED's were expensive, about $1000+. Yes, you can build your own LED lights with normal LED's cheap as seen on Facebook and online. I was just experimenting to see how well plants grow with a light that closely follows the sun. LED lights still do not have all color frequencies that CMH lights do. The best light to use according to a HT's test showed the CMH was better then HPS and LED lights at the time of the article. I do not recall the date of the article, but was around the 2013 time. Being the sun was the best light than any other light to grow high quality pot.
I have a large greenhouse now for growing pot in it to keep plants away from the rainy weather. It's been a few year since growing outside. The last Strawberry Cough plants was 9' tall and got well over a pound from that as was the Papaya pot plant. I have some seeds to a plant that I heard about decades ago, Alaskan Thunderfuck which needs to be grown outside if you want a good yield, 2 to 3 pounds from one plant! Indoor you have to stop veg after a few nodes so it can be managed properly. I live in the country with the farms and have land to grow outside with no problem. And by the way, the Extreme Northern Lights autoflower from AMS mention in the description that it took 11 different strains to make the final product. I did not know it was not going to grow like a normal pot plant and from an autoflower plant is way cool. I still love Bubbleponics because it's so easy to take care of. Humm, maybe some time I will check the PH of the water. Live long and prosper and stay safe.