My first grow: is my issue too strong lights for my seedlings?

Delps8

Well-Known Member
I googled the light to see if it was dimmable, to try and get your temps down a few degree and save it been 6ft in the air..

All I got was a load of sales bullshit.
Can't believe companies like this still exist.
Over $2000 for a load if gimmicky crap.
Reminds me a lot of the light that BlackDog is/was selling - old tech with new hype. I did a Google Maps search for their address and, as of about a year ago, it looked like their space had been taken over by a dog groomer. How appropriate.

One thing that is different is that this light allows you to modify the spectrum. There is, arguably, some value to that but the market has abandoned veg and flower lights.

Kind is taking the same approach. They don't talk about their PPFD or efficiency. Instead, they've added tchotchkes to change the spectrum. I understand the science behind it (I bought veg and flower lights from Growcraft) but, in terms of cost effectiveness, there's just no there there. The market has spoken and white LED + far red is on a roll.

The home/personal/small grower is not the market for this product. Per their literature, they're looking to sell to growers who want an HPS replacement and those folks may not be familiar with PPFD maps and efficiency ratings and all the other characteristics of LEDs that are not in HPS. Lacking that understanding, they're susceptible to the tunable spectrum because "With a tunable spectrum, you can make it run light metal halide and then fire it up as an HPS!".

A good PPFD map is as flat as Kansas. These have a big hot spot in the middle and PPFD values collapsing very soon after you move off center*.

Fans? Yeh, my blurple had fans, too. Yikes.

*I was trying to come up with something cute about the PPFD maps looking "Christina Hendricks sunbathing on a cold day" but couldn't quite nail it down. :-)
 

coreywebster

Well-Known Member
Reminds me a lot of the light that BlackDog is/was selling - old tech with new hype. I did a Google Maps search for their address and, as of about a year ago, it looked like their space had been taken over by a dog groomer. How appropriate.

One thing that is different is that this light allows you to modify the spectrum. There is, arguably, some value to that but the market has abandoned veg and flower lights.

Kind is taking the same approach. They don't talk about their PPFD or efficiency. Instead, they've added tchotchkes to change the spectrum. I understand the science behind it (I bought veg and flower lights from Growcraft) but, in terms of cost effectiveness, there's just no there there. The market has spoken and white LED + far red is on a roll.

The home/personal/small grower is not the market for this product. Per their literature, they're looking to sell to growers who want an HPS replacement and those folks may not be familiar with PPFD maps and efficiency ratings and all the other characteristics of LEDs that are not in HPS. Lacking that understanding, they're susceptible to the tunable spectrum because "With a tunable spectrum, you can make it run light metal halide and then fire it up as an HPS!".

A good PPFD map is as flat as Kansas. These have a big hot spot in the middle and PPFD values collapsing very soon after you move off center*.

Fans? Yeh, my blurple had fans, too. Yikes.

*I was trying to come up with something cute about the PPFD maps looking "Christina Hendricks sunbathing on a cold day" but couldn't quite nail it down. :-)
The bit about black dog and dog grooming made me spit my coffee out ...

Funny enough it was one of their lights that made me look at LEDs , all the gibberish that a noob me fell for.

That got me back on RIU researching and luckily it was when growmau5 was still about and knocking out video tutorials.

However I had spent a fair bit to try and replicate the black dog lights before I asked him for assistance.
He gently told me I bought a load of shit and which COBs I should be looking at.
Which I did, back before hlg was hlg.

So I do owe them something at least for getting my attention onto LEDs..

Back then their 600w light was £2800 .. and it was just marketing rubbish, there certainly wasn't the information regarding tailored spectrum.
Even now though I think it's too early to be having total spectrum tuning outside of it being a sales gimmick.

Blackdog and Kind are still relying on "bullshit baffles brains" to sell their overpriced outdated tech.. it's a shame , but at least the likes of Mars and viper spectra have gotten mostly away from those tactics.
 

Delps8

Well-Known Member
The bit about black dog and dog grooming made me spit my coffee out ...
:-)

Oh yeh, I got a big laugh when it popped up on the screen!

That some group is on repping the Alien grow systems here in the US. Check out the literature.


Funny enough it was one of their lights that made me look at LEDs , all the gibberish that a noob me fell for.

That got me back on RIU researching and luckily it was when growmau5 was still about and knocking out video tutorials.

However I had spent a fair bit to try and replicate the black dog lights before I asked him for assistance.
He gently told me I bought a load of shit and which COBs I should be looking at.
Which I did, back before hlg was hlg.

So I do owe them something at least for getting my attention onto LEDs..

Back then their 600w light was £2800 .. and it was just marketing rubbish, there certainly wasn't the information regarding tailored spectrum.
Even now though I think it's too early to be having total spectrum tuning outside of it being a sales gimmick.

Blackdog and Kind are still relying on "bullshit baffles brains" to sell their overpriced outdated tech.. it's a shame , but at least the likes of Mars and viper spectra have gotten mostly away from those tactics.
Good story about the learning curve and how you had a sherpa. I bought a Kind LED back in 2017 - one grow and archived the tent until 2021. Whole new world in 2021 and I got the PPFD map from Kind. The Kind was in the trash the next day. It may have been good for its time but that four year break put that light against the Mars SP 3000 which was half the price.

Technological change is relentless.

.KIND XL 600 Series 1 PPFD Diagram.png1710176649936.png


They're providing "break through products for buyers who want to reap the benefits of leading edge technology" doncha know!

I don't think we're going to see much of a push to sell variable spectrum lights in the mass market in the near future. Per above, technological change is relentless but the commodity grow light market is selling…commodity lights. You can get standouts but, by and large, low end grow light will tend to be very similar because it's a price driven market and the big driver of crop yield is the number of photons on the canopy.

There's an interesting synergy between red and far red that results in an increase in photosynthesis that exceeds the number of added photons. To take advantage off that, new lights are including some far red but adjusting the spectrum just doesn't do much…yet.

Three, five, ten years? Sensors capturing environmental data + reading the canopy and adjusting the spectrum (blue in veg, red in flower) and changing the intensity of groups of diodes so as to light the canopy evenly.

For now, I'll stick with Dr. B - light quality (color) shapes the plant; light intensity drives yield.
 

FollowAroma

Member
Looks fine. Cut back on watering them. You may have problems with the coco coir down the road. I wouldnt recommend it for beginners. Also, you get what you pay for with that stuff. Those cheap bricks of it are trash.
 
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