I had the UV/IR bar set with my first Grower's Choice E720. I ran a couple of runs. I like that setup way better than any quantum board I've tried. I added another this fall when I moved to a 4 x 8 tent. What I don't have is an apples to apples comparison. I could run one E720 with and the other without ... and I probably will at some point. It probably won't be this run though. I'm already involved with a bunch of cloning. It's something to think about for the future though.
Careful. Running tests like that can be addictive.
But yeah I would need to see 3 or 4 grows doing side by sides with clones before I felt like I had a good understanding of UVB. Change only the UV between the 2 clones and all other grow parameters are equal. Then get the end results lab tested. It’s a lot of effort for home growers.
In what I have run including splitting a plant in 2 and adding UVB to just half of the same plant, blind testing done with UVB finished vs no UV finished flower the user could not differentiate via smoke it all came down to the visual differences. I’ve still got some test buds if you want to see them.
I TLC tested them for cannabinoid levels and my testing was not precise enough to see a difference in THC. CBG was higher in irradiated buds.
What I will say is that the UV irradiated buds quit growing and ended up noticeably smaller. I documented all that too on the thread I linked above. Still got all the data from that test if you want it.
So if this is telling at all - those bulbs and bars are no longer in any tent. Pulled them all, Far Red too. It was very interesting but in the end it just seemed like technology for technology sake and the buds were no better. I’m sure there is a sweet spot that can be found for the non PAR spectrum that does result in a positive with some metric. But for me it’s a 95%er tweak. Like overclocking CPUs 20 years ago. If it works nice you got free cycles. But it’s just as likely to crash the pc.
An easier thing to do in terms of tweaking plants is injecting O2 in the root zone. That has results anyone can clearly see and probably costs the same in hardware and uses less power. I mean if ya wanna tweak stuff….