Chinese LED Grow – 75 (actual draw) Watts per plant veg/100W per plant flower

Goldy said:

hey man, how far were your panels from the tops of the buds? I've read that it's easy to have them too close with seemingly little ill effect but hugely less yield. I'll try find where I've seen it. I think it was in respect to LEDs in general rather than MarsHydro. Have you tried any other brands of LED panels?

The pics look really nice. Crazy they were so light

Dunno if it's been mentioned in the thread already but MarsHydro and Blackdog LED are the same. Just relabeled and sold on for heaps more. I.e. the actual wattage of the mars is half of what they state..apologies if already said.

I've been pretty impressed with the panels for veg myself..was going to look into getting the 1600w model.

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Hey Goldy, old thread but still have the LG panels for seeds/clones/vegging and they do really well for that. This was the second round trying to flower and yes they looked good, matured the buds and the quality was good, just no density. In comparison, I'm feeding even a little less under the CMH and still getting 2-3x the weight. Like I just pulled the first full 3x3 round with one of the 315w CMH and pulled 10.9 zips and went down to as low as 400 ppm feeds every other watering. I tried several heights above the canopy but on average through flowering they were in the 10-12" range which is a balance between coverage and intensity. Problem with putting them too much closer is you loose coverage for your footprint. Much higher and you'll just get flufflier buds. The problem with the LG's and another 2 I tried prior to this is they don't have the spectrum to flower properly. They'll flower, they'll look Ok but the bud is fluffy/light, not worth it imo. Before you invest more into these Chinese panels flower out a couple of plants and see what you get, that'll tell you whether it's worth it or not. Don't get sold on number of Watts, I thought maybe I hadn't given them enough power but this thread I was running more than enough to flower with the right spectrum and they were still not up to par.

There are some great LED panels that can pull very nice, tight buds but they're in the higher end like the A51's, Apache, and DIY Cree 3070 COB lights. Don't know what kind of space/room you have but would be worth checking thread in the red link in my current signature where I ran a couple of rounds with these LEC Sun Systems, if your room can handle one of these 315w LEC's you'd do well to consider them, for $500 they'll outdo any Chinese panel. Cheers.

Wow, yea there's no arguing with 2-3x as much! bet you were pleased with that weight, might have to look into the CMH a bit. I've only got a small area,1.2m just for personal med. Just love the idea of LED in the cheaper power bills - every bit helps! just not it you've gotta drop thousands on the actual panel itself lol.

Goldy said:

Wow, yea there's no arguing with 2-3x as much! bet you were pleased with that weight, might have to look into the CMH a bit. I've only got a small area,1.2m just for personal med. Just love the idea of LED in the cheaper power bills - every bit helps! just not it you've gotta drop thousands on the actual panel itself lol.

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Yeah, that's essentially the difference between cheaper Chinese LED's and high end LED's or this CMH I'm running. Cheap to buy but not effective so it's not really a good investment, pretty sure you'd be disappointed going low end. I can say that confidently after trying to flower with them twice, then switching only lights, same environment, same medium, same feed schedules, and clones from the same plants I flowered under the Chinese LED's, it was a more than fair comparison. I went with the CMH fixture as I would have had to spend twice what I spent to get the same yields from LED's.

One of those LEC Sun Systems would work great for a 1.2m x 1.2 space if you have 2m height. If it's lower you'd be better off with one of the LED brands I mentioned, they'll pay off in the long run. Cheers.