![]() It's not going to be anybody's go-to for industrial applications, but it's more than sufficient to please a plant or two that's struggling through a grey winter or having to move into a darker room in the house. We wanted to make sure to keep the rather simple Aspect model around, as well. A few items left our list entirely, as well, including a less advanced model of the Roleadro Galaxy Series and an older Miaxisun, both of which have been replaced by models far more flexible from the same brands. That's more to do with the incredible heat handling capabilities of the V1200 than it is to do with anything necessarily deficient in the California Light Works model now living at number three. While the G8LED model that topped our last selection maintained its number one ranking, our previous second best has been unseated by the likes of the Viparspectra V1200. Master growers have been known to keep a light meter on hand, so they can confidently fine tune the spacing in their gardens, to maximize yield. These diagrams can be helpful, especially for growers looking to equip large areas and trying to calculate proper spacing, but the notoriously skeptical consumer in me can’t help but wonder about their accuracy. Savvy marketers provide their audience with detailed diagrams, sometimes referred to as PPFD maps, that clearly detail their light’s intensity. Essentially, this measures how many viable photons are going to reach your plants when they're positioned a certain distance below, and a particular distance from, your lights. PPFD is a spot measurement that calculates micromoles per second, per square meter. Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density (PPFD): Quite possibly, this might be the most important metric to consider when shopping for your new lights. Note that this doesn’t describe how much light is getting to your plants, but rather simply how much is being released from the fixture at the point of origin. Photosynthetic Photon Flux (PPF): This is the metric used to measure a given light’s PAR output at the fixture, measured in micromoles per second. ![]() Put simply, PAR is the part of the light spectrum that matters to plants. Just as there are shades of ultraviolet and infrared that are invisible to the human eye, plants can only see light that lands on certain parts of the spectrum, specifically, between 400 and 700 nanometers. Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR): This is the name given to the range of light that plants use for photosynthesis. As far as wattage goes, for all practical purposes you should only be worried about your input wattage, as it speaks directly to how much this fixture is going to cost you in electricity. The way some companies advertise their gear – calling a light with 400, five-watt LEDs a 2,000-watt fixture, without taking efficiency into account – can be extremely misleading, and enough to give the uninitiated a headache. For old-school growers who are used to comparing nominal 400-, 600- and 1,000-watt fixtures, this is going to be a bit of an adjustment, but my advice here is to do your best to forget about wattage. With that in mind, here’s some basic terminology to arm yourself with while you shop: With prices varying so drastically and every company trying to impress you with a different set of numbers, it can be difficult to suss out the good and the bad. This can be an extremely confusing category to shop in, especially for users who don’t have any sort of background in electrical fundamentals or indoor gardening. ![]() We also added the Spider Farmer SF-2000 - which caught our eye with its Samsung and Mean Well components, as well as the the Ezorkas Tri Head and Barrina V-Shape - two relatively low-powered models that we thought were worth including for the portion of our audience that isn’t interested in launching a commercial cannabis operation, but rather is just looking for a bit of extra light to help speed things up with their indoor herb garden or countertop microgreens. During this round of updates, while most of our previous selections proved to still be worthy picks, we did end up replacing the Viparspectra V1200 with the Viparspectra 2020 Pro Series, which, among other improvements, includes a new solid-state cooling system that relies on a large aluminum heat sink in lieu of its four, former cooling fans, which tend to be noisy and are prone to eventual breakdown.
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