It’s the amount of light being produced per watt. The high efficiency leds that are being used put off very little wasted energy in the form of heat. In fact I’ve had to dim the boards in order to keep from burning the plants. When I first got it I figured I’d turn it almost all the way up. That was a mistake. My plants started to burn and bleach from the amount of light and distance. Due to space constraints I can’t really raise the lights much more so I had to turn them down.
Compared to the burples I was running I’m using about 1/3 of the electricity for what I can only assume is even more light than they were getting before. The burples put out a good amount of heat which now I realize is just wasted energy. Not only do they use cheap inefficient drivers but the leds themselves put off a decent amount of heat and wasted energy.
I’m fairly new to quantum boards myself so I’m not the best resource for their efficiency other than I’m experiencing it first hand and am having a hard time quantifying the difference in watts drawn vs the amount of light produced.
I was turned on to them by
@Buzzer777 and others on here who swear by them and I can attest that they are far more efficient at their duty than anything else I’ve ever seen.
In my veg chamber for example I had 216w of T-5 flouros and it was fairly dim. I added 200w of led lights from a fixture I was given to test out and burned the shit out of my plants. I had to install a dimmer and have it turned down to about 80 watts now and the plants are much happier and it’s still a good 25% brighter than it was with the T-5s. This fixture when I took it apart uses similar leds and driver to the quantum boards just in a slightly different configuration. My guess is they use last gen leds but are still very bright and efficient. I went from having an average day time temp of 83-86 inside my grow rack to barely being able to hit 73. It stays at a constant 69-70 at night when my flowering lights are off.
That’s a difference of 10+ degrees in heat and wasted energy just by upgrading to newer technology. To be able to grow in the rack and use an average total of 235 watts per hour with everything running is amazing imo. It costs more to heat a waterbed, use a deep freezer, charge a laptop, run your refrigerator, use a slow cooker than it does to grow plants with high efficient leds. And I don’t mean a combination of those I’m talking any single one of those things vs my grow rack in its current configuration. That’s mind boggling.
Like I said I’m not the best at explaining this it’s just some testing I’ve done using a kill-a-watt meter plugged into my surge protector but I’ll attach two pics to this post that show the watt usage when my flowering lights are on and off. I run my veg lights, fans and in-line ventilation 24/7.
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The above image is when everything is on including my flowering lights.
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The pic above is when everything is on except my flowering lights.
I run 11 hours with my flowering lights on and 13 hours with them off.
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