kacikoby
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A decent PAR meter costs almost $400 (the cheaper Apogee), instead you could get a $20-$30 Amazon lux meter that will work fine with your hid light and I've been told it's fairly accurate for the white light LEDs. I go for 30k-50k lux in veg and 70k lux at the center in flower, I've found too much more and buds start to bleach on my plants.
I have a Sunche HS1010 lux meter ($17 USD on Amazon). I recently bought an Apogee MQ-500 PAR meter. If someone bought the Sunche, I could do some comparisons of cool and warm light to have a conversion factor.
The PAR meter uses clearskycalculator.com to verify the meter is calibrated. That could be a way to convert a lux meter's reading to PAR. (Enter your lat/long, altitude, time of day, day of year.).
I have the Dr Meter one but if you get around to making comparisons I'd be interested in seeing them anyways. I can't imagine lux meters are that different from each other
FWIW: I just measured a new warm-white LED lightbulb. Using the Apogee MQ-500: 485 ppfd. Using the Sunche HS1010 meter: 24,000 lux.
You mentioned 30-50k veg, 70k flower. I think 30k sounds good for veg. But, for flower, if these numbers track each other, 70k would be high ppfd. I've read 900 ppfd is the point of diminishing returns. 45,000 would be about that (if the numbers scale together that way).
I haven't had the PAR meter long. I should measure the sun using that clearsky site. I could use the lux meter too.
Thanks, the 485 ppfd to 24k lux for warm white light is a useful baseline for me. I agree that if the numbers do scale like that 70k lux is probably really pushing it, but I've noticed significantly better bud growth in the spots with 60k+ lux compared with the spots at or below 50k lux on my Spydr 2p. I really need to just fork over the money for a PAR meter
Exactly this... Numbers are exactly as I find too. I can push about 80,000 with CO2 but it's right at that edge where I would not go more.That seems like a lot of light for that space, especially if you don't have Co2. In a perfect world you would have a par meter and you could definitively know how many lights to have and where to place them. Without Co2 you'd go for no more than 500-600 ppfd in veg and no more than 900-1000 in flower, possibly less. A decent PAR meter costs almost $400 (the cheaper Apogee), instead you could get a $20-$30 Amazon lux meter that will work fine with your hid light and I've been told it's fairly accurate for the white light LEDs. I go for 30k-50k lux in veg and 70k lux at the center in flower, I've found too much more and buds start to bleach on my plants.
Use the lights that let you get the most even light at the intensity you want over your whole canopy. That cmh is probably as effecient or more efficient than those LEDs for whatever that's worth.
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