Opossum420 said:

Super ecstatic I just put in my order. Ordered a Gorilla Tent Lite line 4x4 tent and was wondering if you gents would be nice enough to give me some light suggestions. My plan is to probably run about a 250 watt HPS light based on what im trying to spend and what ive been researching but i would love to have a few other opinions and reccomendations such as personal experience with HPS versus LED and which is superior and why. And if i were to run LED how much is enough? Anyways thanks for advising this green greenthumb!

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I can share my lighting experience, I'm also new to growing since the first of the year, I have one somewhat successful grow under my belt using LEDs in a 4x4 tent using a 6-bucket RDWC system.

at the time, I had no idea what to use for lights but being a techie type guy, I was leaning toward LEDs. The reasons I went for LED was so I wouldn't have to deal with the heat produced by an HPS and I wouldn't have to deal with changing bulbs or trying to figure out when to change a bulb due to bulb performance degradation.

- The next step was to figure out what to buy for an LED or to build my own.

After doing a ton of research on LEDs, I decided to go with a pre-built light from PlatinumLED. for my needs, I decided to buy a p600($600) which I knew, from talking to PlatinumLED, would not cover the whole 4x4 area. Their recommendation was to have two of them to fully cover the 4x4 area. The $1200 price tag was a bit much so I used only one as I was not using the front 1/3 of the tent to grow.

Results:
I ended up Vegging and blooming with this setup. this light, set at 24" over the canopy, vegged great. The blooming was not as great as the core coverage for this light is really 2x5 and really wasn't enough to cover the four plants that I had so most of the main kolas grew large directly under the light but the outer edges only flowered small "popcorn" buds. I ended up with roughly 8ozs from all four plants, I was happy for a fist time and called it a noobie success };-)

Conclusion:
The LED worked as intended, the ambient air temperature in the tent never got above 85f, usually sat around 80 without any kind of exhaust running. The light wasn't enough to get the full potential out of all the plants I had while blooming.

Moving Forward:
I decided that Vegging and Blooming in the same tent was not optimal for me (takes too long) so I decided to build a 4x8 bloom tent(I have a thread going in the DIY LED forum). I also decided to continue to use the p600 light in the veg tent. For the Bloom tent, I decided to build my own 1000W LED lighting system using COB leds with the help from @sixstring and watching @growmau5 youtube videos.

I still didn't want to deal with the heat and bulb replacement of the HPS lights and I looked into using 630 and 315 CMH fixtures which run cooler than the HPS but still have the bulb replacement issue that I didn't want to deal with.

That's where I'm at now, I hope this helps a little in your decisions

Oh and .... Welcome to the farm, lots of very useful information here...

That's awesome! You're working a bit outside my budget but thats an awesome set up! Are watts equivalent when comparing LED to HPS ? What would be the LED wattage comparison based on efficiency versus a 250 watt HPS bulb if you might know?

h4ppyf4rmer said:

Oh and .... Welcome to the farm, lots of very useful information here...

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Thanks! Im Ecstatic for the resource!

How many plants you plan on going, and what is your ideal light budget?

Ideally 4 and about 250$. I'm open to any different suggestions based on plant number and light type!

Opossum420 said:

That's awesome! You're working a bit outside my budget but thats an awesome set up! Are watts equivalent when comparing LED to HPS ? What would be the LED wattage comparison based on efficiency versus a 250 watt HPS bulb if you might know?

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Soooo, there's a whole science behind all this lighting stuff...It's fairly confusing but people try to do the simple power consumption equivalence (watts) of the different lighting.
Not to dive too deep, the technologies are different so it's kind of hard to make that comparison. Watts is the amount of power consumed by the device. To find the equivalence, you need to compare PAR per watt and photon density of the devices. (I'm probably explaining this incorrectly };-) )

so the short answer is no, 1000W HPS is not the same as 1000W LED.

See this is why I made an account on this forum! Any clue what kind of an LED setup I could get away with in my price range or should I shoot HPS?

I'd maybe go with a Viparspectra 1200w (535-ish actual watts), but that's going to cost $400. Puts you at around 45 actual watts per foot in your tent. The mid-range LED's pay for themselves over the course of a year though with energy savings. Both with the light consuming less itself, and less need for methods to reduce heat. My plants love mine.

I have zero experience with HPS though.

Opossum420 said:

See this is why I made an account on this forum! Any clue what kind of an LED setup I could get away with in my price range or should I shoot HPS?

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I have read that some members have had good luck growing with lesser expensive lights than the ones I use. I don't really have any recommendation, unfortunately. hopefully others will chime in that have done this with a similar budget as yours.

How do you feel about the 600w version of that Viparspectra versus HPS?

MW7945 said:

I'd maybe go with a Viparspectra 1200w (535-ish actual watts), but that's going to cost $400. Puts you at around 45 actual watts per foot in your tent. The mid-range LED's pay for themselves over the course of a year though with energy savings. Both with the light consuming less itself, and less need for methods to reduce heat. My plants love mine.

I have zero experience with HPS though.

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Opossum420 said:

How do you feel about the 600w version of that Viparspectra versus HPS?

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That's what I have in my 3x3 tent. It'll definitely get them going good, but might not be enough for the long haul (if you fill your tent from wall to wall). You could always get one now, get them going, and in a month or two down the road add another 600w and just daisy chain them. I won the bid on a 300w version on eBay for $67 as well I intend to add once it comes time for flower.

If you do go that route, put it about 18" above the plants. I had zero stretching issues this way. I had it at 24" and they wanted to stretch

Awesome thanks for the tip ! I like the Idea of running LEDs a lot I just don't know where to start !

The Spider Farmer 600w might be worth a look as well, only like $5 more and adds the option of dimmable lighting. Haven't used one, but have heard good things.

Know anything about that MasterGrow 1200W ?

Opossum420 said:

Know anything about that MasterGrow 1200W ?

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Not really, but after looking at it a bit I'm gonna lean towards don't go that route. It's actually pulling less actual watts than the 600w vipar with veg/bloom both turned on, and doesn't have any option to use only veg/bloom modes. It's just on or off. The color spectrum sucks as well, only really a bunch of red, with some blue. Not much in between.

Not sold on cheap double-chip LED's either.