A customer has a question and I hope we can get some opinions on it, thanks
"I am planning to develop and produce led grow lights.
And as I have studied the Internet about the best combination of different wavelengths, I thought maybe you as an expert can give me some helpful information.
My plan is to design a Grow-light with smart controller.
The light should have a certain amount of different wavelengths, like :
390, 430, 470, some green, some orange, 630,660,730, and 850 (for heating and after burn effect. Plus some cool white for growing, and warm white for blooming.
And the combinations should be arranged for seeding, growing and blooming… Also the time period should be possible to adjust, also the after burn effect should be able to be controlled, like about 2 hrs before lights go out, the infrared light should be added, to tell the plants that the sunset is coming soon. Anyway, all the intelligence should be realized by a small box with digital display, and different sensors like temperature, humidity, brightness, etc. These parameters should be able to be set by remote control, rsp. Mobile phone app. This way you can check the situation of your plants anytime, anywhere.
What is your idea about that? Do you think this is a good idea to follow? Oh, and the total power consumption should be from 300 Watts up to 900 Watts, with different sizes of the housing. And 3 different beam angles from 120 down to 40 degrees.
I would love to hear some recommendations from you as an experienced user, thank you very much in advance and best regards."
This was posted around the time possibly before I joined, otherwise I surely would’ve provided some input. Do we know if whoever posted this joined the group? I have looked at doing something similar, but haven’t seen anything that would justify the benefits associated with the cost.
The timers and controllers are available at a pretty hefty cost, it would also require the use of buck drivers and separate power supplies as it’s stated. All driving the cost per watt up significantly.
That being said, if you’re willing to give up the automation and monitoring capabilities you can pretty reasonably get yourself the other stuff. You simply design your led strings on their own drivers and just plug in or remove whichever drivers to/from your timer circuit as you wish. Far red initiation setups are already available to simulate sunset, but it’s looking like the major diy guys are showing similar results by simply adding far reds to their main light system. So it doesn’t appear that there’s a major advantage to having a separate circuit specifically for the far reds. As for deciding on the specific wavelengths to provide, just supplement what you’re whites are missing which will depend on color temps mostly.
The use of reflectors can control the beam angles, but it also does so at the cost of photons. Mixing them can cause some spot intensity issues, so you should do so carefully. Trying to mimic a commercial fixture that has reflectors, lenses, and a glass or plastic cover has been shown to have drastic reductions in available photons. So I’m not sure that would be a good model to follow.
The remote dimming is probably the easiest function to apply, but it has very little practical use. Any of the three way dimming drivers can dim on a 0-10v signal. I’m not into it, but my understanding is that arduino applications for this are available at reasonable cost. My issue here is that how often are you fine tuning your light intensity and/or spectrum? There’s no real benefit to doing it on a daily basis, or even weekly. You typically would do this once or twice within your entire grow, which makes spending money on the ability to do it remotely kind of silly. If you’re light is new and your trying to figure it out then sure, I’d be tinkering with it too. But I would surely want to be there in person watching how my plants respond to any changes.
Maybe I’m just not all for it because in my opinion I don’t see the value. But I would think that the best way to get most of these functions would be to buy a fixture that already offers most of these functions and then just deal with the options it doesn’t have, or look at then adding the missing features. If someone is looking to do something like this just because, I’d be happy to tag along and help anyway I can. But until I see some solid evidence there are major gains it’s not something I’m going to spend a lot of time messing with.
