In all fairness, I'm posting a response made to me by the owner of the company. As mentioned above, his name is George Mekhtarian and he seems to be a stand up guy. Enclosed is part of the email he sent me today:
"I wanted to follow up on your inquiry re. SolarStorm and the posts on the forum.
I’ve been following the thread on THC farmer with some amusement but recently I’ve noticed the discussion getting off track for all the wrong reasons. We fully expected people to question the merits of our product. There has been plenty of skepticism about LEDs. As you personally experienced with Procyons, LEDs in the past overpromised and under-delivered.
What we did not expect was for people to question the legitimacy of our business. I guess we’re new to online retailing and we’re learning and I welcome your feedback on how we can do a better job.
First, I want to tell you a little about who we are:
My company MWW Inc. has been around for over 13 years. We employ around 20 people at our 10K sq. ft. facility in Canoga Park. We have manufactured LED based grow lights for major distributors such as C.A.P. or R&M supply (randmsupply.com) as the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for over three years. Our product was branded as XtremeLED and is currently sold at major hydroponics stores.
So, no I don’t work out of my Mom’s garage ;-) But even if I did, people on THC farmer should support the little guy over the big online LED stores that import grow lights from China. Keep in mind that Apple, HP, Microsoft were all companies that started at their family’s garage…LOL..
When we completed the development of the SolarStorm and SolarFlare products earlier this year, we knew we had breakthrough products. So we needed to market them directly to consumers for many reasons, not the least of which being that we wanted to get a direct channel of communication with the growers to continuously innovate. Hence the new brands and new company name,
California LightWorks.
We were exhibiting at the Indoor Growing Expo in Long Beach last month and had a few people with light measurement devices come by and compare the SolarStorm on display to StealthGrow’s large 1250HO $3,500 unit and they said ours registered higher on their meter. From the specs, StealthGrow 1250HO actual power draw is 680W and ours is around 675W. In addition, of course, SolarStorm has UVB and no other LED fixture has that.
We truly believe we have a breakthrough product that’s made in the USA and is very competitively priced at $1999. My background is Electrical Engineering and I have designed and implemented the SolarStorm working closely with local growers. Everything from the circuit boards to the sheet metal cover is made at our factory in Canoga Park. We use the best, highest powered LED emitters we can find: We get them from LedEngin a silicon valley based company.
As I said, we did expect people to be skeptical about the merits of our product and that’s why we’re offering the Grower Feedback Program. We can’t make money selling the SolarStorm at $1000. But we need to put units in grower’s hands so we can build collateral and street credit.
FYI, the feedback from this program is being posted on
www.ledgrowlightforum.com This forum is run by an independent guy based in the North East that who also runs myhydroponicgardening.com. We only have 3 people posting feedback so far but we expect many more shortly.
I really would like to win people like you over so we can turn the discussion on the forums around from “Who in the world would buy from these guys?” to “Does the SolarStorm really work?” because we already know the answer to the latter question is affirmative.
So short of sending you a SolarStorm unit for free (I wish I could do that) please tell me how I can convince you that we’re for real. By the way we chose to go with PayPal because of their strong buyer protection policy. If you prefer a different form of payment that makes you feel more comfortable, we can arrange that.
Thanks. Please consider posting some of these points on THC farmer. And I really hope you join our Grower Feedback Program."
As you can see, he answered many of the questions raised here and in private messages I was sent. He feels he has developed a superior product and is trying to get it out to growers so the word spreads. Don't let my negativity dissuade you away from these- they may be the answer we've been waiting for!!!!!
