Led bulb vs cfl bulb

So I have 60 watt cfls soft white that use 13 watts with 900 lumens. I also have 100watt leds that use 14.5 watts at 1500 lumens. Also both are 2700k. So will the led be significantly better for flowering than the cfls?

Use the led light yes it will be alot better it has a brighter output

3 Likes

Thanks a bunch. So would 2 of the leds be better than using 3 cfls. I’m running a real tight space and wondering. Or should I squeeze in a 3rd bulb?

Absolutely 3000 lumens as apposed to 900 is far better. The more light they have the bigger her flowers will be of course applying proper nutrients help as well, if you can get 3 of those leds that would be better

4 Likes

Thanks again I’m running nutes according to this schedule mid bloom.

And this is what I’ve got going on.

The cfls were burning some leaves I’m hoping these are cooler and maybe get the third in there not sure if I can tho.

You wanna make sure the leds can hang a substantial amount above canopy about 18" if possible due to the intense light your gunna need a bigger area if she isnt flowering yet shell easily double in size when you switch to flower

3 Likes

I’m in third week of flower

I think these will run cooler than the cfls, plus i have a battery operated fan taped to the door blowing at the lights with rechargeable batteries in it. The fan last the 12 hrs.

I can’t move it to anything bigger. All I can do is tie it away from the lights.

Yeah they are way cooler than the cfls I can probably get the 3rd in.

@Noctis420 are you doing Hydroponics or soil?

This is my first Hydroponic grow. I messed up and went into flowering too late so as you can see its really cramped. Just trying to get something out of this and I’ll be happy and learned a lot for round 2.

1 Like

You’ll definitely wanna be careful with the led bulbs if the cfls were burning them than the led lights definitely will due to being far more intense

2 Likes

Thanks, I was wondering if those bulbs are strong enough. I am trying my first micro grow, doing 1 or 2 Buddha Tahoe plants in coco coir, seedlings just popped.

1 Like

A lot of times how you use these household bulbs is more important than which one you use. People have been growing with Cfl’s for a long time. You can really improve the amount of par by mounting them horizontally and making some sort of reflector to go above them. The key to being successful is using the right color temp and keeping them close enough to avoid your plant stretching.

The led bulbs cam be great too. I would advise to get bulbs that the diffuser can be removed from. Them same idea applies about color temps and distance to plants.

4 Likes

@Noctis420, Hi Is that all you used to grow this plant are 2 CFL’s ?

Hey @BobD1 I origanlly had a 300 watt led in there but i was forced to use bulbs to finish the grow up because I had no room in there and the bud came out nice looking and it was really sticky but I didn’t get to test it out because of a mold issue unfortunately. The ones in the pic above were led bulbs though. They started burning the plant so then I switched to cfls.

Which 300 watt led?

From the photo, it looks like they were allowed to stretch way too much. Using the context clues, you would benefit a lot more by being set up with a movable light fixture. Growing hydro it’s not as easy to move your plants, so you want to be able to move your light.

I would guess that led had a lot of red in it, which started the stretch. Then moving to the weaker light caused it to stretch even more. There’s a few ways to prevent that from happening again, but we would a little better idea of what exactly happened.

1 Like

@dbrn32 hey they didn’t stretch I cut off all of the lower leaves because the cfls were not strong enough to get the lower half so I just concentrated on the upper half. They out grew the box I had a adjustable led in there until they were up against it. I flowered to late and they out grew the box.