PadawanWarrior
Well-known member
Have you grown with CMH? I swear the buds are more frosty. My favorite setup so far is CMH with LED. My 2 CMH lights are off right now to save some amps from my circuit, but if it could handle the extra watts I'd be using both still. Someday I'll upgrade the circuit. I'm happy with my LED's though too.@Wolverine97
LEC lights are a marketing tool. Somebody selling you normal lights, with a different name, to try and corner you into believing they have something special, that everybody didn't have. Which is a past tense.
By it's right name, it's a cmh. Though the newer HF ballast types with different sockets and outputs, so you don't mix them with your existing cmh.
HPS reached ~1.7umol/w which left the old mh behind. Then new mh came along with 1.9umol/w. This was good while LED was still in it's infancy. Today, LED isn't really developing, and is mature tech. Nobody is buying LED with just 1.9umol/w.
A 315 lamp alone, is about $115. A Mars 300w unit, $230, both the first I saw on Amazon.
The 315 lasts half as long, so there seems good symmetry.
The 315 is 1.95umol/w but most of that light isn't on your plants. It must reflect off something. The driver also needs powering. You won't get 1.8umol/w as a system efficiency.
Back to Mars. Costs the same, but you get 2.8umol/w system efficiency. That is 50% more light, or 33% less power to make as much light.
The reason CMH died is plain to see. A devote user was recently posting as finding new CMH gear was causing a problem. IIRC they were guided towards people still selling it under a false flag. LEC.
It's a zombie product.
We should also look at the blue and UV these produce, and how stunted you want your crop. Possibly a desireable trait in veg, or with very stretchy plants. Making something reluctant to grow isn't an ideal though.
You might want to swap out any 400 MH's you have, with a 315, which is quite equivical. Though LED would actually gain you something instead