[GpsFrontier]

Hello shillamus,

If you had a choice between led shoplights and flourescent shop lights which would you pick..

First I would have to research the manufacture of the LED lights to see if they produce quality lights for growing plants, otherwise no mater now much you spend on them it's a waste of money. But assuming the lights are quality lights I would still have to run the numbers to decide. That includes calculating the sq footage of coverage area I need lighting for, how many lights I need to cover it, as well as comparing equipment and electrical costs. But as of yet I haven't found any quality LED lighting that I consider cost effective. I would have to break even within one year for me to consider it cost effective. By break even I mean make back the extra money spent on higher equipment costs within one year from the electrical cost savings. So that would mean florescent lighting would be my preferred choice. That is unless I need a lot of coverage area, then I would go with multiple low wattage HID lighting. At least until such time as the cost of LED lighting comes down enough to be cost effective.

HID eat a lot of electricity and cost a lot.. you seem to think they are effective?

HID lighting is effective, their the industry standard for commercial growers. Commercial growers wouldn't use them if they weren't effective. As for eating up a lot of electricity, a watt is a watt, is a watt. 400 watts of LED, 400 watts of florescent, and 400 watts of HID all cost EXACTLY the same in electricity to run. Watts are how the electric company charges you for electricity. Your electric bill will tell you exactly how much your paying per kilowatt hour. A kilowatt hour is 1,000 watts being used for 1 hour. As for HID costing a lot, I'm not saying it's cheap, but when you need more coverage area, and you start adding up the cost of all the florescent light fixtures you would need to cover the same area HID will cover, the costs are about the same or cheaper using HID.

By law your rate will be on your electric bill. Make sure you include the surcharges. The surcharge are is the extra amount they charge when you go beyond the allotted usage. Same way your cell phone company charges a higher rate when you use more minutes than your plan allows. They don't cut your service off, they just make you pay a higher rate at that point. If you don't have your electric bill handy, or don't want to go to the trouble to do all that, you can just estimate electrical costs using the national average of 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That's pretty much what I do anyway. Last I checked we were paying 9.3 cents per kilowatt hour (including surcharges) so the difference is negligible for me. Also when I do comparisons for other people or posting I have to use the national average since I don't know what everyone elses rate is.

Once you know how much your paying per kilowatt hour (or just use the national average), it's easy to calculate your electrical costs using a electrical cost calculator. Just fill in how much your paying, how many watts the device is, and how long you plan to run it each day. Click "calculate" and the next window will tell you how much that will cost you to run daily. Just multiply that by 30 to get the monthly costs. Easy smsheasy.

Here is an example of a cost comparison I did recently back in October. Ironically it's comparing LED tube shop lights to florescent lighting just like your question. Here the exact LED T5 tube lights I'm referring to in the comparison, as well as the fluorescent-Multi-Volt-Strip-Light-ZR-1-54T5HO-MVH/204352440" target="_blank">4 foot T5 florescent lights. And this comparison is for growing lettuce with a the coverage area of 8 sq feet. The typical coverage area of four 4 foot T5 bulbs.

T5 florescent
4 foot twin bulb florescent light fixture with bulbs $40
$40x2= $80
216 total watts (54 ea bulb)

T5 LED's
4 foot twin bulb florescent light fixture with bulbs $40 (you don't need the bulbs because you will be using the LED tubes instead, but they come with the fixture)
$40x2= $80
LED T5 bulbs $70 each (doesn't include shipping)
$70x4= $280
120 total watts (30 ea bulb)

That's a $280 equipment cost difference. (and doesn't include shipping)

Electrical costs calculated using the national average of 10 cents per kilowatt hr

Florescent
216 watts running 18 hours a day
Daily $0.39
Monthly $11.70

T5 LED
120 watts running 18 hours a day
Daily $0.22
Monthly $6.60

That's a $5.10 difference in electrical cost per month

$280 divided by $5.10= 54.9. So it will take 54.9 months to break even in electrical costs from the higher equipment costs. 54 months is 4.5 years. It will take nearly 5 years just to break even before you can actually start saving any money.

Even if you are willing to wait 4.5 years before you start saving any money, and that is better than most LED lighting. Typical break even point is between 5 and 10 years. I find it ironic that the company has a 5 year warranty which tells me that's probably about the life span of the bulbs themselves. So just when you are about to start actually saving money, you will probably have to buy new bulbs and wait another 4.5 years to break even again. If the bulbs wear out before the 5 years, they wont replace them with new bulbs, they will just prorate them and you wont get hardly any money back or towards new bulbs anyway.

Granted as typical with LED lighting the actual wattage consumed was lower than the rated wattage, but the difference wasn't significant enough to make a big difference. The total difference was 17 watts, amounting to 3 cents a day in electricity, or $0.90 a month, $10.95 a year. That would only shorten the break even point closer to 4 years instead of 4.5 years.

If I could find the old silver refelctors cheap I would put up some light sockets with these bubs

You can easily make your own light reflectors, you don't have to buy them.

Ah yes, pot growers. I have nothing against pot growers but the fact is they simply don't have to care about being cost effective/economical. When your getting $1,000 to $2,000 a pound for your product you don't have to care about being cost efficient. When your making that kind of money you can throw money around like Scareface.

LED's have the big issue of a high lumen drop off rate beyond 2 feet. But you can get around this issue by over saturation. Sure those LED's in the picture are much higher than 2 feet from the plants, but the room is over saturated with light. When you have light fixtures so close to each other the overlapping of the lights will reduce the lumens/par drop of beyond 2 feet. I attached an illustration to help explain what I mean. The close proximity of the light fixtures to one another combined with the high wattage (500-700 watts) of each light results in being able to get good coverage throughout the entire room due to over saturation.

But is it cost effective and economical? No, you can accomplish the same coverage using HID far cheaper. Both in equipment costs as well as in electrical costs. But again when you can get $1,000 to $2,000 a pound for your product, cost isn't an issue. If you were growing other plants like tomatoes or peppers you would go bankrupt in no time. Even if you got the LED equipment for free, you would still go bankrupt on the electrical costs. So while LED lighting is a viable option when cost isn't an issue, growing fruits and vegetables is a completely different story.