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The 1 240 watt led 7 band panel only seem to cover a 1 foot by 2 foot square and once the plants got to 18 inchs high they started to die off near the bottoms. This thing will grow but I would need quite a few to work for what I want. If they did work as advertised this could have been a different story.
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Hello cable24601,
Sadly this is the same exact type of comment I hear from just about everybody that try's LED lighting time and time again. For small low light requirement plants like lettuce there is some potential, but for growing anything substantial and/or a descent quantity of plants they just don't work as the manufactures advertise them to. The reality being that by the time you get enough LED panels to grow what you want, your simply better off using MH and
hps. That's why I always say LED's just aren't ready for prime time yet.
Even if you bought 4 of those 240 watt LED's, you still wouldn't be able to grow a tall plant, unless you placed them around the plant at different heights, and you would still be using almost 1000 watts of electricity. A watt is a watt no matter if it's a LED or MH light, it still costs the same. You would get much better coverage, light penetration, and growth by using 2, 400 watt MH or HPS
lights, and only be using 800 watts of electricity.
Sure you will need some ducting, and couple of fans for ventilating the heat generated by the HID lighting. But ducting is not very expensive at Lowe's, and/or Home Depot. And you don't need expensive inline fans from the hydro store either. Even one $40-$60 dollar blower fan can circulate enough cubic feet per minute (cfm), to exchange the entire volume of air in a 20 by 10 foot greenhouse (200 square feet), that was 10 feet tall (200x10=2000 cubic feet). A blower fan with a 2000 cfm would be plenty for that space. The ducting would just help to pull the air from near the lights, or top of the room first (the warmest air). But a $15-$20 bathroom ventilation fan can be placed inline at the end of ducting coming from each light, and should have plenty of cfm to circulate enough air as well.
I'm just guessing here, but I guess the 240 watt LED's cost about $300 each. Probably about the same for a 400 watt MH and
ballast. So that basically cuts the cost of equipment in half (buying 2 MH, instead of 4 LED's), and uses less wattage to boot. As well as MH and HPS provide much better coverage, light penetration, and thus plant growth. Of coarse you need to add the wattage for the ventilation to the mix, but I think that's a wash. Simply because either way you'll want/need enough ventilation, or the plants will use up all the co2 in the room then stop growing. By circulating fresh air in the room, you replace the used co2, so you need good ventilation either way.