You happen to know what lux you guys get with your boards being so close? Also what watt per board you’re running? Thinking of maybe dimming mine and getting them close like the led bars.
We get plenty of lux but our meters arent ahe most reliable.
This is what we do, over a 1.1m (3.7 feet) wide aisle, 7 foot long section:
1 fotop across, every 40 cm (16"). Means around 5" distance between boards. 5 boards total in a 8way wago. We use hlg240s in the last 3 wago points, starting at 1 and going up to 3 at the highest. Means 150w and change for every board and we cant get it much closer than 8-10 inches without stress.
But even at 100w and 6 inches it flowers great, around +600ppfd iirc.
I say you could defo turn them down a bit and drop them closer, especially if you see the plants respond well.
I think the form factor plays into this; when you have light coming onto cannopy from all directions, boards literally covering the cannopy, it seems like you can get good results out of less watts.
That setup is about 24 square feet and 750 board watts. So around 30 w per sq foot, a bit low but gives us more than enough light.
Edit: boards are lm561c
We have a few others that run differently.
Our new favorite is the 2700k 90cri spectrum, really worked nicely with our amnesia haze.