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My horticulture lighting guide and other weird interests.

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4

far red light papers 2024

last update: 19 July 2024


  • Far-red: The Forgotten Photons ---YouTube vid by Bruce Bugbee, Utah State (those yield claims and results are for lettuce and not cannabis)

  • [Far-red photons have equivalent efficiency to traditional photosynthetic photons:

implications for re-defining photosynthetically active radiation](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/pce.13730) --this is Bruce Bugbee's argument for including far red light in PAR measurements



photosynthesis in leaves in State 1](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005272813002144)






PRODUCTION](https://api.mountainscholar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e2ce892e-21ec-42f4-b402-7021d58ecc70/content) -master thesis

Field Conditions](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Far-Red-Light-Reflection-from-Green-Leaves-and-on-Kasperbauer/135567932368846ca9ca07bdbffe0b1de99643ad)


0 Comments
2024/07/20
01:44 UTC

12

A far red light primer

last update: 19 july 2024

TL;DR: You likely do not want to add far red light in the most common indoor grow situations like with cannabis. I went through some of the peer reviewed literature, have done my own testing, read through the misinformation that is ever present on cannabis forums, read up on what industry professionals are thinking, and came up with this primer. Far red likely benefits some crops like lettuce.

David Hawley Ph.D of Fluence has a solid primer on far red light that you should read through before reading this primer. He articulates how there is a lot of confusion when it comes to far red light and plant growth.



Quick far red light facts

  • Far red light is defined as light from 700-750 nm or 700-800 nm depending on the source. PAR (photosynthetic active radiation) is light from 400-700 nm only. ePAR (extended PAR) is a definition being popularized by Bruce Bugbee (one of the world's foremost plant lighting researcher) which is light from 400-750 nm and is not recognized by ANSI/ASABE S640 which are the standardized definitions for the "quantities and units of electromagnetic radiation for plants". ANSI/ASABE S640 defines light with a wavelength of 700-800 nm as far red light and in most situations is the correct answer.

  • According to Bruce Bugbee et al, far red photons are equal to PAR photons in photosynthetic capacity, however, things are a little more complex than this blanket statement and far red photons with a wavelength longer than 750 nm have little photosynthetic capacity, and why ePAR is defined as 400-750 nm only. Far red light must be used in conjunction with PAR light for efficient photosynthesis and far red light is very inefficient on its own for photosynthesis.

  • The older past claims of adding far red light to PAR light with plants to significantly boost photosynthesis rates above normal are not being backed by the modern peer reviewed literature although there may still be some synergistic effect. This is commonly called the "Emerson effect" or "Emerson enhancement effect". The Emerson effect must use light that has a wavelength of less than 680 nm (deep red) and greater than 680 nm, and these longer wavelengths of far red light can be used instead of PAR photons to a certain point for photosynthesis. The Emerson effect has nothing to do with flowering nor does it have to do with combining multiple wavelengths of light other than with far red light.

  • Far red light causes increased acid growth which will result in leaves to be larger (but thinner) and stems to be more elongated. This will increase the LAI (leaf area index) of a plant for greater photon capture but you may not want the additional elongation in the stems or inflorescence (flowers/buds). Plants are sensitive to far red radiation through the phytochrome protein group out to about 800 nm and this is why far red is defined as 700-800 nm. But, even longer wavelengths can elicit some responses in plants which is important because many video cameras use 850 nm LEDs for night/dark time illumination.

  • Close to 50% of far red light is reflected off healthy green leaves, depending on chlorophyll levels, and far red also transmits through leaves at a greater rate than PAR light. For reference, perhaps 6-10% of red/blue and 15-20% green light is reflected off a healthy green leaf.

  • Far red LEDs (735 nm) have a higher theoretical maximum PPE (photosynthetic photon efficacy) of 6.14 uMol/joule at 100% efficiency and there are far red LEDs on the market that are >4 uMol/joule. For reference, a 100% efficient 450 nm blue/white LED would be 3.76 uMol/joule. Far red LEDs can be more energy efficient than PAR LEDs.

  • 1-2% of light intercepted by a leaf is readmitted as far red light. This is known as chlorophyll fluorescence and the levels at a particular PPFD roughly tells us about how well the photosynthesis systems in the plant are performing in real time, with lower amounts meaning the plant is doing better. Plants are always exposed to tiny amounts of far red light whenever the plant receives light even from a pure blue light source, as an example, due to the chlorophyll fluorescence from the leaves.

  • Far red generally promotes flowering in long day plants but can be variable in short day or day neutral plants. There may be a difference in far red light on continuously during normal daylight hours versus end of day far red light treatment only.

  • In cannabis, the latest limited research so far is showing that far red light may lower final yields, cannabinoid levels, terpene levels and anthocyanins (purple pigmentation). There are only a few studies on far red light and cannabis and there needs to be more studies before hard claims can be made, but there's a good reason most lights don't have far red LEDs.

  • Far red light can improve yields in some plants other than cannabis such as lettuce by making larger leaves. Far red generally lowers anthocyanin and phenolic compounds in microgreens which is undesirable.

  • If you read about red to far red ratios, it's often the amount of red light specifically at 660 nm and far red light at 730 or 735 nm, rather than all red light and all far red light. It's important to understand what the author means.



Far red photosynthesis and the Emerson effect

Far red light increases photochemical efficiency in photosynthesis and most far red photons are not actually absorbed by a leaf (perhaps 10-20% of far red photons are absorbed in a stand alone leaf depending on leaf thickness).

Far red light must be used with PAR light for efficient photosynthesis, and far red light on its own is very inefficient known as the "red drop effect" (see the McCree curve which is only for monochromatic light). The red drop off effect starts to happen at 680-685 nm so the common 660 nm deep red LEDs are the longest wavelength and the lowest energy photons compared to other PAR photons that can drive photosynthesis efficiently on its own.

PAR (up to 680 nm) and far red (specifically >680 nm in this case to about 750 nm) working together is known as the Emerson effect. There are some papers that claim that red and far red working together can give a significantly greater photosynthetic capacity than normal, and one might find this claim in botany textbooks. However, Zhen/Bugbee claims that red and far red have an equal net photosynthesis, not a greater net photosynthesis, with up to 40% far red light able to be used with PAR and have a linear response, but with longer wavelengths of far red being less efficient:

What's going on with the Emerson effect?

In plants there are two photosystems that operate in series that are involved with photosynthesis: PSII (photosystem 2- named in order of discovery) which is the first step is mostly only sensitive to PAR light and can be over excited by PAR light and not very far red sensitive, while PSI (photosystem 1) works with PAR and far red but can be under excited by PAR light.

To simplify what happens with far red photosynthesis, there are electrons that get transported from the PSII to PSI when illuminated, but the PSI is not quite as efficient at processing these electrons as the PSII with PAR light alone, so we can get a bit of an electron "traffic jam" between the PSII and the PSI (through a few mobile electron transport carriers particularly plastoquinone). By adding enough far red light, we make the PSI act as efficiently as the PSII that clears up this electron "traffic jam". Adding far red increases photochemical efficiency in the leaf and that in a nutshell is how the Emerson enhancement effect works.

But, the PSII (unlike the PSI) is not very far red sensitive, and that's why we can't efficiently drive photosynthesis with far red light alone. This is the "red drop effect" and why PAR has always been defined as light from a wavelength of 400-700 nm. Wavelengths longer than 700 nm (actually starting at about 680 nm) take a nose dive in its photosynthesis efficiency unless that far red light is added to PAR light.

  • PAR alone- good photosynthesis but PSI is not optimal

  • Far red alone- not much photosynthesis because PSII is not working well

  • PAR and far red- the Emerson effect with both PSI and PSII working at maximum efficiently

This all gets into electron transport found in the "z scheme" that is part of light dependent reactions in photosynthesis:

I really want to emphasize this point: PAR as a PPFD measurement is not going away despite new metrics like by Bruce Bugbee promoting 400-750 nm ePAR because far red light really does not work on its own efficiently. Both metrics have their uses and given a personal choice I'd buy an ePAR meter rather than a PAR meter. I elaborate further on this post on /r/budscience on issues with ePAR:

This book chapter below really gets into the fine details of how the Emerson enhancement effect really works:

It's important to understand that there is a difference between net photosynthesis in a leaf and the final yield in a plant. They are closely correlated but not necessarily completely correlated.

This below is a paper stating the far red lower yields in cannabis. As a caution, look at the pics and you'll see that no training is being used which likely affected the results in the study. There needs to be more studies before strong claims can be made.



Efficacy of far red LEDs

TL:DR- Far red LEDs can make engineering sense and have the potential to be more energy efficient than PAR LEDs. Don't get "efficacy" confused with "efficiency".

PPE is the "photosynthetic photon efficacy" of the LED and is a metric pertaining to the amount of photons that are generated compared to the energy input to the LED in joules (watt-seconds). The best white LEDs are currently around 3.1 uMol/joule (micromoles of photons generated per joule) and the best red are a little above 4 uMol/joule.

Far red photons have less energy than PAR photons therefore we can theoretically create more photons per energy input to the LED. To calculate the energy of a photon in electron-volts (eV), take 1240 and divide it by the wavelength to get the energy. Then use 10.37 and divide by the photon eV to get the maximum PPE.

Example for a 735 nm far red LED:

  • 1240 / 735 nm = 1.69 eV <---energy of the photon in eV

  • 10.37 / 1.69 eV = 6.14 uMol/joule <---maximum possible PPE

  • A 100% efficient 735 nm far red LED will have a PPE of 6.14 uMol/joule

Because far red LEDs can have a higher theoretical PPE than red LEDs, due to far red photons having less energy than PAR photons, this means that far red LEDs could be more energy efficient. The maximum efficacy of a 100% efficient 735 nm far red LED is 6.14 uMol/joule, while for 660 nm red it's 5.51 uMol/joule, so a far red LED can put out about 11% more photons than a red LED at the same electrical efficiency.

By comparison, a 450 nm blue/white 100% efficient LED would only be 3.76 uMol/joule.

Of course we don't have 100% efficient LEDs and the best LEDs today have efficiency in the lower 80s% (Samsung LM301B/H). The Samsung LM301 EVO is 86% efficient for the top bin at nominal current levels but uses a 437 nm LED as a phosphor pump rather than more traditional 450 nm LEDs and is rated at 3.14 uMol/joule.

White LEDs aren't going to get much more efficient because it's more than just the electrical efficiency of the LED chip to consider, it's also the quantum efficiency of the phosphors used and the efficiency of the optical extraction of the photons from the LED itself. That 86% efficiency for the Samsung LM301 EVO is close to as high as it's going to go (Ledestar claims white LEDs that are about 89% efficient).

The best far red LEDs are now close to 4 uMol/joule which would be about 65% efficient so there is still room for improvement and there's not a phosphor efficiency hit. The phosphor used in white LEDs also causes some of those photons to scatter and far red (and red) LEDs don't have that issue. The very best 660 nm red LEDs are about 4.4 uMol/joule or 83% efficient under driven a little so there is still a little room for improvement, but not as much as far red LEDs.



Photomorphogenesis

Far red light is a plant morphology (shape) regulator and promotes the shade avoidance response. Far red light will increase the amount of "acid growth" in a plant which causes additional stem/petiole stretching and larger but thinner leaves. These larger leaves can capture more photons and the longer petioles can space the leaves out further both which can increase the canopy LAI (leaf area index).

What happens with acid growth, which is different from growth through photosynthesis, is that the plant cell walls loosen and swell up with water becoming larger than normal that is regulated through the plant hormone auxin (and gibberellins). This is what causes stretching in plants.

If far red LEDs can have a higher theoretical efficacy, and if according to Zhen/Bugbee we can use up to 40% far red light, then why don't we just use 40% far red light in LED grow lights?

Because it's going to hyper elongate your plants if you do, and we may not want that except perhaps in some crops like lettuce. Even then 40% far red is likely excessive even in lettuce which is why Bugbee says to use 10-20% far red instead (source- his YouTube videos). You may read that the sun has a around a 1:1 ratio of far red light, but that is only compared to red light, not the additional green or blue light. 700-750 nm far red makes up around 19% of sunlight as measured as solar 400-750 nm ePAR (but full sunlight has a significantly higher PPFD of around 2000 uMol/m2/sec than what we normally grow at indoors).

Far red increases acid growth mediated through the phytochrome protein group. There are five identified forms of phytochrome (A-E) that play different roles in plants that are in two states: far red light changes phytochrome to Pr and red changes phytochrome to Pfr. It's these two states that determine how phytochrome is expressed.



Photoperiodism

Photoperiod cannabis is a short day plant and the autoflowers are day neutral. Many far red light studies are for long day plants that can react the opposite to short day plants with photoperiodism.

There is evidence that NIR photons can delay photoperiod flowering in cannabis by 3-12 days. The study below has to do with 850 nm photons often used in night time security cameras but the NIR lighting levels are pretty high (Bugbee is 3rd author):

This study claimed no difference in far red light and flowering time but the far red PPFD was pretty low:



Leaf Optical Characteristics

While dark green leaves reflect 6-10% blue/red and perhaps 15-20% green, about 40-50% of far red light is reflected off a green leaf. Far red also has a high transmission through leaves.

The following pics are spectral shots taken with my spectroradiometer:



Far red fluorescence

Any time that a leaf or any part of a plant that contains chlorophyll is being illuminated with PAR light then that plant part is also radiating far red light. Roughly 1-2% of the light absorbed by a leaf is being re-radiated as far red light. This is known as chlorophyll fluorescence (CF) and higher amounts of CF at a particular PPFD means that photosynthesis is less efficient. For example, we can measure the amount of CF to see how well a plant is photosynthesizing like if the plant's roots are dry then the stomata (gas exchange pores) in the leaves close to prevent moisture from escaping. This also cuts off the plant from receiving CO2 shutting down photosynthesis and increasing the CF.

Here is a direct shot of a leaf glowing with far red light. The leaf was illuminated with a 405 nm UV laser. One can use this technique to see leaf damage not normally visible to the naked eye:



SAG's personal thoughts on far red light

Look at what the high end science driven LED manufacturers are doing like Fluence LED. Are they adding far red LEDs to the vast majority of their lights? Nope, just red LEDs. Are there any papers showing that adding far red has a total positive efficacy in cannabis? Not that I've seen so far.

Are there papers showing a positive efficacy with other plants? Yes, but not with cannabis and it can be financially tricky to grow other plants with LEDs as the sole source light (so many commercial vertical lettuce grow ops have gone out of business because they had no realistic business model in the first place, particularly in Europe where energy prices are higher). Microgreens can be grown under LEDs with financial success but far red generally lowers red/purple anthocyanin pigmentation and lowers aromatic phenolic compounds which we don't want.

To me, far red light is that nonsense that causes my plants to start to elongate, and as a tiny grower in particular, that last thing I want is extra elongation in my plants. I would add far red to lettuce, though, to get bigger leaves.

Full sunlight is around a PPFD of 2000-2200 uMol/m2/sec. Such intense light will cause your plants to be very compact, perhaps more than you want. That's where you might want to add far red light and natural sunlight is right around 10-20% far red compared to 400-700 nm PAR light (not compared to the whole solar spectrum). Plants generally have a significantly lower photosynthesis rate at full sunlight levels. Can adding a bunch of far red light change this indoors?

I've seen far red photosynthesis "boosters" for sale such as small far red pucks that are only a few watts. I've seen threads on cannabis forums about "ZOMG!!!" my plants are growing so much better with the far red puck. It's all BS.

Far red lasers are particularly dangerous because you'll see the reflection from the dim beam but might get fooled into thinking that there is not much power in that dim far red beam because our eyes have low far red sensitivity but not zero sensitivity. In 2009 I had a close call with a 20 watt far red laser that I wanted to use with a beam spreader as a far red light source. I looked at the diffuse reflection of the far red beam when first setting it up and took my googles off briefly to help align things (but...but...but...just a quick look! The beam is pointed the other way!). I had a headache for a few days and my eyes felt like they had sand in them. I never use lasers as general light sources anymore, even if using a beam spreader. The conservation of etendue also means that the laser can be focused down to a tiny very intense point which can make wrinkled foil side reflectors in a grow chamber safety problematic unlike with LEDs.

4 Comments
2024/07/20
01:43 UTC

11

Technical aspects of microgreen lighting

part of SAG's Plant Lighting Guide

last update: 21 April 2024

TL;DR- you may want to experiment using low color temperature white lights rather than high color temperature white lights for growing some microgreens and try having the lights on 24 hours per day with the lower color temperature. A lower color temperature may allow you to run your microgreens at high lighting levels for greater photosynthesis. 200-400 uMol/m2/sec is the norm for most microgreens, but some of the papers below show mixed results and promote using a lower PPFD and I've seen commercial growers promote around 100 uMol/m2/sec. Most people's hobby grow ops I see online are likely growing at a lower PPFD.

Although I'm only an amateur grower and experimenter when it comes to microgreens (I have far more experience with cannabis), I did take the time to skim over about 30 peer reviewed papers on the subject of microgreen lighting that are linked below, and I do know the technical aspects of the theory along with almost three decades of indoor growing experience. I'm merely offering some opinions here as it pertains to microgreens.

This YouTube channel has done far more light testing with microgreens than I have done:


Be careful of assumptions

A major issue with making broad statements about very optimal microgreen lighting is that you're dealing with a variety of different plant species: radish, basil, pea etc. With cannabis for example, you're dealing with a single species, and even then different cultivars can have different optimal results in light quantity (the PPFD) and light quality (the SPD or spectral power distribution i.e. the specific wavelengths). Even the optimal photoperiod can be different with different cannabis cultivars according to the very latest research.

This higher variety notion can be magnified even further with microgreens because the same species of a microgreen can have different cultivars with very different optical characteristics in their leaves e.g.- sweet basil with green leaves and purple basil with purple leaves due to the very high anthocyanin content. Another example would be the red radish cultivars versus the green ones. Different cultivars can also have different specific light sensitive protein expressions (although not a microgreen, different tomato cultivars can have very different reactions to light particularly the photoperiod, as an example).

Don't assume that all microgreens have the same optimal lighting conditions.

Don't make assumptions about your light intensity- get a light meter down at canopy levels using a light meter that is cosine corrected and that has a remote sensor head, and not a potentially unreliable phone app.

Don't assume that you can grow hemp microgreens which can be legally problematic without a license in many states in the US like Nevada, even with the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. It costs several thousand dollars to get fully licensed to grow hemp in Nevada and I don't know how the state mandated harvest report would work with hemp microgreens. I believe Arizona has a maximum 14 day old hemp seedling standard for microgreens.

Don't assume a commercial grower actually understands lighting theory. I have yet to meet anyone IRL outside a plant growth lab and very few people online who understand the technical aspects of the theory. I have seen "experts" promote certain wavelengths for plants of pigments only found in algae, for example.


Light intensity and measurement

In horticulture the light intensity is the PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density) measured in micromoles of photons per square meter per second. I write it as uMol/m2/sec although it's often written as µmol m-2 s-1. With white light, and white light only, we can use lux instead of uMol/m2/sec (1) <---read the notes below. For a white light with a CRI of 70 or 80 we can use 70 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec and be within 10% true all of the time of a quantum light meter (assuming both meters are properly calibrated). With modern phosphors using 73 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec and be within 5% most of the time.

For a CRI 90 white light we can use 63 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec and be within 10% all of the time and 65 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec to be within 5% most of the time. For the sun we use 55 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec. To be noted, most professional quantum meters claim no better than 5% absolute accuracy although the good ones I've measured were closer to within 1% as measured with my spectroradiometer. Cheap quantum light meters like the $150 one by Hydrofarm can be a crapshoot due to the sensor used (horrible design!), and the cheap LightScout meters can be problematic from an even different type of sensor used although they will be good enough for white light for non-scientific use. Based on my testing, I would not trust cheap quantum light meters for color LEDs or blurple lights.

For common measurements I use the Apogee SQ-520 for PPFD and the Extech 401025 for lux. For complex measurements I use a Stellarnet Greenwave spectroradiometer.

I have an article on using lux meters instead of quantum light meters for white light with the theory of why we can do this accurately enough:

Due to cosine correction errors, unknown sensor errors depending on the specific phone, and the way that people tend to tilt their phone back when taking a reading, I do not recommend using your phone as a light meter no matter what app you may be using. You can get proper lux meters with a remote sensor head starting at $20-$30, and particularly as a professional or heading in that direction, it's irrational not to have a proper light meter when growing plants. Know your PPFD! Don't use lux meters with the red/blue "blurple" lights- that is a case where you want to use a proper quantum light meter unless you know the lux to uMol/m2/sec conversion value.

I have been generically using 200 uMol/m2/sec (around 15,000 lux) with microgreens but a review of the literature below shows that a higher PPFD may be more optimal for both yield and phenolic content. A lot of those papers below are showing around 300 uMol/m2/sec (around 22,000 lux) may be more optimal depending on the microgreen or even around 400 uMol/m2/sec for some microgreens like basil. Few if any papers promote 500 uMol/m2/sec and above for any microgreen and some promote in the 100 uMol/m2/sec range.

To me it never made sense to have any periods of darkness when growing any vegetative plant but in most plants we are not trying to grow with elongated stems so microgreens are a special case. With some microgreens we want a very elongated stem with very small and immature leaves.

For the 24/7 in vegetative growth argument, generally speaking crop plants don't get "tired" and need to "sleep" in a vegetative state unless perhaps grown at a very high PPFD. This can be demonstrated by measuring the net photosynthesis rate by measuring the amount of chlorophyll fluorescence a plant gives off (1-2% of the light absorbed by a plant is readmitted as far red light, the amount depends on the PPFD and how efficient photosynthesis is working in the plant). I can measure the amount of chlorophyll fluorescence using my spectroradiometer or by using a large area silicon photodiode with a far red filter with a high precision, high sensitivity bench top multimeter (Rigol 3068).

Below is an example of a shot off my spectroradiometer measuring far red chlorophyll fluorescence to measure photosynthesis efficiency. In this case I was seeing how long it takes radish microgreen to "wake up" (30-60 seconds from darkness) and "go to sleep" (3-5 minutes from lights on). Different lighting spectra can give a slightly different signature depending how far the light penetrates the sample leaf. I can use this technique to see how much light a plant can "handle" short and long term (there are also other techniques like measuring the photochemical reflectance index).

  • chlorophyll fluorescence over a few minute period --this is the far red light being emitted by a plant and is radish microgreens "waking up" in this case. Each line represents 2 seconds. The greater the chlorophyll fluorescence at a given PPFD the lower the photosynthesis efficiency. It takes time for certain enzymes involved with photosynthesis to be activated when the lights first turn on.

So generally speaking, running the lights 24/7 is fine for most plants we grow as far as photosynthesis.

To be noted, it is important that microgreen trays have an even PPFD so there is even stem stretching which is a compelling reason to use tube style lights.

SAG tip: if you see people throw around specific wavelengths for photosynthesis, they probably are not understanding how photosynthesis works by wavelength. If you see someone saying you need certain wavelengths for specifically chlorophyll A and B then that is most definitely a red flag and they are likely misunderstanding relative absorption charts for chlorophyll dissolved in a solvent at a relatively low chlorophyll density, rather than how leaves actually work that have a very significantly higher chlorophyll density. The notion that certain wavelengths are needed for photosynthesis simply is not true and all of PAR (400-700 nm) can drive photosynthesis. See this article for the theory:

Here is an example "technical" article where the author very clearly does not understand the theory and there are many, many mistakes in it:


The lighting spectrum

One of the grow goals of many microgreens is long stems. What many people will do is have a period of etiolation (complete darkness) in the beginning of the grow cycle or long periods of darkness each day which encourages acid growth (cellular elongation or stem "stretching") which is different from growth through photosynthesis. Acid growth is basically where the cell walls loosen up and are able to fill up with water. A lower PPFD and lower levels of blue light as a ratio of light also causes this stretching. We don't neccessarily gain any dry yield with increased acid growth beyond increased acid growth also cause leaves to be bigger (and thinner) and thus have a greater light capture area for greater photosynthesis in the individual microgreen, but we will gain a lot more wet yield and that's important with microgreens, particularly if the focus is on having longer stems.

Blue light typically has the greatest effect on plants as it pertains to acid growth through the cryptochrome and phototropin protein groups. Far red light can cause additional acid growth through the phytochrome protein group.

Any discussion on the shape of the plant brought on by light like extra stretching/acid growth gets into photomorphogenesis and how the above mentioned light sensitive proteins are being expressed.

This is what a typical blue action response chart looks like for blue light by the specific wavelength. It's sometimes called the "three finger action response" response in botany. Remember, this is not a photosynthesis chart:

An issue is that most people are using lights with a very high CCT which has a high amount of blue light (2). Blue light generally suppresses acid growth the most and suppresses overall photosynthesis rates a bit in most, but not all, modern peer reviewed articles on photosynthesis rates by different wavelengths. We can see this in the McCree curve where blue light has a lower photosynthesis rate than red light or even 550 nm middle green light (3).

To me it never made sense to use a very high color temperature like 6500K to grow most microgreens because the relatively high 30% or so blue light component may be working against your goal of having longer stems and larger leaves (4). Higher lighting levels also decrease acid growth/stem elongation which is the argument that by having a lower color temperature light that increases stem elongation, we can negate the effects of the higher lighting levels i.e. lower color temperature with less blue at a higher PPFD may be optimal for greater yield while still keeping the stems longer.

To illustrate this point I have some pictures below of radish and peas grown at a PPFD of 200 uMol/m2/sec with the lights on 24/7 for maximum daily photosynthesis rates (a DLI of about 17 mol/m2/day).

If you grow with red/blue "blurple" light instead of white light, you may want to choose a blurple light that has lower amounts of blue light if you want longer stems. Blurple has no green light and green light acts the opposite way than blue light on plants, so it may be worthwhile to use lower amounts of blue to get more stretching (some academics have speculated of unknown green light receptors in plants but I think the blue light proteins are simply reversible like the red/far red phytochrome proteins are).

I've seen a lot of people promote 6500K because it's closer to natural sunlight. That's a bad argument known as "appeal to nature". For example, natural sunlight also has a lot of far red light which will lower anthocyanins and phenolic compounds. A lot of studies coming out show that far red will also reduce yields in some plants. If one wants to appeal to nature then why aren't they also using high amounts of far red light at a red to far red ratio close to 1:1 like it is in nature? There is nothing natural about indoor growing under artificial light sources.

BTW, all white lights are "full spectrum" by definition of having adequate red, green and blue light components. Blurple lights are not "full spectrum" because they don't have green light. It could be the case that people who use the term "full spectrum" are also including some far red and a bit of UV. It's not a recognized industrial term as per ANSI/ASABE S640 and more of a marketing term, so take it for what it is.


pics of some results

To be clear, this is not exactly a peer reviewed study I'm doing, and I'm only showing a few pics to illustrate a point, not to make hard claims. My plant count is not high enough to make hard claims nor would I make hard claims using single small grow containers, nor do I have proper climate controlled grow chambers.

All microgreens I grow are normally at a PPFD of 200 uMol/m2/sec. They are grown with the lights on 24 hours per day with an ambient temperature of 75-80 degrees F and a relative humidity of around 20% in the Mojave Desert (you absolutely can grow microgreens in low humidity environments with experience and proper technique). My CO2 levels tend to be around 700-800 ppm when I'm home.

This is what the grow setup looks like with six, 2 gallon "space buckets" that each have a unique LED configuration (the dark one lower right is actually pure UV-A). Different wavelengths, different color temperatures, some can be pulsed. This allows me to brute force the problem in a relatively tiny area:

I have found that you can get a fairly straight line in the results for peas at 2000K, 3000K, 5000K and pure blue. 2000K had the longest stems and the largest leaves.

Radish was a little different in that 2000K gave the longest stems and the largest leaves but the difference between 3000K and 5000K was not as large. But 2000K is the way that I'd grow radish with how I grow. I let these get a little larger than radish microgreens should be.

  • radish at various CCT --microgreen radish is not normally grown this big and you would not want to eat those shown

I prefer to grow microgreens with a lower CCT and there can be a significant difference between 2000K and 3000K white light in the microgreens I've played with. I prefer to have the lights on 24 hours per day. Your results may vary.


What about adding far red light?

Far red is tricky when it comes to plants. High amounts of far red light will definitely increase acid growth so you will get longer stems. Far red will also easily penetrate through leaves to hit the stems even when leaves block other light (far red is also highly reflected by leaves and ~10% far red is actually being absorbed in a single pass depending on leaf thickness). Far red may help drive photosynthesis in a phenomenon called the Emerson effect (5).

Far red is well known to trigger the "shade avoidance" response in plants by increased acid growth through the phytochrome protein group. The shade avoidance response is simply additional acid growth.

The issue is that you need a lot of far red light to really trigger this response to get the extra elongation, and in some of my personal experiments, far red light may reduce the amount of anthocyanins and this is supported in the literature below. It's almost never the case that we want reduced anthocyanins and "purple" is its own selling point (particularly in cannabis and not just microgreens).

In this study below adding far red light decreased yields and phenolic levels. A lot of studies in plants are showing that far red has no effect on yields or reduces yields:

Far red LEDs do have the potential to have a much higher efficacy than other LEDs and a theoretical 100% efficient 735 nm far red LED would have an efficacy of 6.14 uMol/joule.

As an aside, far red has been a bust so far for cannabis in the literature with lower yields, lower cannabinoid levels, and potential delayed flowering. It could be the case that the benefit of far red is at extremely high, outdoor sunlight PPFD levels.


Why not grow with no blue light?

This may work but you need to experiment with the specific cultivar to make sure that you get the results that you want. Blue and UV can trigger increased anthocyanin production to make the microgreens more red or purple which can be a desirable aesthetic characteristic. Blue and UV can also trigger chemicals to increase the aroma in many plants (increased phenolic compounds) which can be an argument against using lower CCT lights that have less blue light.

Furthermore, in many types of leaves you will not get normal growth without some blue light, and have unequal cellular expansion in the leaf veins and the rest of the leaf material, resulting in leaves that are "crinkled" and unnatural looking. You can see this if you grow many (all?) lettuce cultivars under pure green or pure red light and is sometimes called "red light syndrome" as used in botany.

Although I've done pure green grows, a problem with green is that green LEDs themselves have a relatively low efficacy and efficiency known as the "green gap" in semiconductor physics. Nitride (blue) and phosphide (red) LEDs can be 80% and higher efficiency, but green lies in between those so the best efficiency right now is about 40% for some Cree LEDs and most are significantly lower. This translates to an efficacy of about 1.7 uMol/joule at best (remember that efficacy and efficiency conversion values are wavelength dependent).

Green light generally has the opposite effect on plants than blue light from a photomorphogenesis perspective such as increasing stretching rather than reducing stretching. Green may also reduce anthocyanin and other photochemical byproducts but this gets into how you define green. In many papers, "green" is defined as 500 nm (cyan) to 600 nm (amber) and 501 nm "green" may have different results from 599 nm "green" particularly with anthocyanins. We can actually run into the same definition problem to a lesser degree with "blue" in papers.

The latest Samsung white LM301H EVO LEDs have an efficacy of 3.14 uMol/joule (about 2.9 uMol/joule system efficacy depending on the LED driver) and an efficiency of 86% for the highest bin, so it doesn't make engineering sense to use green LEDs for horticulture when it's better from an energy use perspective to use a blue LED with a phosphor for the green light component. T8 non-LED fluorescent lights, by comparison, have an efficacy closer to 1 uMol/joule and T5 tubes are only a little better. Just say no to old style mercury vapor tube fluorescent lights!


Should you grow with very high CRI lighting?

No.

Very high (above 90) CRI lights have an additional deeper red phosphor(s) in the 660 nm range and a flatter lighting spectrum with shallower spectral dips that is closer to an ideal black body radiation source (which would be CRI 100). Most white LEDs use a 450 nm or so blue LED as the phosphor pump and all the rest of the light generated is through fluorescence of the phosphors. Very high CRI lights are less energy efficient.

If you want this deeper 660 nm or so red then you are better off from an energy consumption perspective to just use lower CRI lights and add 660 nm LEDs to the light source. The latest 660 nm red LEDs can have an efficacy of over 4 uMol/joules (low 80s% efficiency).

Having additional deeper red phosphors lowers the energy efficiency of the white LED by increasing the total Stokes shift (the difference between the 450 nm LED and the wavelength of the emitted light) in the white LED which is why higher CRI LEDs tend to run a bit hotter and have a lower efficacy.

You may want to use higher CRI lights where you prepare and serve food, though, because that extra deeper red will make colors look more natural and get red meats and red fruits/vegetables to "pop" in their appearance. Lower CRI makes colors appear dull and lifeless. Personally I think that low CCT but ultra high CRI lights can look a bit weird for general use (I have a 3000K CRI 97 DIY light by my bed).

I generally recommend CRI 80 grow lights with additional red LEDs as needed.


Gimmick lighting

I have enough experience to be very skeptical with any gimmick lighting and plants. Anything outside normal upper light and side or intracanopy lighting I consider gimmick lighting.

One type of gimmick lighting that might be worth exploring for microgreens is having far red only lights on during the dark period if using a more traditional dark period rather than lights on 24/7. The idea here would be to try to boost acid growth greater than etiolation for more stem stretching. Far red may be able to drive low levels of photosynthesis on its own (the photosynthetic drop off with far red light is called "red drop" in botany).

Pure UV-A is really a no-go. I've experimented with pure UV-A and microgreens and you'll get less photosynthesis using LEDs that are less efficient and end up with dwarfed plants that give a lower yield. You'd have to experiment if you get a significant anthocyanin or phenolic compound boost. UV-A LEDs are also less electrically efficient than PAR (400-700 nm) LEDs.

UV is pretty well known for increasing phenolic compounds. One idea may be to grow with very low blue light and then add UV light in the last 24 hours to try to boost phenolic compound and anthocyanin levels.

Pulsed light is supported in some literature to boost yields 10-15% in some plants although the results in literature are mixed. Instead of say 200 uMol/m2/sec of continuous light, you may use 400 uMol/m2/sec of light at a 50% duty cycle switched at perhaps 500 Hz. They will give the identical DLI (mol/m2/day) but the higher pulsed PPFD could trigger a boost in some photochemical reactions in addition to greater potential yield....maybe.

Pulsed light could be taken a step further and maybe pulse blurple light during one part of the 50% duty cycle, and pulse far red during the other part of the 50% duty cycle, as an example. I have no idea what that would do and just throwing out ideas. I would do this at a much higher frequency like 100 KHz (even most COBs I've pulsed work at >300 KHz and would be junction capacitance limited).


Conclusion

In conclusion, I don't know what's best for you and your particular setup. A trend in the literature below supports around 300 uMol/m2/sec may be best for many types of microgreens. Yield per energy consumption may be best at a lower PPFD, though. For me to completely light profile a specific microgreen would take a few months in my setup because I more than have to try a bunch of spectral combinations, I also have to try various PPFD combinations, and I can only do six combinations at once at a lower plant count.

If I optimal light profile a particular microgreen how much greater yield or greater phenolic compound levels am I really getting? At what point is one just being pedantic? What are the established professionals doing?

But, it may be worth it to try experimenting using lower CCT lights like 2000K at a higher PPFD to get the stems to stretch more and to have larger leaves. This may allow you to run the lights 24/7 for greater photosynthesis and faster harvesting times. You have to weigh this against the possibility of lower anthocyanin and phenolic compound levels than higher CCT lights. You would have to experiment.

I do know that there is some dogma (an authoritative opinion or belief presented as a fact) when it comes to microgreen lighting and vegetative plant lighting in general that may not be true.

Finally, in my opinion there is nothing special about 6500K lights for vegetative plant growth although this narrative is commonly pushed online.


notes

(1)

What is white light is its own article and actually a complicated subject. My definition is not going to be that same as another person's definition and different industries have their own standards. I loosely define a white light source as a light source that collectively emits light that is on or near the Planckian locus of the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram within a certain color temperature range, such as 2700K to 7000K.

For the purpose of this article, I also define white as 2000K although many people would agree that 2000K would be an amber light source, but to me amber is a specific wavelength range. Bridgelux has a "white" LED with a CCT of 1750K that I would not consider white.

Correlated color temperature (CCT) is essentially the red to blue ratio of a white light source with a lower CCT having more red light and a higher CCT having more blue light (green light has nothing to do with CCT). "Correlated" is used because the color temperature of the artificial light source is correlated to the temperature of a light emitting black body radiation source like an incandescent light bulb or the sun in the temperature unit of Kelvin. We normally don't use "degrees" with Kelvin like Celsius or Fahrenheit because it's an absolute temperature scale. It's a "3000 Kelvin" light and not a "3000 degree Kelvin" light, for example.

Color rendering index (CRI) is how well a light source makes colors look compared to a black body radiation source like the sun. Plants don't care about the CRI. The important thing to know, however, is that higher CRI lights have additional deep red light being emitted.

You can look at very high versus lower CRI and CCT charts here:

(2)

The whole idea of 6500K for veg growth gets down to what is the highest color temperature that can be tolerated to be used in shop lights, warehouse lights and the like because the higher amounts of blue light helps with dynamic visual acuity and alertness. It's also close to an illuminant standard used in photometry (standard D) and about where red/green/blue have the same ratio.

6500K lights can be a little more efficient due to the lower amount of Stokes shift in the phosphor (less light is being emitted through fluorescence rather than be directly from the blue LED that is used as the phosphor pump).

There's nothing special about 6500K in growing plants. Quartz metal halides used to be used as HID lighting for plants that had a color temperature of around 4000K.

As an aside, there's nothing particularly special about specifically 2700K lights in flowering other than we may want the reduced blue. 2700K is close to what incandescent bulbs are and why they are popular. HPS is around 2100K.

For modern cannabis growing, around 3500K is fairly typical as both a veg and flowering light, and 3500K CRI 80 is what I use as a standard control light.

(SAG tip for cannabis: if you have a separate higher CCT veg light and a lower CCT flowering light for cannabis, using the higher CCT light for the first two weeks of flowering will greatly help keep the cannabis plants more compact which can be important for tight growing spaces. In the HPS days, I'd encourage people to use metal halides for the first two weeks of flowering for cannabis)

(3)

The McCree curve is only valid from a PPFD of 18-150 uMol/m2/sec and only for monochromatic light. There are papers to support that at a higher PPFD that green can drive photosynthesis greater than even red light due to red light becoming saturated on a leaf's surface while green light can penetrate and drive photosynthesis deeper in a leaf. In most leaves 80-90% of green light is being absorbed.

(4)

This is close to the amount of blue light in a white light source:

  • 2000K is about 3 or 4% blue

  • 2700K is about 10% blue

  • 3500K is about 15% blue

  • 4200K is about 20% blue

  • 6500K is about 30% blue

(5)

Far red (700-750 nm) light "may" increase photosynthesis rates by increasing photochemical efficiency. There are two photosynthetic reaction centers, photosystems 1 and 2. PS2 comes first in the reactions and electrons can get "jammed" up when going from the PS2 to the PS1. PS1 can be driven by far red light so a little far red light can help clear up this electron "traffic jam". This is essentially how the Emerson effect works if adding far red to PAR light. But, the question is how well does it actually work and there are mixed results in actual modern testing.

There has been a push to add far red in normal PAR (400-700 nm) measurements but this has not been adapted as an industry standard. I discuss this here:


links to open access literature

Remember that just because there are optimal conditions in a lab does not necessarily mean those results are optimal for a commercial grow operation.

Yield of Microgreens in Controlled Environments](https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/33aebdc2-e247-4e21-b6dd-ce7c827e57f6/content) ---Ph.D thesis. TL;DR- greater blue decreases stem length and makes leaves smaller

2 Comments
2024/05/01
23:22 UTC

10

Posts I've made to /r/budscience

part of SAG's Lighting Guide

last update: 28MAR2024

/r/Budscience actually contains a lot of quality information and I encourage you to join. These are some of the posts I've done and many of the links have discussions.


This gets into why ePAR has been rejected as an industry standard, so far.


By switching to 13/11 instead of 12/12, this study found 35-50% greater yields. But what about total flowering times?


Far red is being busted with lots of elongation, lower yields, lower terpenes, and lower cannabinoid levels.

UVA lowers things a bit.

UVB elevates some terpenes and lowers others. Total terpenes are lowered.


I also give some tips from my experience with designing and using aeroponic systems.


Light quality (specific wavelengths) really doesn't affect rooting that much.


UV light keeps getting busted!


Bugbee et al. Blue light lowers yields.


A weak study but supports that blue light lowers yields.


Another paper showing the type of light isn't that important for cloning.


SAG gets into more pissing matches! If you make a claim, you need to back it up with evidence. If you say that you have done far red experiments or have grown at 3000 uMol/m2/sec of light (lol...), and if you can't back it up, you're completely and utterly full of shit.

A flawed paper that shoots down far red, yet again.


Study that shows nitrogen is more important than phosphorus for flowering.


Pics of nute disorders.


Every doubling of containers size gives around 43% greater yield in this paper.

0 Comments
2024/03/29
02:27 UTC

23

Cannabis links part 3 (first half of 2023)

update: 21 July 2023

This was sourced from Google Scholar. Around Jan 2024 I'll do another scrape to get all the 2023 papers on a different thread (there's a character limit).

Interesting paper:



  • [A Survey of Modern Greenhouse Technologies

and Practices for Commercial Cannabis Cultivation](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=10149009)

A Foucauldian Genealogy (critical history) of Western Cannabis discourse and knowledge](https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/18857/ShoreMScThesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) --master thesis

medical Cannabis crops: considering human safety, recent- and developing RNAi methods, and research inroads](https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/155338/1/ps.7323.pdf)

  • [THE EFFECTS OF REFLECTIVE PLASTICS ON

FLOWER AND CANNABINOID YIELDS IN DAYNEUTRAL CANNABIS SATIVA L. IN A GREENHOUSE ENVIRONMENT UNDER SUPPLEMENTAL LIGHT](https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/113296/Rice_Howard_Reflective_Mulch_Project.pdf?sequence=1)


cinerea, on cannabis (Cannabis sativa L.) plants grown under greenhouse conditions](https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/cjb-2022-0139?download=true)

Oxidative Tolerance Processes Without Impacting Growth in Young Plants of Hemp (Cannabis Sativa L.)](https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1347314/v1/d1b05050-e2a5-4f1f-851a-61f7176738b1.pdf?c=1647868917)

  • [EFFECTIVENESS OF MYCORRHIZAE AND VERMICULTURE SEED

INOCULATION FOR GERMINATION, VEGETATIVE GROWTH, CANNABINOID CONTENT, AND CURED FLOWER WEIGHT OF CBD-RICH HEMP (Cannabis sativa L.)](https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/16715/BOYER-THESIS-2023.pdf?sequence=1) --master thesis

  • [Varying light intensity can alter metabolic profile and cannabispiradienone

content of industrial hemp](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Muhammad-Roman-5/publication/371834150_Varying_light_intensity_can_alter_metabolic_profile_and_cannabispiradienone_content_of_industrial_hemp/links/6497bf51b9ed6874a5d737af/Varying-light-intensity-can-alter-metabolic-profile-and-cannabispiradienone-content-of-industrial-hemp.pdf)

enhanced phytocannabinoid production in medical Cannabis cultivars](https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2670871/v1/7b944344-3092-4ee8-bc2a-39cb525eb5fb.pdf?c=1678950880)


Growth Broth Improve Biomass and Secondary Metabolite Accumulation of Cannabis sativa L.](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jafc.2c06961)

  • [Cannabis sativa: Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and

Plant Tissue Culture for Micropropagation](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ravindra-Malabadi/publication/372335345_Cannabis_sativa_Applications_of_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_and_Plant_Tissue_Culture_for_Micropropagation/links/64aff4e38de7ed28ba95e7c5/Cannabis-sativa-Applications-of-Artificial-Intelligence-AI-and-Plant-Tissue-Culture-for-Micropropagation.pdf)


  • [Maximizing medical cannabis growth and quality: An evaluation of the effects of

ecological water regeneration in greenhouse cultivation ](https://gsconlinepress.com/journals/gscbps/sites/default/files/GSCBPS-2023-0164.pdf)

Δ9-TETRAHYDROCANNABINOL (THC)](https://www.journalijisr.com/sites/default/files/issues-pdf/IJISRR-1167.pdf)


MEDICINAL CANNABIS: AN UNDERUTILIZED ANCIENT ETHNOMEDICINAL PLANT FOR HUMAN WELLBEING](https://www.xisdxjxsu.asia/V19I02-84.pdf)

  • [Efficacies of Biological Control Agents for Controlling

Fusarium spp. in Soilless Cannabis Cultivation](https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/15726c2f-3822-42d0-93e1-b3ec6843a535/content) --master thesis

Trichome Morphology Analysis and HPLC Phytocannabinoid Content](https://repository.ukim.mk/handle/20.500.12188/25120)

BOTANICAL ORIGIN](http://www.journalijisr.com/sites/default/files/issues-pdf/IJISRR-1178_0.pdf)


Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol Contents in Different Tissues of Four Cannabis Cultivars using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry](https://www.hst-j.org/articles/pdf/KYVd/kshs-2023-041-03-10.pdf)

  • [Combined Effect of Biocompost and Biostimulant on Root

Characteristics of Cannabis sativa L.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ioannis-Roussis-2/publication/371732759_Combined_Effect_of_Biocompost_and_Biostimulant_on_Root_Characteristics_of_Cannabis_sativa_L/links/6492ca78b9ed6874a5c40c25/Combined-Effect-of-Biocompost-and-Biostimulant-on-Root-Characteristics-of-Cannabis-sativa-L.pdf)


Seeds Sown under Organic Growing Technology](http://www.jeeng.net/Formation-of-the-Quality-Indicators-of-Hemp-Cannabis-Sativa-L-Seeds-Sown-under-Organic,166388,0,2.html)

balancing act](https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/cjb-2023-0056?download=true)

  • [Micropropagation of Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.)

](https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/58/3/article-p307.xml)

  • [Study on the Effects of Light Intensity on the Growth and Metabolites of Industrial

Hemp](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4456899)


Prices: Evidence from Cannabis Scanner Data](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10367.pdf)

](https://www.publish.csiro.au/fp/Fulltext/FP22264)

sativa L.) seeds](https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/3098519)


  • [The role of cannabis (Cannabis sativa) cultivation growth

as a driving force in land use and cover change (LUCC) in the upstream part of the Laou river catchment area (Northern Morocco)](https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/dag/dag_a2023v69n2/dag_a2023v69n2p333.pdf)

  • [Using a global diversity panel of Cannabis sativa L. to develop a near InfraRed-based chemometric application for cannabinoid quantification

](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-29148-0)

](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/3/1015) --math models for green houses

  • [Effect of silicon on some growth, physiological and phytochemical properties

of Cannabis sativa L. in soil and soilless culture](https://ecophytochemical.gorgan.iau.ir/article_699775_5c9ec829774ab0787f6398b740557d20.pdf)

  • [Biomass and Nutrient Accumulation by Dual-Purpose Hemp and

Concurrent Soil Profile Water Depletion at Three Locations in Kansas in 2022 ](https://newprairiepress.org/kaesrr/vol9/iss3/4/)

0 Comments
2023/07/21
15:39 UTC

17

SAG's Space Bucket posts linked together

last update: 10 JUNE 2024

part of SAGs Lighting Guide

Latest:



TL;DR- white UFO or PAR38

Lighting level measurements for the white dimming UFO with a five gallon bucket:

Lighting level measurements for the PAR38 build:



bucket cooler/warmer project

This is a current project to come up with a cheap and easy way to cool and warm a bucket.



a discussion on defoliation

If you don't know what you are doing then don't defoliate.



don't underwater your plant!

As a beginner, use the second knuckle rule. Stick your finger in the soil down to the second knuckle and if it feels dry then do a complete and thorough watering (not just around the stem). Experienced growers typically just go off weight of the soil container.



how to do full color fluorescent imaging

This is a great DIY project. If you have a cheap UV laser, go out at night and point it at the grass. The red dot you see is chlorophyll fluorescence. It can help to use a yellow/orange/red filter to look through to block the UV.



FAQ I'm working on



a few examples of bucket builds



testing lights

I tested seven different cheap quantum boards and they all failed. Three were quite deadly. I talk about safety testing and standards in some of the posts.

A quick tip on how to tell if the light is dangerous- look for plastic washers used anywhere in the lights construction. The light maker is playing games with the grounding and it's likely a dangerous light. Lights on Amazon, eBay and the like don't actually need safety testing to be sold (lights bought in store at a Walmart or a big box hardware store will be safe).


7 Comments
2023/05/27
23:52 UTC

21

An analysis of and how to mod the FECiDA UFO LED dimmable grow light

SAG's Light Guide linked together

edit- THIS LIGHT HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO A SAFETY RECALL AND CAN NO LONGER RECOMMEND THIS LIGHT

I discuss this issue here:


This is an analysis and how to hack the generic white dimming UFO grow light that is popular on the /r/spacebuckets subreddit. At $40 it's a pretty ideal solution for lighting up a five gallon space bucket but understand that it is what I commonly call a "junk light" due to the lower quality LEDs and LED driver. I would not use this light for more than a one square foot grow and don't use it normally myself (I DIY most of my lights).

I like the light because there is low voltage on the LEDs that is isolated from ground with the MCPCB (the aluminum plate that the LEDs are soldered to) also being directly grounded. The 13-100% power dimming function is very convenient. It will totally rock a 5 gallon bucket and the current best options now for the 5 gallon bucket is this light or the dual PAR38 setup.

What I don't like is the LED driver itself that has no safety markings. The light fixture itself has a CE mark but I don't trust CE with cheaper Chinese products. Without cracking the LED driver open and reverse engineering it while examining the PCB (eg checking the distance between PCB traces on the line voltage side known as "creepage" and that appropriate line voltage circuit protection is used) I can't truly attest to its safety but it would easily pass a basic electrical safety test. I don't know if it would pass a full UL 1598 (luminaires) test.

This light also blows hot air down through the light and into the bucket and we really don't want that. Below I discuss how to flip the fan so it sucks air out of the bucket instead and if you should do this mod.



PPFD (light intensity in the bucket)

Test conditions: inside a 5 gallon bucket, aluminum foil liner, Apogee SQ-520 quantum PAR sensor, the light placed on a lid with a hole cut in it. "medium power" is an estimate and may differ a bit from the measurements.


10 inches below the light:

  • full power: 1354 µMol/m2/sec

  • medium power: 780 µMol/m2/sec

  • lowest power: 173 µMol/m2/sec

6 inches below the light:

  • full power: 1570 µMol/m2/sec

  • medium power: 925 µMol/m2/sec

  • lowest power: 196 µMol/m2/sec

3 inches below the light:

  • full power: 2950 µMol/m2/sec

  • medium power: 1630 µMol/m2/sec

  • lowest power: 382 µMol/m2/sec



electrical characteristics

Gear used: Rigol DM3068, Fluke 287, Siglent SDS1202X-E, TinySA


LED driver frequency: about 63 KHz

max voltage on LEDs: 40.292 volts DC

average current : 1.294897 amps (5 minute average after 10 minute warm up, 74 F ambient)

current standard deviation: 377.6441 µA (as above conditions)

ave current / std dev = 3429 (ENOB = 11.7) --this is a figure of merit

true power on the LEDs: 52.174 watts

fan power draw: 0.81 watts (70 mA at 11.5 VDC)

power draw light fixture: 61.0 watts

minimum power draw light fixture: 6.4 watts

power supply electrical efficiency: 86.9%


Take a look at the RFI (radio frequency interference) pic above with the tiny spectrum analyzer. That's all noise being generated. As a ham radio operator/geek I can't have such a light around and it will also interfere with some of my high gain amplifiers. From almost DC to 80 MHz I'm getting interference. I've tested worse lights but this is pretty bad.



optical characteristics

Gear used: Stellarnet Greenwave spectroradiometer


CCT: 4631K

lux to PPFD ratio: 68 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

chromaticity coordinates: x = 0.340, y = 0.318

DUV = -0.0158 --this is how far off from an ideal white light source we are (black body radiation source and it's that line in the middle of the 1931 chromaticity diagram also called the "Planckian locus"). For normal light bulbs we want +/- 0.006


SAG tip: I want people to see a close up pic of a red LED on this light:

That's not really a red LED but rather a blue LED with a red phosphor. Normally we would never buy a light that has these sorts of very low performing LEDs on a light. That's a red flag to normally never buy the light. Actual red LEDs will have a clear package and if you get in close you should be able to see a real red LED's die. Blue LEDs, also used in white LEDs, are so cheap due to economy of scale, that this is a way for low end light makers to advertise that they have red LEDs when they really don't (but they still put out red light). Lots of the really cheap lights on Amazon use this trick but not all of them do.



how to open the light up

Obviously when you modify a line voltage device that you assume full liability when doing so. This light is fairly safe because all of the internal parts are insulated and the aluminum heat sink for the LEDs is directly grounded. I wouldn't do more than flip the fan because that's still a cheap power supply with no safety markings.

You need to drill out the heads of the rivets. Put the light on a folded heavy towel or something to protect the light's dimmer knob and take a 1/4 inch drill bit and just drill down into the center divot in the rivet. The head should pop off and the rivet's pin should fall out. If the pin does not fall out you may need to take an awl of something with a hammer and pop it out. In the worst case you can drill the pin out and retap the hole.

I bought an assorted pack of stainless steel machine screws, found the right size, and forced them in the holes causing them to be rethreaded. You have to be careful doing this because it's easy to strip the holes.

Ideally you get in there and scrape some of the paint/enamel off so that the head of the screw makes a better ground bond contact. You need a dremel tool or something similar. The enamel is tough and did not want to come off:

An issue is the ground bond and how the rivets and now the screws are part of the light's grounding system. The aluminum heat sink is directly grounded but the rest of the light is grounded through the rivets/screws. A solution/hack is to drill/tap a ground point on the light fixture and tie all of the grounds together (this is what I would do). I don't know how legal the grounding is because the ground bond should be on the same metal as the power input to the light but "same location" could be interpreted differently (I doubt it):

  • UL 1598: *6.14.2.2 The grounding means shall be in the same location as the power supply connection means and

shall be a pigtail lead grounding conductor, a pressure terminal connector, a wire binding screw, or the equivalent*

I can measure a good ground bond using the screws with a muiltimeter but that's not how ground bond points are tested. It requires high current then you measure the voltage drop across the junction. The ground bond point and system has to handle 30 amps for 2 minutes:

  • UL 1598: *17.2.3 The test of impedance shall be performed by passing a 30 A current from a part to be grounded

to the grounding terminal means for a period of 2 min and measuring the potential drop between them at the end of the period* --(no more than 4 volts drop after 2 minutes)

But to be clear, that sort of ground bond testing is done at the manufacturer level and electricians don't normally do ground bond testing because we only work with certified products in the first place and have been well trained in their use (no product safety marking means no install which in the US is covered under state electrical codes rather than the National Electrical Code).



The fan mod

The 0.8 watt fan in the light really sucks and is not pushing a lot of air. I partially damaged the power supply when I shorted the fan wires. Now when the power light switch is in the off position but still plugged in, the light will quickly strobe on and off at minimum power. When power supplies strobe like this it typically is responding to a shorted condition or the short circuit circuitry has been damaged. Don't do this.

When I flipped the fan and put everything back together the light stayed cool and at 75 degree F ambient I can press the palm of my hand into the LEDs at full power and keep it there for at least for seconds (I strive for 4 seconds, if I have to remove my hand after an honest one second then it is getting too hot).

But, when I had the now modded light on a bucket and measured the temps I was getting a 10 degree F rise over ambient inside the bucket. That's ok if your temps are low but we normally do not want such a temp rise.

By simply putting another cheap fan on top of the existing fan I was able to draw enough air through the bucket to have less than a 3 degree F rise. That's more like it and it's ready to grow some cannabis. I used a cheap 60 mm fan as the additional fan and shows just how bad of a fan that came with the light is.

Can you just swap out the fan with a better fan? Maybe....I did for about 10 minutes and it worked but the new fan was drawing about 200 mA while the original fan draws 70 mA. 130 mA seems small but that's triple the current draw and with such a cheap power supply I would not do this. I would have to open up the LED driver and take a hard look before I could recommend triple the current even at these smaller current levels. The fan power supply itself is not well regulated and drifts above 15 volts in an open condition and dropped from 11.5 to 11 volts with the better fan.



Is it worth modding this light?

You should know what you are doing. This isn't really dangerous like removing the cover from a light bulb and everything is insulated...or is it? I have to test the insulation to close to 1700 volts DC to make that claim in this case and my insulation tester only goes to 1000 volts. I need (1000 volts * 1.41) + twice the supply voltage and that illustrates the problem with making electrical safety claims. It tested safe for me but I don't have the gear to actually do the needed test and high voltage testing is often destructive testing.

I personally like the fan flip mod using the external fan but at the end of the day I would be recommending a mod with a no safety marking LED driver and modification to the grounding system. The existing rivets actually give a pretty good ground bond (not legit but just using a multimeter in a 4 wire Kelvin setup their junction point is less than 0.1 ohms).

Another mod would be to just remove the LED driver with a better driver and run a better fan off a separate 12 volt power supply. You could flip the aluminum heat sink around and mount your own LEDs.

So I'm torn- if you have experience then modding appears somewhat safe and it will improve the performance of your bucket system. If you have no experience you'll likely mess up drilling out the rivets and/or stripping out the holes when you try to self-tap the screws and have a poor grounding system (or more poor as the case may be).

Think before you drill and don't blame me if things go wrong.



What is ENOB? (going down the rabbit hole with power supplies)

ENOB means "effective number of bits" and used with ADC/DAC circuitry and their circuitry (op amp, voltage references etc).

I use this as a figure of merit with power supplies to test how stable and how much noise there is in the power supply. It's usually for voltage but in this case I tested for current since the light has a constant current power supply. I want to know just how constant the constant current is and have a simple figure of merit.

You need high resolution to get this number and the multimeter itself always needs a higher ENOB than the power supply being tested.

What I do is use a 6.5 digit, 2 million count multimeter (Rigol DM3068) and let the multimeter and the light warm up for at least 10 minutes. With high resolution multimeters you have temperature considerations and in the first 10 minutes my multimeter can drift as much as 40 ppm or 0.004% which is way too much for good accuracy and precision. I let my multimeter warm up and then compare it to a precision voltage reference that I never turn off and that is how I try to get closer to a few ppm error very short term (the resolution is actually 0.5 ppm true or 0.035 ppm with 100 times over sampling).

I'm likely closer to perhaps 3-5 ppm off if not more depending on how my voltage reference is feeling that day and what the room temperature is. Even the best 8.5 digit multimeters on the market can only guarantee 7-8 ppm (4 ppm ultra high accuracy option) over a one year period but they tend to perform better than that.

Anyways, then I hook the light up to read current and let the meter do a running average over a 5 minute or so period. While the meter is doing that it's also precisely measuring the standard deviation of the current or how much noise and drift there is. I divide the current numbers, take the base 2 log of that number, and that's how I get my ENOB.

For example from above:

  • average current: 1.294897 amps

  • current standard deviation: 377.6441 µA

  • average current / std dev = 3429 (1294897 / .0003776441)

  • Log2(3429) = 11.7 and this is how I get the bits.

So if this were a voltage reference I know it's stable enough for a 11.7 bit system (ignoring decimation techniques). I may be able to get away with using it with a 12 bit ADC but 8 or 10 bits is a better idea.

An ENOB of 11.7 is not good but when you consider the price point of the light and consider the application of the LED driver it's not bad either. It's an RF noise generator but at least it's a consistent RF noise generator.


What is the ENOB of my multimeter? Well it's 2 million count and Log2(2 million) is about 21. With 100 times over sampling I'm theoretically at closer to an ENOB of 25 very short term (as per data sheet of 0.035 ppm resolution over sampled). That 100 times over sampling is actually 100 NPLC or "number of power line cycles" because with higher resolution multimeters you have to take instabilities that the power line causes into account and by precisely integrating over power line cycles there is a lot of noise that we can get to drop out. I doubt I'm truly seeing these numbers.


What calibrates the calibrator?

Quantum mechanics and liquid helium.

Once we used to use special batteries called a Weston cell that would put out 1.018638 volts but that's not really good enough for the 7.5 and the 8.5 digit multimeters and the Wetson cell has some tiny temperature drift.

With the Josephson voltage standard we can use a microwave frequency to control the voltage output and microwave frequencies can be ultra precise using small atomic clocks (rubidium or cesium frequency standards). I don't pretend to understand how it all works. But there are government and commercial labs (eg NIST, Fluke) that have these voltage standards and what people can do is ship in their 8.5 digit multimeters to be calibrated "against the stack" or use a traveling standard with a precision temperature controlled buried Zener diode calibrated to multiple stacks that can calibrate the 8.5 digit multimeters:

https://us.flukecal.com/products/electrical-calibration/electrical-standards/732c-734c-dc-voltage-reference-standards

I only have 6.5 digits so I can use low cost calibration standards that have been calibrated to an 8.5 digit multimeter.

https://voltagestandard.com/001%25-10v-reference --(initial calibration is 0.5 ppm with a 2000 hour burn in and calibrated to your choice of temperature)

If you really want to go down the rabbit hole then there is a YouTuber named Marco Reps where you'll learn about the "precious PPMs" with dry German humor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZxJR3C0N0c

5 Comments
2023/05/11
14:07 UTC

34

SAG's Open Cannabis Links part 2

11 NOV 2022

Part of SAG's Lighting Guide


I ran in to the 40,000 character limit with part 1

I still have to take time to organize everything! I have over 250 papers to go over and reorganize. This is less than half of all cannabis papers that have now been published.




Most interesting and contradicts Bruce Bugbee:



and content on photosynthetic pigments in hemp (Cannabis sativa L.)](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tomas-Vyhnanek/publication/361585129_Effects_of_intermittent-direct-electric-current_IDC_on_growth_and_content_on_photosynthetic_pigments_in_hemp_Cannabis_sativa_L/links/62bad80b5e258e67e10bd772/Effects-of-intermittent-direct-electric-current-IDC-on-growth-and-content-on-photosynthetic-pigments-in-hemp-Cannabis-sativa-L.pdf) (I'm highly skeptical of this stuff)


  • [Effects of chitin and chitosan on root growth, biochemical defense response1

and exudate proteome of Cannabis sativa](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.27.514128v1.full.pdf)

  • [An Uncertain Middle Ground: Burford Abstention in Federal Cannabis ContractAn Uncertain Middle Ground: Burford Abstention in Federal Cannabis Contract

Enforcement Actions Enforcement Actions](https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1741&context=udlr) (legal)

Botrytis cinerea and Other Cannabis Fungal Pathogens](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1falLDyyv4vmPg2FM4cCgbnzentajb-qL/view)

HEMP POWDERY MILDEW THROUGH HOST RANGE DETERMINATION, FUNGICIDE USE, AND GENETIC HOST SUSCEPTIBILITY](https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/111926/Cala_cornellgrad_0058F_13268.pdf?sequence=1) (PhD thesis)


a sustainable future.](https://sciforum.net/manuscripts/12359/manuscript.pdf) (India)


  • [Horticultural Management and Environment Control Strategies for Cannabis

(Cannabis sativa L.) Cultivation](https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10214/26674/Hoogenboom_Jennifer_202201_MSc.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y) (master thesis)



THE PRODUCTION OF QUALITY FULL-SPECTRUM CANNABIS EXTRACT FOR MEDICINAL PURPOSES](https://eprints.unite.edu.mk/963/1/Acta%20Medica%20Balkanica%20FINAL%20FINAL-119-128.pdf)

DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN YOUNG MALE AND FEMALE HEMP PLANTS](https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/196502/HIGGINS-FINALTHESIS-2022.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) (senior thesis)


sativa L.) cultivars sown on three dates in Canterbury](https://www.agronomysociety.org.nz/files/ASNZ_2021_07._3_hemp_cvs_growth_effects_Canterbury.pdf) (New Zealand)

and Cannabinol Formation in Cannabis Resin at Various Temperature and pH Conditions](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wuttichai-Jaidee/publication/352206874_Kinetics_of_CBD_D_9_-THC_Degradation_and_Cannabinol_Formation_in_Cannabis_Resin_at_Various_Temperature_and_pH_Conditions/links/619c9701d7d1af224b1a1a72/Kinetics-of-CBD-D-9-THC-Degradation-and-Cannabinol-Formation-in-Cannabis-Resin-at-Various-Temperature-and-pH-Conditions.pdf)

  • [Optimization of the Decarboxylation of Cannabis

for Commercial Applications](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.iecr.2c00826) (free download at bottom of page)

80 ________________________________________________________

Cannabinoid Content: A Review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9404914/)

from Iran: Quantifying Diversity to Underpin Future Cannabis Breeding](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357704283_THC_and_CBD_Fingerprinting_of_an_Elite_Cannabis_Collection_from_Iran_Quantifying_Diversity_to_Underpin_Future_Cannabis_Breeding)

90 _____________________________________________

in hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) using gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s42238-022-00161-w.pdf)

to visualize root development and monitor growth parameters, as applied to an elicitor response of Cannabis sativa](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13007-022-00875-1.pdf)

5 Comments
2022/11/11
17:06 UTC

60

SAG's open access cannabis links

SAG's Open Access Cannabis Links

last update: 11 NOV 2022 (added 100 papers in part 2)



  • Most links are for THC cannabis but some are for hemp or CBD and found primarily using Google Scholar. At the very bottom is a recently added section which will likely be every few months.

  • Please report dead links! You sometimes have to look around a bit to find the actual PDF download in the page linked to.



Highlights



Cannabis spectral and lighting

--THESIS


--ULTRAVIOLET


--SPECTRUM AND LIGHTING LEVELS





the Production of Cannabinoids](https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/510146)



Commercial Cultivation

--THESIS

an Indoor Growing Facility](https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/44222/Ghodsian_washington_0250O_20433.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) master thesis

  • [An Environmental Analysis of Recreational

Cannabis Cultivation & Processing](https://digital.wpi.edu/downloads/gx41mm39x) senior thesis


--ENERGY


--BUSINESS


IN METRO VANCOUVER](http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/solid-waste/SolidWastePublications/CannabisReport.pdf)


--ENVIRONMENT AND SAFETY

cultivation facilities in Denver, Colorado](https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/19/13973/2019/acp-19-13973-2019.pdf)

  • [Growing practices and the use of potentially harmful chemical

additives among a sample of small-scale cannabis growers in three countries](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/126618/1/DAD_GCCRC_Chemicals_paper_ACCEPTED_PROOF.pdf)



  • [The greenhouse gas emissions of indoor cannabis

production in the United States](https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/e2/60/e295ff9744eab576ce7fa326b729/cannabis-nature-1.pdf)

additives among a sample of small-scale cannabis growers in three countries](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/126618/1/DAD_GCCRC_Chemicals_paper_ACCEPTED_PROOF.pdf)


--CULTIVATION


)




Root zone

in Soilless Cannabis Cropping Systems: Implications for Growth Promotion and Disease Suppression](https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/16079/11/soderstrom_l_200923.pdf)


production?](https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202012.0736/v1)



Propagation and genetics


the domestication history of Cannabis sativa](https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.abg2286)





AND MAGNETIC FIELD STIMULATE SEED GERMINATION AND SEEDLING GROWTH OF Cannabis sativa L.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hassan-Feizi/publication/344868325_TITANIUM_DIOXIDE_NANOPARTICLES_AND_MAGNETIC_FIELD_STIMULATE_SEED_GERMINATION_AND_SEEDLING_GROWTH_OF_Cannabis_sativa_L/links/5f94fd27299bf1b53e4392d2/TITANIUM-DIOXIDE-NANOPARTICLES-AND-MAGNETIC-FIELD-STIMULATE-SEED-GERMINATION-AND-SEEDLING-GROWTH-OF-Cannabis-sativa-L.pdf)



Biochemistry


Preferences in Legal Recreational and Medical Cannabis Cultivation Operations in Oregon and Colorado](https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1045029/v1/c94b423f-223a-4223-ac83-2fb3d01c104c.pdf?c=1636577854)

“Karma Lemon” Cannabis Producing Cannabinoids in Thessaloniki-Greece](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dani-Fadel-2/publication/342267867_Yielding_Morphological_Characteristics_and_Biochemical_Analysis_of_Karma_lemon_Cannabis_Producing_Cannabinoids_in_Thessaloniki-Greece/links/5eec4721299bf1faac627fc0/Yielding-Morphological-Characteristics-and-Biochemical-Analysis-of-Karma-lemon-Cannabis-Producing-Cannabinoids-in-Thessaloniki-Greece.pdf)


for medical purposes](https://www.scielo.br/j/rod/a/k69ddvqc5cgCTmKmRfBGqmS/?format=pdf&lang=en)




Recently added

39 papers added 20may22

  • [Technological surveillance of medical Cannabis

horticultural production](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claudia-Jimenez-Hernandez/publication/360247058_Technological_surveillance_of_medical_Cannabis_horticultural_production/links/626b15a7bfd24037e9dd0523/Technological-surveillance-of-medical-Cannabis-horticultural-production.pdf) -gets in to keywords for research searching

  • [Horticultural Management and Environment Control Strategies for Cannabis

(Cannabis sativa L.) Cultivation](https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10214/26674/Hoogenboom_Jennifer_202201_MSc.pdf?sequence=3) -master thesis

  • [Expanding Research Initiatives Relating to Micropropagated

Cannabis sativa L. Through Integration of Multidisciplinary Methods](https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10214/26872/Pepe_Marco_202204_MSc.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) -master thesis

  • [Beyond vegetables: effects of indoor LED light on specialized metabolite biosynthesis in

medicinal and aromatic plants, edible flowers, and microgreens](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/jsfa.11513) -spectral manipulation

Morphology and Increase THCA Yield in Medicinal Cannabis](https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/agronomy/agronomy-12-00852/article_deploy/agronomy-12-00852-v3.pdf?version=1650433838) -mix and match scion and rootstock


  • [A Comprehensive Review on the Techniques for Extraction of

Bioactive Compounds from Medicinal Cannabis](https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/molecules/molecules-27-00604/article_deploy/molecules-27-00604.pdf?version=1642505610)

in southeastern Brazil](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Virginia-Carvalho-4/publication/359970580_Chemical_profiling_of_Cannabis_varieties_cultivated_for_medical_purposes_in_southeastern_Brazil/links/626803dbbca601538b6a83e3/Chemical-profiling-of-Cannabis-varieties-cultivated-for-medical-purposes-in-southeastern-Brazil.pdf)


cultivé en hydroponie : impact de N, P et K sur la croissance, productivité et qualité](https://corpus.ulaval.ca/jspui/bitstream/20.500.11794/73208/1/37951.pdf) -French and English, Concentrations above 25 ppm P and 175 ppm K, however, did not improve the productivity and the quality of the inflorescences

  • [Analytical Techniques for Phytocannabinoid Profiling

of Cannabis and Cannabis-Based Products—A Comprehensive Review](https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/molecules/molecules-27-00975/article_deploy/molecules-27-00975.pdf?version=1643709174) -42 pages

A Methodology for the Differentiation between Hemp and Marijuana Samples](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Virginia-Carvalho-4/publication/352699641_Facing_the_Forensic_Challenge_of_Cannabis_Regulation_A_Methodology_for_the_Differentiation_between_Hemp_and_Marijuana_Samples_Presumptive_and_confirmatory_methods_for_hemp_and_marijuana_analysis/links/613fc9246c61e2367c79866a/Facing-the-Forensic-Challenge-of-Cannabis-Regulation-A-Methodology-for-the-Differentiation-between-Hemp-and-Marijuana-Samples-Presumptive-and-confirmatory-methods-for-hemp-and-marijuana-analysis.pdf) -High-performance liquid chromatography


  • [Empirical Evaluation of

Inflorescences’ Morphological Attributes for Yield Optimization of Medicinal Cannabis Cultivars](https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC9063709&blobtype=pdf)

  • [Post-Harvest Operations to Generate High-Quality Medicinal

Cannabis Products: A Systemic Review](https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/molecules/molecules-27-01719/article_deploy/molecules-27-01719.pdf?version=1646558142)

  • [Industry-Based Misconceptions

Regarding Cross-Pollination of Cannabis spp](https://fjfsdata01prod.blob.core.windows.net/articles/files/793264/pubmed-zip/.versions/1/.package-entries/fpls-13-793264/fpls-13-793264.pdf?sv=2018-03-28&sr=b&sig=CXXYYZNpxKylburRHjpV8SUv%2FKIjJP4RiGlql2EWJ2o%3D&se=2022-05-20T04%3A12%3A13Z&sp=r&rscd=attachment%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27fpls-13-793264.pdf)

  • [Cannabis for Medical Use: Versatile

Plant Rather Than a Single Drug](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paula-Berman-2/publication/360165558_Cannabis_for_Medical_Use_Versatile_Plant_Rather_Than_a_Single_Drug/links/626623328cb84a40ac889101/Cannabis-for-Medical-Use-Versatile-Plant-Rather-Than-a-Single-Drug.pdf) -biochem

  • [Post-Harvest Operations to Generate High-Quality Medicinal

Cannabis Products: A Systemic Review](https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/molecules/molecules-27-01719/article_deploy/molecules-27-01719.pdf?version=1646558142)

  • [What do we know about opportunities and

challenges for localities from Cannabis legalization?](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/ropr.12460)

  • [Weeding out the Dealers?

The Economics of Cannabis Legalization](https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=783031087103096101022070111097121074031015063050001069009037027033120068020026109077071004017090030117029029075068068118080104006077028086015072041099041088099046095097085123098005095120125028055107046054063120094095123006088004027024101071121029008085091127001118082000023098015025111&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE) -69 pages

10 Comments
2022/01/15
22:38 UTC

38

Bruce Bugbee AMA Highlights and Commentary

Bruce Bugbee AMA highlights and commentary

part of SAG's Lighting Guide

Bugbee AMA <<<link to the AMA

last update: 13 SEP 2021



Organic vs synthetic fertilizers

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha66mu4/

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6ate2/

I think "organic" is non-sense and stopped using it in the late 1990's (I'll go ahead and put that flame suit on now!). For me and cannabis, it was/is a consistency issue. I knew a lot of growers (Seattle area) who would use hot organic soils, and in many instances get leaves all curled up due to phosphorus levels being way too high affecting taste and how the pot smokes (I thought this was a huge problem in Amsterdam in the late 1990's). Or the lower leaves may start yellowing much too early. I prefer everything dialed in perfectly from start to finish and expect all leaves to be green when harvested.

But, fertilizers and "organic" are outside my specialty, and I do not engage in debates over it. My mantra has always been, "find what works for you and stick with it". I use General Hydroponics 3 part flora with the same 1:1:1 ratio (NPK of 7/6/11) for everything and every plant. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are about the same with very high potassium levels (all protein/enzyme synthesis relies on potassium, and plays a role in many other plant processes like photosynthesis and carbohydrate metabolism). I use the same fertilizer ratios for radish seedlings as I do for flowering cannabis, with the same pH for hydro and soil (around 6.5), but at different strengths. I need consistency so my motivations may be different than yours because I enjoy researching plant lighting, not plant fertilizers.

Because I use potassium hydroxide for pH control, my potassium levels are even higher than what's mentioned above.

Even outdoors I avoid organic fertilizers. I have seen nitrifying bacterial inoculations perform very well outdoors, and I'm sure it works well indoors, too.

I would like to say that I'm quite pleasantly amused that Bugbee is not a fan of organic! Take that, hippies. /s

"find what works for you and stick with it"



Veg vs flowering fertilizers

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha64ihk/

I use the same for everything.



Fertilizer strength

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6du4n/

TL;DR- EC of 1.4

This is in the ballpark of what I run cannabis at.



pH with lime

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6328a/

Lime is a pH buffer in that it stays in the soil. I personally use potassium hydroxide, and I do tend to run my pH a bit higher than most people.



Container size

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6f985/

TL;DR- the bigger the better. There is a good meta-study below. It likely has to do with cytokinin levels which is a hormone responsible for cellular division, and higher cytokinin levels in the roots means higher cytokinin levels throughout the plant. Bonsai plants have small leaves due to small root mass. Not all plants can be turned in to a true small bonsai plant, though.

A case for smaller containers may be the sea of green style of growing. But, taller containers that are narrow stills means one can have a larger container size. BTW, legal reasons and plant count is a compelling reason not to do sea of green.



Flushing

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha69aqr/

TL;DR- don't bother in most cases. Below is what he's referring to.

I can honestly say that no one can ever tell if I flushed a plant or not.



Pruning

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha65974/

TL;DR- minimal

This is another amusing response because I tend not to prune, either. I prefer to light up the lower leaves rather than prune. Airflow issues may be a good reason to prune, though. People often over prune and a photon that is absorbed by the soil is a wasted photon.



Mediums

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6dzmq/

Don't ask too many question in a single post!



Powdery mildew

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6gamw/

TIL about silicon levels in the soil and PM (powdery mildew). For me, I use strains not prone to PM, and use a half teaspoon of baking soda and a drop of liquid soap in a standard size spray bottle to spray on the leaves for PM. This raises the pH of the leaf surface so PM can't grow. I'm highly allergic to PM and know if it's there before it becomes visible.



Heirloom strains

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha67xj0/

I think a lot of heirloom strains suck. I've grown original strains that were around in Seattle in the 1980's, and the Dutch did wonders in correcting their many flaws in the 1990's. Original Big Bud from the 1980's is very prone to botrytis (gray mold) and "banana hermies", the Dutch version does not have these issues.

These newer strains out are superior to most heirlooms in most every way. An heirloom that I am very fond of is Durban Poison which is a South African pure sativa that is an 8 week plant with very high yields. Durban Poison x Northern Lights #5 is also a favorite and another huge yielder.



Spectrum tuning

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6c3mi/

Spectrum shapes the plant, but high light increases yield- Bugbee. This is perfectly written.

....

High efficacy (the technical term for efficiency) is more important than spectrum- Bugee. This is horribly written.

NO, just NO! Efficacy is absolutely not the technical term for efficiency, particularly in lighting, and I don't know why he wrote this. There are many instances where efficacy and efficiency will be the same, but I've never seen them the same in lighting. Never.

I would have wrote it as, "in general, light quantity is more important than light quality".

Say I have a 450 nm blue LED that is 2.8 umol/joule and a 660 nm red LED that is 2.8 umol/joule. Those are identical efficacies, right? That is the PPE or "photosynthetic photon efficacy". But that blue LED has an electrical efficiency of 74% and the red LED has an efficiency of 51%. Refer to my cheat sheet under the Energy and efficacy of photons for the math, and why I'm right.

But SAG, he has a PhD and you barely graduated high school with a GPA of 2.3 and never even took high school biology! I don't care, he's wrong here.

Luminous efficacy and luminous efficiency are also no where close to being the same. Not even the same ballpark. I talk about this in my cheat sheet linked to above under "Luminous efficiency and lux meters", and show a luminous efficiency chart. Luminous efficiency is in percentage sensitivity for a certain wavelength of light relative to 555 nm and the spectral response of the human eye, luminous efficacy is lumens per watt. Those are not close to being the same. It mixes things up but I can also have a red 660 nm LED that will have a luminous efficiency of about 6%, could have an electrical efficiency of 60%, and this gets us a photosynthetic photon efficacy of 3.3 uMol/joule that would have a luminous efficacy of about 25 lumens per watt.

  • Luminous efficiency chart from the book, "Introduction to Radiometry and Photometry" and an example of "fair use" under 17 USC part 107.

He's actually been wrong on other stuff like claiming UV photons are "hundreds or thousands of times more powerful" than PAR (source- 4 minute mark on video, How Ultraviolet Radiation Affects Plants with Dr. Bruce Bugbee). Photons of those energy levels would be x-rays or soft gamma rays (depending how they are generated- x-rays are emitted from electrons, gamma rays are from atomic nucleus but can have the same energy levels), and this will quickly kill the plant.

Even if he's talking about a UV beibg thousands of times more powerful for a photomorphogenesis effect, he still has to prove the claim and the claim has not been proven in the literature.

He used to also conflate PPF with PPFD (he explained why in a couple videos, and why he does not anymore). When I see papers conflating PPF and PPFD, I look to see if Bugbee is being referenced.

My points being, just because it's Dr Bruce Bugbee does not mean everything he's saying is correct although it nearly always is. I've corrected my share of PhDs IRL and online, and the title "Dr" does not confer infallibility. But, most PhDs will readily stand corrected if actually demonstrated to be incorrect because that's being a good scientist, and it's easy to make mistakes just typing or talking away in an AMA. I go back and do edits as needed in my lighting guide to fix my mistakes or to add clarifications.

Also, don't confuse some slight criticism and scientific corrections for lack of respect.



My questions- overdriving light, chlorophyll fluorescence, spectral sensors

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha63jmi/

I wanted his opinion on overdriving plants and he did not actually answer. But, saying "We are doing additional studies o this now" is honest which should be respected. "I don't know" is always acceptable in this case and it means the person has credibility because they are not BSing you. Red has has a higher theoretical (and currently practical) maximum efficacy over blue although the efficiency may never reach that of blue. Did I mention don't get efficacy and efficiency confused!

He did say that he also uses chlorophyll fluorescence techniques but preferred other techniques (it allows me to see what individual proteins are up to). His alluding to chlorophyll fluorescence not being able to be used on single leaf and whole canopies models is actually wrong (see the work by David Kramer). NASA also uses chlorophyll fluorescence imaging in some satellites.

He ignored the question about using $5 spectral sensors instead of using silicon diodes with a fairly cheap interference band pass filter and a rather expensive response flattening filter (that one linked to is larger and more expensive than needed), for making a full spectrum PAR meter. As a businessman, I completely understand why he would not answer this question and I would not have answered either if I were in his shoes. There are technical advantages of using the silicon diode instead of the spectral sensor such a faster response time which means a running average can be done to give a smoother response that won't bounce around. The reason the cheap Hydrofarm quantum light meter readings bounce around is because it uses a four channel spectral sensor that uses no averaging. Here's a picture of that spectral sensor. I hooked it up to an oscilloscope and it takes three readings per second (100KHz I2C).

I strongly recommend against cheap quantum light meters like the Hydrofarm meter and Apogee is going to be your best deal for calibrated scientific equipment. Only use full spectrum PAR meters with LED lighting otherwise 660 nm LEDs aren't going to read accurately.

Get something like an Apogee SQ-520 for lab work (this is what I use), get something like an MQ-500 for more field or mobile work.

  • 11 channel spectral sensor I was talking about. This is the future of light meters because spectral sensors can be so versatile. It's literally turning your light meter in to a very low cost spectrometer that can be used for full spectrum PAR, lux, CCT, red/far red ratio, chlorophyll meter etc all in one device.

BTW, "570/531 nm photochemical reflectance index" (PRI) I mentioned is a way to tell if a plant is going in to light saturation by monitoring small changes in xanthophyll. It can be measured with a spectrometer or one can build a PRI camera using a couple of bandpass filters.



IR cameras

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha649b5/

This can mean NDVI cameras or thermal imaging cameras. NDVI can measure chlorophyll levels, thermal imaging can give ideas about transpiration rates. I use thermal imaging myself.

Thermal imaging picture of cannabis leaves:



DLI (daily light integral)

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha65vuf/

That answer is for top light, and a total plant DLI can run higher if using side or intracanopy lighting.

  • DLI = ((PPFD/100) * 8.6) * (% hours light on time per 24 hours)


Far red light

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha66kq3/

Far red triggers the shade avoidance responses which increases acid growth (plant cells get larger). When Bugbee talks about greater light capture he means that leaves can be made larger than normal with far red light. Very high amounts of far red light could cause foxtailing in buds in some cases.

Green light also triggers the shade avoidance responses.

Far red can cause excess stem elongation which is why he mentions he uses it during veging and not flowering. Far red may also increase photosynthesis efficiency through the Emerson effect.



UV light

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6jc88/

TL;DR- UV to increase THC is an urban legend. To note, the only UV light sensitive protein known is the UVR8 protein which is UVB sensitive, not UVA sensitive. Keep that in mind.

There are studies from the 1980's that may show increase in THC from UV but those strains back then had lower THC levels in the first place compared to modern strains.

This is another answer from Bugbee that amuses me because I've been saying for a long time that the UV light question has not been demonstrated to increase THC. Perhaps there's a study out there I'm missing.



Green light

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha6ia29/

I would be willing to bet that he meant cryptochrome and not phytochrome. I'm happy he mentioned Terashima et al and green photons (I think he got the dates confused because it's 2009 that the green photons work was published, not 2005).

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha63xm5/



Photoperiod

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha67xd9/

TL;RD- shorter photoperiods do not accelerate flowering, longer photoperiods may increase yield



QWERTY or DVORAK

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha64cwk/

IMO, DVORAK is basically like kicking a puppy, and that is wrong. You're not a filthy puppy kicker, are you?



Don't ask way too many questions at once!

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/paoigz/im_dr_bruce_bugbee_professor_of_crop_physiology/ha635by/

Don't do this and you should post the questions separately in blocks of two or three. A person doing an AMA will typically not spend too much time with a single person, and most of the questions will be ignored.



7 Comments
2021/09/09
08:06 UTC

139

Testing the most dangerous light (bloom plus grow BP1000) so far and why I'm such a cynic against shills

Testing the most dangerous light so far and some strong criticism

part of SAG's Lighting Guide

This is the light tested:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082Y1PMWF?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_product_details

As a disclaimer, as always, I bought this light myself so there is no conflict of interest.

edit- spelling and just a bit of wordwmithing



The electrical safety test

Click the link on the light above and look at the one star ratings. What do you see? A bunch of people getting electrical shocks and the light overheating. When I first examined the light the first thing I noticed was some plastic insulators like this that immediately raised a red flag.

https://imgur.com/a/ZBKR8E3

Upon really close inspection I noticed that there was a thermal pad between the heat sink and the MCPCB (metal core printed circuit board and where all the parts are mounted). A thermal pad provides electrical insulation.

https://imgur.com/a/Azrfxdc

Hmmm....what's going on here? To confirm my suspicion I tested for continuity between the MCPCB and the heat sink and found them to be electrically isolated. So we have an energized circuit board that is not grounded although most people who don't know how to properly test lights would not notice, with a very thin plastic film over the energized components that does not provide adequate ingress protection, creating a situation that will get people killed although the light does appear grounded.

It's bullshit like this that is going to get people killed, and why I have an issue with people who have no idea what they are doing performing light "tests". How many of these YouTubers, who look like they know what they are doing by waving a light meter under a light, do you think would actually catch this fatal flaw in this light? None of them would because as far as I know none of them are properly trained or understand electrical safety.

You want to see a YouTuber who gets electrical safety? Check out the fellow electrician Big Clive.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtM5z2gkrGRuWd0JQMx76qA

I didn't even need to do a light meter test because what's the point if I'd never recommend the light in the first place. I did, though, and about eight inches away from the center is the 1000 umol/m2/sec point.



Thermal imaging pics

Here's some thermal shots of the light tested:

https://imgur.com/a/nkfLHb2 (2 thermal pics)

It's important to note that on the backside of the light, in the pic with my thermal imaging camera, the light appears to be fairly cool with a hot spot on the label. What's going on? The heat sink has a very low emissivity while that label has a very high emissivity that gives a true temperature reading. This is the problem with using cheap non-contact thermometers.

The light measures 70 degrees F above ambient and my rule is that a grow light should never run above 145 degrees F. This is a partial failure and why people are getting burns off the light beyond electrical shocks. I say partial failure because a small fan could keep the temperature down. Heat kills LEDs faster.



Spectroradiometer pics

https://imgur.com/a/FUrXAn8 (2 spectrometer pics)

The first pic is my spectroradiometer in "scope" mode which gives me a raw output. The second pic is what's called a "second order derivative" which is used in analytical chemistry and really allows me to get in close and analyze the phosphors used. Every major downward dip is a different phosphor so these modern white LEDs have a lot more going on that what is shown in the data sheets. I use the same technique to analyze pigments and some proteins in plant leaves.

I'm not aware of anyone on the internet outside academia that gets into actually analyzing the phosphors in LEDs, let alone analyzing pigments and proteins.



What's under the hood

https://imgur.com/a/fBEVeHA (4 under the hood pics)

The line and neutral are going through power resistors, which is then rectified, smoothed out with a capacitor, and this higher voltage DC is then fed to the LEDs though linear current regulators in parallel. If you want to make something cheap and dangerous then this is the way to do it. The capacitor is going to be a major fail point particularly at higher temperatures.



MY RANT (and why I'm such a cynic)

The layman gets so impressed with people waving a light meter under a light, maybe doing a grid test, but none of them are doing a safety test to see if the light is going to kill people. I could probably train a monkey to wave a light meter under a light. That's hyperbole of course, but I could train someone in an hour or two to do most any test that you see on YouTube because waving around a light meter is trivial. Right?

Additionally, when I first get a light I'm not making non-sense shills posts on /r/spacebuckets about "herp-a-derp I got this free light, anyone else have this one? I'm going to put a plant under it and keep making a bunch more posts of this free light. Because it's free advertisement for this person who gave me a free light, and I'm too corrupt to get it. I'm even going to do shout outs to the person who gave it to me for free because fuck it, I got a free light and everyone has a price, mine just happens to be low". It's hard to be unbiased when receiving free stuff, and non-sense to compare lights when the lighting levels are not known, right?

This shilling problem was so bad on /r/microgrowery, at one point around 2016 with the mods receiving free lights, posts were being removed and people banned for promoting other lights. There are good reasons I'm proudly banned from /r/microgrowery for calling out non-sense. /r/microgrowery was quite literally founded on corruption, and the original mod was given the boot when publicly called out. When I started making waves about direct sidebar links to pirated grow books, a practice that Reddit admins would not allow today, the current head mod (Codine) threatened to sabotage my lighting guide with misinformation, which is why I made my own subreddit to protect the integrity of my lighting guide (PMs are forever archived!). This all sounds pretty corrupt, right?

The mods of /r/hydroponics were allowing stickied posts by MarsHydro, and MarsHydro was deleting posts on their own subreddit about people getting electrical shocks off their lights which others have confirmed to me about the electrical shock issue. It's very fair to ask, what's in it for the mods? MarsHydro also plays the non-sense "600w" game which is highly misleading. That sounds pretty corrupt, right?

In 2007 I was active with GreenPineLane, the first forum dedicated solely to LED grow lights. The head mod received a free 100 true watt light that had LEDs that were 15% efficient. The person who gave him the light claimed it would perform as well as a 400 watt HPS that would be around 30% efficient. The mod claimed this seemed right after trying to grow a single tomato plant. But I did some severe call outs because we all know that this would be utter non-sense and therefore corrupt, right?

The first grow light on the market was the LGM5 by Solaroasis that used 5 mm low power LEDs and cost well over $30 per watt. source. The person was claiming this 6-9 watt low power light could compete with HPS. When put to the test it could barely grow a tomato seedling without sever elongation. Complete and utter bullshit, right?

Eric Biksa, a public figure so there is no Reddit TOS violation, was writing in Maximum Grow magazine in early 2008 that LED lights were 10-20 times better than HPS while also claiming to be a world class hydro expert at age 24 despite no training. In summer 2008 in response to his non-sense, I wrote a 3000 word essay calling him and the whole LED grow light industry out for being founded on fraud at the time which can be seen here (a huge mistake was saying little light energy was converted to mass when I really meant that photosynthesis itself was very inefficient). The editor loved the essay because she wanted balance in the claims, the publisher hated it because he did not want to upset the LED grow light manufactures who bought advertisement space, so instead of an article it was published as a letter to the editor (it only meant I would not be paid $500 for the essay which was not the point). That would have been pretty corrupt of the publisher, right?

LEDGirl of HydroGrowLED fame was claiming in 2009 that she could get 2 grams per watt and in 2015 that she could get 4 times the yield per watt over HPS. I called her out in real life and believe me, LEDGirl is just as much as an unstable nutcase IRL as she is online. Four times the yield per watt over HPS is a corrupt non-sense claim even by today's standards, right?

I've seen MIGRO straight up grab energized circuit boards without a ground and handle it carelessly. That's either suicidal or a person who is utterly clueless on safety (people in the comments were trying to warn him). He'll also tell people to remove the covers from LED light bulbs which is very dangerous. He's first and foremost a salesman and acting grossly irresponsible, right? (I have many critiques of MIGRO, including having a weak grasp on actual theory, such as making up his own units like PPFD/W(???) and not understanding efficacy vs efficiency as well as being a bit naive on science in general, but I believe he basically operates in good faith for a salesman- he's also good at waving light meters around).

LEDTonic sells a cheap generic light that is twice the price per watt than any other light, and says 12 watts of cheap LEDs per square foot is adequate. source. This is one of the worst deals I've ever seen in all of LED grow lighting. Don't do business with people, who in my opinion, are scammers. Once a scammer always a scammer, right?

MostlySafe is such bullshit that he claims he created the whole concept of space buckets and used to sell homemade shoddy quality $600 space buckets! archived. He literally doxxed me when I called him out. That's pretty fucking cowardly, right?

If you're publicly shilling a free light then you are fair game for criticism, and I will publicly call you out on it, because you made it public. I've been calling people out for ten years on Reddit, have been doxxed three times for it so far, I've literally lawyered up when legal threats were made by MostlySafe against me and three other people including the head mod on /r/spacebuckets, and I'm not going to change. Nobody is going to control my or anybody else's hobby, right?

I have never accepted a free light, I'm not trying to sell anything, never done affiliate links, don't make any money off my guide, back my claims with links to hundreds of sources, back my claims with calibrated lab gear if I don't have another source, and I'm guessing I'm doing something right with over 5,000 subscribers. When I first wrote my lighting guide I was telling people not to use LED grow lights for commercial purposes because back then LEDs could not compete with HPS, which I received a lot of criticism for, and it would have been corrupt to say otherwise. Right...?



Affiliate links

You'll see people promoting lights with affiliate links. Most of the time they have never tested those lights and it's all bullshit if that's the case. They are less interested in the truth, and are more interested in a sale. Not all of them, but most of them. I understand some affiliate links keeps some websites going. But if people are writing lighting guides full of affiliate links then how can they truly be unbiased? Enough said.



N=1 and how not to do a test

N=1 means the plant count (population number) used in a test. It's complete non-sense to only use a single plant because you are not going to catch false positives and false negatives known as type 1 and type 2 errors.

Here is a YouTube video that uses an N=1 test that has over 800,000 views by Albo Pepper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfihE4IuFuU

It's such non-sense that the plant under the CFL light was allowed to dry out. How is this even remotely a legitimate test? What does this say about the person performing the test? You'll see stuff like this all the time on YouTube. IS THIS THE BEST GROW LIGHT OF <insert year here>!!!! Non-sense. What does best grow light even mean?

Even in academia, I was once volunteering at a plant growth lab to get some hands on lab experience. I open up a $300,000 plant growth chamber, picked up a tray of arabidopsis thaliana (a model plant used in botany), and they were all dried out. Photosynthesis shuts down before wilting happens. How can this be a legitimate test with such sloppy procedures? Non-sense.

Bruce Bugbee discusses this problem and how hard it can be to do a legitimate test. I've never seen a legitimate test done in the hobby community. The conditions must be identical, and Bugbee himself articulates this and how hard large scale cannabis testing can be. Almost always seedlings are used in tests because clones, being genetically identical, can hide type one and two errors if they have specific mutations. Seedlings provide a little bit of genetic variability so your test does not get stuck in some type one or type two error.

How many plants do you need for a test? N=7 would be the absolute minimum for p<0.05 at power = 0.8 for a SN = 1.6. This is what I was taught at the plant growth lab I volunteered at. Most tests are done with dozens of plants if not hundreds of plants, though. This applies for lighting tests, root tests, or any other type of grow chamber plant test. Arabidopsis thaliana is a tiny long day plant with an eight week life cycle, which is one reason why it's used as a model plant beyond having many variants available with specific genes knocked out. It's also why seedlings are sometimes used in studies, and you can get N>100 in even small containers that will fit in a space bucket.

N>100 microgreen radish seedlings in two gallon space buckets under a table at 2000K, 3000K, and 5000K. 215 uMol/m2/sec, DLI 17 mol/m2/day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_a_test

http://www.3rs-reduction.co.uk/html/6__power_and_sample_size.html



In conclusion

The light above sucks, YouTubers mostly suck, LEDTonic sucks, the doxxer MostlySafe sucks, shills promoting free stuff suck, affiliate link people suck if they have not at least used the lights, corrupt people in general suck, Star Wars episode eight power sucks, auto-tune music sucks, the US army (infantry) sucked, jumping out of a C-130 with a partial parachute malfunction sucked, covid sucks, white supremacists suck, legalizing pot in WA state but not allowing small private recreational grows sucks, the other people who have doxxed me suck, the deer who keep jumping in front of my car suck, the IMF sucks, Star Wars episode eight power sucks again, Jesus cult door knockers suck, that time I did four hits of LSD by myself sucked, that time pepper spray went off in my pocket sucked, the time I had a gout attack and then stubbed my gout swollen toe sucked, and Star Wars episodes one and nine also sucked (but not as bad as episode eight, it's a scientific fact that episode five was the best).

46 Comments
2021/08/04
03:00 UTC

83

SAG's lighting guide cheat sheet

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide linked together

last update: 17 JAN 2022 (changed lux numbers per latest research)



Using a lux meter for plants

  • Using a lux meter as a plant light meter article -You only use a lux meter with white LED grow lights. You should use a proper $20 and up stand alone lux meter preferably with a remote sensor head. Your phone is likely not an accurate lux meter due to cosine errors in real life conditions. This is a hardware issue that can not be corrected for in software, and the white translucent plastic over a proper light meter's sensor is the cosine correction.

  • You should not use a lux meter with red/blue dominate "blurple" grow lights. The theory why is in the above article and some below. Only the more expensive $500 range "full spectrum" quantum light meters should be used with blurple LED grow lights to get accurate readings. Less expensive quantum light meters can work well with white LED grow lights, HPS, and sunlight but not necessarily with blurple LED grow lights.



Rough lux lighting levels for cannabis

White light CRI 80, 70 lux = 1 µmol/m2/sec:

  • 5,000 lux_____ unrooted cuttings (many people go higher)

  • 15,000 lux____ lower end seedlings (microgreens)

  • 30,000 lux____ lower end vegetative growth (cannabis seedlings)

  • 40,000 lux____ lower end flowering, rapid veg (tomato, pepper)

  • 75,000 lux____ safer maximum beginner level

  • 100,000 lux___cannabis starts light saturation


  • Keep in mind that with higher lighting levels that things go bad much faster and the fertilizers and all other growing parameters need to be dialed in. The 100klx number is based on the latest 2021 university level research on cannabis and linear growth rates.

  • I've grown various seedlings just fine at 35klx and many people on /r/spacebuckets are running their plants at >75klk or equivalent. You really want to stay above 40klx for flowering and many professionals are going to be closer to 75-90klx. I tend to grow plants at higher lighting levels myself.

  • If your seedlings or veg plants are "stretching" too much then you need more total light or a higher color temperature light.

  • I've seen research papers where cannabis is being rooted at 15,000 lux.



lux to PPFD conversions

The below will get you within 10% for white light.

  • 55 lux = 1 µmol/m2/sec sunlight CRI 100

  • 63 lux = 1 µmol/m2/sec white light CRI 90

  • 70 lux = 1 µmol/m2/sec white light CRI 80

  • 80 lux = 1 µmol/m2/sec HPS CRI 40

Higher CRI lights have a higher concentration of deeper red light (around 660 nm) which does not read as well with a lux meter. CRI has a bigger impact on lux to umol/m2/sec conversion values than CCT (color temp).

I've tested dozens of LEDs with my spectroradiometer (Stellarnet Greenwave) to get these numbers to always be within 10%. These are true measurements and not based off any specific lux meter which may be different. The claims are also backed by peer reviewed literature that uses 67 lux = 1 µmol/m2/sec as a generalization for all white LEDs and not taking CRI into account. (source).

Specific conversion values and spectrum shots for a dozen different Bridgelux LEDs can be found here.



DLI (daily lighting integral) calculations

  • DLI is the amount of light that the plant receives in a 24 hour period. The unit of measurement is mol/m2/day or "moles per square meter per day".

  • (PPFD/100) * 8.6 --this will give the DLI for a 24 hour photoperiod.

  • Multiply the result with the percentage of light on time per day. ((PPFD/100) * 8.6) * (% hours on per 24 hours)

  • Example: 200 µmol/m2/sec on 18 hours per day. (200/100=2) (2 * 8.6=17.2) (17.2 * 0.75=12.9 mol/m2/day)

  • Example: 1200 µmol/m2/sec on 12 hours per day. (1200/100=12) (12 * 8.6=103.2) (103.2 * 0.50=51.6 mol/m2/day)

This usually only counts the top light, and intracanopy or side lighting can greatly increase these numbers.



The basic definitions

  • PAR = "photosynthetic active radiation" or light from 400-700 nm by standard definition. PAR is what we measure and not a unit of measurement e.g. "300 PAR" makes no sense because the person could be talking about PAR watts. Around 4.6 µmol/m2/sec is one PAR watt/m2 for white light CRI 80. (source table 2) -great source

  • PPFD = "photosynthetic photon flux density" in units of µmol/m2/sec or "micromoles per square meter per second" also written as µmol m-2 s-1. This is the light intensity at the point of measurement. Lux is a close white light equivalent.

  • PPF = "photosynthetic photon flux" in µmol/sec or "micromoles per second" also written as µmol s-1. The is the total light given off by a light source. Lumens is a close white light equivalent.

  • PPE = "photosynthetic photon efficacy" in µmol/joule or "micromoles per joule" also written as µmol/J. This is how many photons of light are generated per joule (watt * second) of energy input. PPF/Watts will give the PPE. Lumens per watt is a close white light equivalent.

  • CCT = "correlated color temperature" is basically the red-blue ratio of a white light source and correlates to (i.e. appears to us as) the color temperature of a black body radiation source in degrees kelvin. Higher CCT, having more blue light, will keep plants more compact at a given lighting level. 3000K and 3500K are pretty common for all around use. Roughly speaking, 2700K is 10% blue, 4200K is 20% blue, and 6500K is 30% blue. (source, fig 1)

  • CRI = "color rendering index" is how well the reflected light of different colors look. For our purposes, the thing to know is that CRI 90 and above light will have deeper reds that will read lower with a lux meter, although the true PPFD levels may be the same. The deeper reds is why CRI 80 and 90 have different lux to PPFD conversion values. Roughly speaking, a CRI 100 light has a luminous efficacy of 250 LPW (lumens per watt) at 100% efficiency, CRI 95 is 280 LPW, CRI 90 is 300 LPW, and CRI 80 is 320 LPW. In the real world, these numbers can vary by up to 10% or so. (source 1, fig 2) (source 2, table 1)

  • Photomorphogenesis /"photo-morpho-genesis"/ or "light, change, life". These are light sensitive protein (phytochromes, phototropins, cryptochromes, UVR8) reactions that can be wavelength specific. For example, blue light up to about 470 nm has a powerful photomorphogenesis effect by keeping plants more compact, while 500 nm cyan light may do the opposite. (source for phototropins) (source for cryptochromes)



The McCree curve

  • Picture of the McCree curve for photosynthesis rates

  • Link to the McCree curve paper (fig 14)

  • The McCree Curve Demystified -good article on the McCree curve by a Ph.D senior research scientist

  • The McCree curve is a quantum efficiency lighting curve used in botany and should be used only as an initial foundation for understanding photosynthesis rates by wavelength. It is far more accurate than charts for chlorophyll dissolved in a solvent or charts for green algae, and it is common for these charts to get mixed up.

  • It was developed in the early 1970's by Keith McCree, a Ph.D physicist that was a professor of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University. He tested 22 different crop plant types for photosynthesis rates with a PPFD of 18-150 µmol/m2/sec, in monochromatic light at 25 nm intervals from 350 nm to 750 nm, and using the single leaf model. The McCree curve is only valid for these conditions. Monitoring CO2 uptake was used to measure photosynthesis rates.

  • The McCree curve illustrates that all of 400-700 nm is useful for photosynthesis including green light, and not just red and blue light.

  • The McCree curve should not be used for very high lighting levels.

  • The McCree curve does not take in to account the whole plant model, or multi-wavelength lights including mixing in far red to try to increase photosynthesis efficiency (Emerson enhancement effect).

  • The work of McCree demonstrated that both sides of a leaf can be used efficiently for photosynthesis. Dicotyledons may reflect more green light on the abaxial (underside) of a leaf, while monocotyledons will have the same green reflectance on both sides of a leaf.

  • YPF (YPFD) or "yield photon flux (density)" is PPFD that has been weighed to the McCree curve. It is fortunately rarely used in botany but you do sometimes see it. There are special PAR sensors that give measurements in YPFD instead of PPFD, as well as spectroradiometers that can do this.



What different colors of light do to plants

  • BLUE. Blue light decreases acid growth which is different than growth through photosynthesis. Excess acid growth, or "stretching", in seedlings/veg is all about greater cell expansion in the stem that we get from lower lighting levels or not enough blue light. We typically only want as much blue in a light source to help prevent any excess stem elongation. Blue photons have much more energy needed for photosynthesis, and this extra energy is wasted as heat that the plant has to dissipate. The associated blue light sensitive proteins are the phototropins and cryptochromes.

  • GREEN. In healthy cannabis, 80-90% of green light is being absorbed and available for photosynthesis. Green is the opposite of blue in photomorphogenesis responses in that green causes stretching also called the shade avoidance responses. Pretty much anything blue does, green does the opposite. Green can help make leaves larger and increase the LAI (leaf area index) for greater light capture.

  • article on green light and plants

  • RED. Red can help keep a plant more compact but not nearly to the degree of blue. Red should be thought of as a lower energy photosynthesis driver and red LEDs can have a PPE that's greater than theoretically possible with white LEDs (blue LEDs with a phosphor). There are red LEDs on the market that are >4.0 µmol/joule. The associated red/far red light sensitive proteins are the phytochromes.

  • FAR RED. Far red causes greater stretching like green light and contributes to the shade avoidance responses. It "may" help put short day plants "to sleep" faster. Far red may in some plants may be able to drive photosynthesis efficiently though the Emerson enhancement effect. About 50% of far red light is reflected off plant leaves, and also transmits easily though leaves. For photomorphogenesis responses, red and far red are opposites like blue and green are opposites.

  • UV. Ultraviolet is a wild card and I can make no rhyme or reason of it working with a variety of plants. It tends to cause dwarfing when used as an only light source (UVA). For cannabis, the idea is to try to increase trichome and THC levels by adding UV, but some researchers including Bruce Bugbee are saying this does not happen. source. The only identified UV protein is the UVR8 protein, which is only UVB sensitive, not UVA sensitive (285 nm peak sensitivity).

  • Anecdotally, certain selective photomorphogenesis experiments I've done with UVA compared to blue, leads me to believe that there may be at least one unknown UVA light sensitive protein either as a primary receptor, or my SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) is a UVA light sensitive protein that can express itself differently in different plant parts, affecting the protein phototropin/cryptochrome signal transduction pathways locally. For example the hypocotyl (the stem before the first set of true leaves) can react much differently than the epicotyl (the stem after the first set of true leaves) in some plants like pole beans in my 470 nm vs 405 nm experiments.



Energy and efficacy of photons

Knowing this helps us make LED efficiency calculations and understand why red LEDs are used in grow lights. It's easy to get "efficacy" (how well something works) and "efficiency" (ratio of useful work) confused.

  • 1240/wavelength of light in nm = energy of a photon in eV (electron volts).

  • 10.37/eV of photon = µmol/joule or the maximum possible PPE (photosynthetic photon efficacy).

  • max possible PPE * LED efficiency = the PPE for the specific LED.

  • Example: 660 nm photon. (1240/660=1.88eV) (10.37/1.88=5.52 µmol/joule). At 100% efficiency, a red 660 nm LED would have a PPE of 5.52 µmol/joule.

  • Example: 450 nm photon. (1240/450=2.76eV) (10.37/2.76=3.76 µmol/joule). At 100% efficiency, a blue 450 nm LED would have a PPE of 3.76 µmol/joule.

  • Question: what is the electrical efficiency of a 660 nm LED with a PPE of 2.8 µmol/joule? (1240/660=1.88eV) (10.37/1.88=5.52 µmol/joule) (2.8 µmol/joule/5.52 µmol/joule=50.7% efficient)

  • Question: what is the electrical efficiency of a 450 nm LED with a PPE of 2.8 µmol/joule? (1240/450=2.76eV) (10.37/2.76=3.76 µmol/joule) (2.8 µmol/joule/3.76 µmol/joule=74% efficient)

  • The above means that we can theoretically get about 47% more light for the energy input with 660 nm LEDs versus 450 nm LEDs. It explains why red LEDs are breaking the 4 µmol/joule barrier, and white LEDs based on blue LEDs with a phosphor never will.

  • Green LEDs are electrically inefficient and is a physics/semiconductor issue. Our eyes are most sensitive to green light so we don't notice.



Luminous efficiency and lux meters

  • Luminous efficiency chart -these are correction factors

  • Luminous efficiency is not the same as luminous efficacy (lumens per watt).

  • Luminous efficiency is a percentage correction factor for wavelengths of light relative to 555 nm that takes in to account the spectral sensitivity of the human eye. 555 nm is what our eyes are most sensitive to and has a luminous efficiency of 1.0002 (it had to be corrected once which is why it's not 1.0000- that's good science).

  • LEDs have a binning tolerance, and a 660 nm LED could actually be 650 nm or 670 nm. A 650 nm LED has a luminous efficiency of 0.107, while a 670 nm LED has a luminous efficiency of 0.032. That means with a lux meter the 650 nm LEDs with give a lux reading three times higher than 670 nm LED although the PPFD may be the same. This is why we don't use lux meters with color LEDs for absolute measurements, and why knowing about luminous efficiency is important.

  • A cheap $10 spectroscope can help you identify that actual dominate wavelength of an LED so you can determine the needed correction factor.

  • A lux meter with cosine correction can be used accurately with any visible lighting spectrum for relative measurements. The cheap $20 lux meters I examined where using silicon diodes with an appropriate short pass filter. Here is the transmission characteristics of the filter for a Dr.meter LX1010B lux meter.. This, combined with the response curve of a generic silicon photodiode, gets fairly close to a true lux curve response that a spectroradiometer can give that takes into account the luminous efficiency by wavelength.



Watts equivalent for common CFL/LED light bulbs

This is equivalent to an incandescent light bulb.

  • 40 watts equivalent is about 450 lumens

  • 60 watts equivalent is about 800 lumens

  • 75 watts equivalent is about 1200 lumens

  • 100 watts equivalent is about 1600 lumens

  • greater than 100 watts equivalent is not necessarily very well defined

  • Spot and flood lights may be a little different if the manufacturer is using equivalent to halogen lighting.

  • The watts equivalent does not ever change although the true wattage does as LEDs become more efficient. This is to help lower the confusion among consumers about what size light bulb they should get as LEDs become more electrically efficient.

  • Be wary of any "watts equivalent" to HPS light. A lot of low end LED sellers will use "600w" or "1000w" as a deceptive marketing practice, and you need to go off actual wattage.



Spectrometer shot of a green leaf

  • GREEN LEAF -This is showing 83% green absorption. High nitrogen cannabis can be closer to 90% green absorption.

  • Pigments listed below the line are absorption points, above the line are reflectance peaks.

  • You'll notice that chlorophyll B has very little effect on the red side, and using 630 nm LEDs to try to target it makes no sense.

  • Carotenoids (specifically xanthophylls) are dominating the blue side. Carotenoids are an accessory pigment that are 30-70% efficient at transferring absorbed energy to chlorophyll. Only through chlorophyll A can photosynthesis take place.

  • Carotenoids help prevent damage to leaves from too much blue light known as the xanthophyll cycle.

  • Measuring the 531 nm to 570 nm carotenoid reflectance ratio is one way to determine photosynthesis efficiency and known as the Photochemical Reflectance Index.

  • As far as known, chlorophyll to chlorophyll energy transfer is 100% efficient through Förster (fluorescent) resonance energy transfer and coherent resonance energy transfer (source page 5)



Emerson (enhancement) effect

  • The Emerson effect is about driving photosynthesis with part of the light PAR (400-680 nm in this case), and part of the light far red (700 nm-740 nm or so), combined can result in photosynthesis rates higher than normal.

  • Robert Emerson used his work with red and far red light to deduce that there must be two photosystems, called photosystem I (PSI) and photosystem II (PSII), named in the order of discovery but for photosynthesis, the process starts with the PSII first.

  • Monochromatic light has a sharp drop off in photosynthesis at 680 nm or so (red drop effect), but this does not happen if far red light is added with about 720 nm being most efficient in driving additional photosynthesis. (source 1 fig 1) (source 2 Bugbee)

  • Far red light can drive the PSI independently of the PSII, and PAR is more efficient with the PSII while not as well excited with the PSI. Basically how the Emerson effect works is freeing up electrons between the PSI and PSII by driving them more efficiently in parallel, and photosynthesis becomes more efficient as a result.

  • You can see this jamming of electrons in this chlorophyll fluorescence shot with proteins associated with the PSII and much less fluorescence associated with the PSI (the single 750 nm hump). Higher fluorescence means lower photosynthesis efficiency. (that shot was just turning on the lights)

  • I think most far red driver boards are gimmicks because they are likely not putting out enough far red light to make a noticeable difference.



Lighting tips

  • You generally want the light meter or the sensor head pointing up and down, not at the light source, to get a cosine correct reading. This is a huge mistake I see people make and the white piece of plastic over the sensor gives the proper cosine correction, not tilting the sensor towards the light which will give false readings. This is also why I recommend meters with remote sensor heads for ease of taking a reading and scanning around.

  • Your phone is a poor light meter if it has no cosine correction (highly likely does not), and I can set up conditions where my Samsung A51 (and Samsung S7) are ten times off a true reading and where they read the same as true. This is a hardware limitation that can not be corrected with in software. Phones are basically worthless for color LEDs due to the luminous efficiency issue. Based on hands-on experience, I automatically discount all lux measurements done with phones.

  • The harder you push your plants the easier it is to mess things up. If you are having health issues with your plant the first thing to do is to lessen the lighting levels on the plant to slow things down.

  • I generally run all plants 24/0 that can handle that lighting schedule in veging. Many long day and day neutral plants can not handle a 24/0 schedule in flowering due to blossom drop. At high levels at 24/0 this can cause photosynthesis rates to lower a bit per amount of light due to some damage being done to certain proteins in the photosystem, and the time needed for these repairs to take place (hours).

  • Light quantity (how much light) is generally more important than light quality (the lighting spectrum).

  • It can be a bit naive to use PPF to try to calculate actual PPFD numbers. If you do then be sure that you over estimate by perhaps 30-50%.

  • I have more success with cuttings at 18/6 rather than 24/0. As a wild guess, it could be because auxins are being produced at their maximum levels in darkness, and auxins help with rooting.

  • You can calibrate any light meter for PPFD as long as the meter has cosine correction. Most light meters are highly linear i.e. a light meter based on a light dependent resistor would likely not be linear, but the silicon diodes found in most lux meters are linear to within 1% over 7-10 orders of magnitude.

  • It takes about 30-60 seconds for a dark adapted leaf to fully "turn on" for photosynthesis. This can be seen in these chlorophyll fluorescence over time pic off my spectrometer. In many scientific papers the researchers may wait 60-90 minutes for a leaf to become fully light adapted.

41 Comments
2021/07/20
06:54 UTC

37

Theory and tips on white LEDs and grow lights

Theory and tips on white LEDs and grow lights

last update: 8 July 2021

I wanted to try writing stuff a bit different so I used bullet points with short and direct statements. There's a bit of theory below but actual white light theory would require its own article due to the 40,000 character limit in a post.



Good paper and the basic definitions

  • From physics to fixtures to food: current and potential LED efficacy -Must read. When I write "above paper" with a page number, this is it. Note that this paper covers a lot of 2020 LED efficiency numbers while also discussing maximum theoretical efficacy in this paper, and it can be easy to confuse the two.

  • PAR -"photosynthetic active radiation" or light from 400-700 nm by standardized definition. PAR is what we measure, and not a unit of measurement. Saying "300 PAR" would be like saying "300 water".

  • PPFD- "photosynthetic photon flux density" or light intensity at the point of measurement. The unit is umol/m2/sec (µmol m-2 s-1) or "micromoles per square meter per second". The close white light analogy is lux.

  • PPF- "photosynthetic photon flux" or the total amount of 400-700 nm photons per second given off by an LED/grow light. The unit is umol/sec (µmol s-1) or "micromoles per second". The close white light analogy is lumens (e.g a 100 watt incandescent bulb (true or equivalent) puts out about 1600 lumens of light).

  • PPE- "photosynthetic photon efficacy" or the amount of photons produced by a light source per amount of energy input. The unit is umol/joule (µmol j-1) or "micromoles per joule". The somewhat close(ish) white light analogy is LPW (lumens per watt). You will sometimes see PPE written as PPF/W.

  • Efficiency is the ratio of useful work (e.g an LED is 50% efficient if half the consumed energy is radiated away as the light). Efficacy, as how I'm using it, is how well something works (e.g that white 50% efficient LED at CRI 80 has a luminous efficacy of around 160 lumens per watt, give or take a bit).



The ultimate efficacy limits of fixtures

"The upper limit of LED fixture efficacy is determined by the LED package efficacy multiplied by four factors inherent to all fixtures: current droop, thermal droop, driver (power supply) inefficiencies, and optical losses" -above paper, page 1

  • To maximize an LED grow light's idealized efficacy, we want the LED current as low as possible (throw more LEDs at the problem as they become cheaper and underdrive them), keep them as cool as possible (a little airflow goes a long ways, maybe 2-10 times so), get the most efficient driver (you want to look up the efficiency by current level curves in the data sheet), and don't use lenses or a glass cover. But, by not using a cover means we lose ingress protection leaving exposed voltages so there are potential safety concerns, and exposing the LEDs directly to the environment can potentially lower their longevity and the grow light's longer term reliability.

  • Current droop -The greater the current though an LED, the less efficient it becomes. This is one reason why medium power LEDs in large series/parallel arrays (e.g quantum boards^® ) have become common at least in the hobby community, and how COBs work by having a large series/parallel array of LEDs in a smaller common package. LED makers typical rate their LED at a "nominal" or "sorting" current that may be significantly lower than what the LED is actually being driven at in real life. The Samsung LM301H has their specs listed for 65 mA, but is rated for 200 mA continuous, for example.

  • Thermal droop -The higher the temperature of the LED, the less efficient it becomes. LED data sheets typically give bin numbers for 25 degrees C (77 F) or 85 C (185 F), and most LEDs are specified to operate at 85-125 C. Higher temperatures also means that the LED degrades more quickly, particularly red LEDs. The difference between 25 C and 85 C is about a 5% efficiency loss for most LEDs. Some 125 C continuous rated red LEDs can take a >20% efficiency hit at 125 C. Higher temperatures will also degrade LEDs faster, and cheap light bulbs are going to run their cheap LEDs very hot. Don't buy the cheapest light bulbs if you want them to last- you get what you pay for.

  • Driver (power supply) inefficiencies -Some low voltage DC drivers can hit about 98% efficiency depending on drive current. There are AC LED drivers on the market that can peak at 97% efficiency. Some Mean Well LED drivers can hit the mid 90s% efficient. Most of the AC LED drivers you find in products are going to be in the low 90s or upper 80's percent efficient, which can depend on specific LED current levels. Drivers with a lower power factor also contribute to greater inefficiencies. Cheap capacitors in cheap lights (particularly cheap light bulbs) is a major failure mode particularly with poor thermal management.

  • Optical losses -Using secondary optics (i.e a lens) over an LED can focus the light so an LED grow light maker can post some impressive PPFD (intensity) numbers right below the light, but the PPF number (total light output) is going to drop, too. There will always be optical losses with a lens of perhaps 7-9%. This same loss applies to grow lights that have a glass/plastic/silicon cover over the LEDs for splash proofing the light. If you grow hydroponically, and a prone to splashing hydro nute solution around, it may be worth it to take this inefficiency hit to keep the salt solution away from the electronics. Electrical safety is another very important reason glass covers are used for the ingress protection they provide.

Keep in mind on LED grow light specs, some low end sellers may give specs (e.g PPF umol/sec numbers) for data sheet temperature and current ideal efficacy (i.e 25 C, lower nominal current), or may not take in to account LED driver losses when posting a umol/joule number, and not how the light actually performs in real world grow conditions. If low end Amazon/eBay style lights are giving specs better than high end lights, then don't don't do business with that seller.



Some basic facts on LEDs, light, and lights

  • The "K" in "color temperature" stands for "degrees Kelvin", not to mean "thousand". For example, it's a 2700K light, not a 2.7K light which is deep outer space cold. It's also a correlated color temperature (CCT), and not an actual approximate black body radiator color temperature like with a 2700-2800K incandescent light bulb.

  • I define "white" as any light source whose spectral output is on or fairly close to the plankian locus in the CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram within a certain color temperature range (2700k-6500K or so). There are many types of white light (i.e different CCT, CRI, TM-30-15 Rf, spectral power distributions), and many ways to create white, so my definition is a bit vague. Bridgelux has 1750K LEDs they call white, for example, but I certainly don't perceive them as white.

  • White LEDs (blue LEDs with a phosphor(s) for this discussion) are mass produced very well beyond any other LED lighting, which can make them cheaper through scale of economy, particularly the surface mount medium power LEDs like by Samsung. The amount of R&D into LED technology has resulted in some white LEDs having a PPE of greater than 3 uMol/joule at nominal (lower) current levels and at room temperature. They will max out at about 3.3-3.4ish uMol/joule depending on CCT and CRI, maybe slightly higher if underdriven.

  • A 450 nm blue LED will likely have a maximum practical PPE of about 3.5-3.6 umol/joule, with a maximum theoretical PPE of 3.76 umol/joule. The 3.76 umol/joule number is the ultimate barrier to white LEDs based off a 450 nm blue LED with a phosphor, and the only current way to get a higher PPE for grow lights is to add actual red LEDs to white LEDs, or if appropriate for your plant, use red and blue LEDs only (perhaps with some white thrown in).

  • There are white LEDs that use the phosphor pump from violet or ultraviolet-A LEDs. Our visibility extends down to about 400 nm, not 450 nm. They use additional broader blue phosphors instead of blue LEDs. But, violet and UV-A LEDs can never have the efficacy of blue LEDs because they have more energy in their photons. We generally wouldn't want to use these types of LEDs in grow light. Seoul Semiconductor Sunlike LEDs use violet LEDs.

  • In most cases it's one photon per photochemical reaction also known as the second law of photochemistry. This applies to photosynthesis and to phosphors. You can have multiple down conversions with phosphors and not break the second law (i.e in a white LED, a photon can be absorbed and emitted multiple times always at lower energy levels), but this does not happen with photosynthesis. This means for photosynthesis that a blue photon does not drive photosynthesis better because blue photons have more energy than green and red photons, and the extra energy in the blue photons is wasted as heat in the photosynthesis process.

  • 2700K has about 10% blue light, 4200K has about 20% blue light, 6500K has about 30% blue light. The greater the blue light content, the more compact the plant will be by reducing acid growth due to lower auxin levels. This is why people will say to use a higher color temperature in veging to suppress growth like stretching, and use lower color temperature in flowering to promote acid growth in flowering. Most higher end white LED grow lights are 3000K to 4000K.

  • Higher color temperature white LEDs will have a higher electrical efficiency, all else being equal, because less blue light is being captured by the phosphors, and the blue light emitted by the LED does not take a phosphor conversion loss hit. The total phosphor conversion loss for a white LED can be 5-20% (page 3, above paper). Because there is a higher conversion loss with lower color temperature LEDs, they will run a bit hotter than higher color temperature LEDs. Lower color temperature (and higher CRI) LEDs will also have greater total Stokes shift heating (the energy difference between the blue photon emitted from the blue LED and the other down converted photon from the phosphor is wasted as heat).

  • Some modern white LEDs may use five or more different phosphors or phosphors with multiple peaks, and I didn't really realize this until doing 1st and 2nd order derivative spectroscopic analysis on a dozen different types of Bridgelux white LEDs. The results can be seen here.. Early white LEDs were using a single yellow phosphor with blue LEDs and some still do.

  • A "perfect" white light source would be right around 4.6 uMol/joule (it can vary a bit depending on the type of white). If you had a hypothetical 100% efficient array of color LEDs and a 100% LED driver to make white light, then you'll be around 4.6 uMol/joule, give or take a little. This is a theoretical limitation for white light no matter the white light source.

  • Mixing warm white and cool white LEDs in a grow light makes no sense, and I consider it a marketing gimmick at best. An exception is if you want a variable color temperature grow light, then it makes sense to to mix warm white and cool white dimmable separately, or use dimmable warm white and blue LEDs to control the color temperature. I go with 3000K or 3500K for all around use for plant growing, but experiment with various 1750K to 6500K COBs, also (1750K is about what candle light is).

  • I consider mixing red LEDs like 630 nm and 660 nm, or 450 nm and 470 nm, to also be a marketing gimmick, unless a clear demonstration as to their combined efficacy can be demonstrated in controlled grows (temp, humidity, CO2, and lighting levels consistent and does not significantly fluctuate to remove as many variables as possible). My first non-controlled experiments were in 2008 where I found no significant difference in 450-660, 450-630, 450-630-660 nm, and white light for a leafy lettuce cultivar. I soldered up a few thousand low power 5 mm LEDs to do these early experiments.

  • There is nothing special about 6500K light for plants that may be used in veging and don't normally use it. Higher color temperature light usually have a higher luminous efficacy, and 6500K is about the highest color temperature that is tolerated for the consumer before appearing too blue. It's more often found in work spaces. 6500K is also the color temperature of the standard illuminate D65 used in photometry. 6500K has very little to do with professional grow lighting, and traditional (non-ceramic) metal halide is 4200K.

  • There is nothing special about 2700K light for plants that may be used for flowering. It's about what incandescent bulbs roughly are and is close to the color temperature for the illuminate standard A used in photometry. You typically want to use this color temperature range or a bit higher for living spaces. Traditional HPS is 2100K.

  • Although we tend to use higher color temperature white light for veging and a lower color temperature for flowering, I've gotten great veg growth with 2100K HPS for cannabis when LST (low stress training) techniques and higher lighting levels were used (500 umol/m2/sec). I've found greater growth at higher lighting levels but at lower color temperatures with various microgreens testing 2000K, 3000K, and 5000K light. If longer stems is what want (and what you get with lower lighting levels), but still want aggressive growth with larger leaves, play around with 2000K white LEDs at higher lighting levels for microgreens.

  • CRI (color rendering index) tells us how well a light source does at accurately reproducing colors in an object relative to a natural or black body radiation source (e.g sun, incandescent bulb). It really falls flat, though, and a different standard has come out called TM-30. TM-30 doesn't actually replace CRI because they are standards from two different organizations, the CIE (International Commission on Illumination) for CRI, and ANSI/IES (American National Standards Institute/Illuminating Engineering Society) for TM-30.

  • A major problem with CRI Ra is that it only measures eight pastel, non-saturated samples in their measurement. Not included are R9 (saturated red), R10 (saturated yellow), R11 (saturated green), R12 (saturated blue), R13 (white skin tone), R14 (leaf green), and sometimes R15 (south east Asian skin tone), which had to be added over time. Most CRI 80 lights have as R9 (red) value of 0, and CRI 90 lights are an R9 value of around 50. This is why you want to use high CRI lighting around food and for photography- CRI 80 is going to give you bland looking reds because of lower red chroma (saturation).

  • CRI plays a larger role in lux to PPFD (umol/m2/sec) conversions than color temperature. Higher CRI lighting will have a greater amount of deeper reds, and deeper reds naturally have a lower luminous flux at the same radiant flux because luminous flux takes into account the sensitivity of our eyes by wavelength. In other words, the deeper reds have a lower luminous efficiency. You can see the differences in my spectroradiometer SPD charts here.

  • You should consider using higher CRI lighting with plants that are also being used for display purposes (like orchids), particularly with plants that have red or purple colors. You should also be using high CRI lighting in your kitchen and dining room or wherever food is served, particularly for red colors like a medium rare steak. You can buy CRI +90 LED light bulbs and a quick google search shows a seller with CRI +95 (Cri 98 in their photometric data sheet).

  • 100% efficient white LEDs would be fairly close to 260 lumens per watt for CRI 100, 280 lumens per watt for CRI 95, 300 lumens per watt for CRI 90, and about 320 lumens per watt for CRI 80. This can vary a bit by up to 10%.

  • Red, green, and blue LEDs to make white light looks awful for general lighting because the CRI is around 40ish. The "rendering" part in CRI is about reflected light, and a RBG white light has relatively narrow spectral power distribution rather than a broader distribution, and the accurate colors of an object won't happen.

  • What I said about objects having colors above is a lie. Objects don't have colors, light has colors and objects have specific absorption and reflection characteristics. Even that's a partial lie because color is a perception only, and we do not all perceive colors the same (e.g red-green color blind). "Color" is so much about our perception, the specific light, the specific subject, camera sensor characteristics, and different display characteristics which is why there are a multitude of different professional color standards.

  • Fidelity Index (Rf) is used with TM-30 measurements and is sort of like CRI (0-100 scale with higher being better, but CRI can also have a negative number), but there's 99 color evaluation samples with a wide range of hue (base color), chroma (amount of saturation), and lightness. It is the average amount of "color smearing" in the 99 color samples, or the average of how far off one is from the color samples. That ultra high CRI bulb above has a TM-30-15 Rf of 94, and around 60 should be the minimum for indoor lighting (higher for living areas). A US Dept of Energy TM-30 tutorial can be found here.

  • Gamut Index (Gf) with TM-30 ranges from 80-120 and is basically the amount of saturation with 100 being a neutral saturation. It is the color gamut area. Lower Gf white lights will make objects appear duller with higher Gf having colors more saturated.

  • You can have a light with the same CCT, CRI, Rf, and still be different because the simpler numbers don't tell us the spectral power distribution. There's a good reason for high end studio photographers to keep gelling their lights as needed (professional videographers have their own standards on white coming out that takes into account the sensors in their cameras).

  • Green LEDs are relatively electrically inefficient which is why they are not commonly used in grow lights. In physics/engineering this is known as the green gap (graph). We do, however, perceive green light much higher than red or blue light, so for display purposes this inefficiency matters less.

  • Red photons have a lower energy with a higher theoretical PPE of about 5.51 uMol/joule (660 nm) compared to blue of 3.76 uMol/joule (450 nm). The higher efficacy is one reason why red LEDs are being added to white LEDs, what's held them back a bit is their electrical efficiency (red and blue LEDs use different semiconductor material).

  • A red 660 nm LED that is 50% efficient would have a PPE of 2.76 umol/joule. A blue 450 nm LED that is 50% efficient would have a PPE of 1.88 umol/joule. A 450 nm blue LED can never be higher than 100% for 3.76 umol/joule, which is 68% efficient for a 660 nm red LED.

  • Red LEDs have now broken the 4 umol/joule barrier in 2020 such as the Oslon Square Hyper Red by Osram (V9 bin 4.42 umol/joule at 350 mA for 80% efficient, and 4.04 umol/joule at 700 mA for 73% efficient). Currently, most red LEDs are significantly less.

  • Osram is taking an interesting approach by having 4000K white horticulture LEDs that contain 15% less red than CRI 70 LEDs. This LED is then combined with their very efficient >4 umol/joule red LEDs.

  • In some cases far red LEDs could be added depending on your design goals. For instance, far red could potentially help drive photosynthesis more efficiently as per the Emerson effect, but also tends to cause more acid growth (stretching in stems and petioles, larger leaves), which we may or may not want. Far red can also be used to control the photoperiod in some plants. High amounts of far red may encourage "foxtailing" in cannabis, and your specific cultivar would have to be tested.

  • Adding UV LEDs are typically only used for light sensitive protein reactions effects, not as photosynthesis drivers per se. The pure UV-A grows I've done did result in slow grow and stunted plants. If I wanted to keep a tiny, important plant alive for a long duration I would be using pure UV-A. But, the effects of UV-A on a plant can be unpredictable and needs to be tested by cultivar. The theoretical maximum PPE of a 375 nm UV-A LED is 3.13 umol/joule, and the relative low photosynthesis rate is going to make them a no-go in LED lighting except for photomorphogenesis effects. Making red lettuce cultivars more red by increasing anthocyanin production, or trying to increase trichome and cannabinoid production in cannabis plants, may be reasons to use UV light.

  • UV-A light is fairly safe (it can be dangerous when you stick your eye close to a light source that appears dim yet has a high radiant flux) and at the time of this writing, only UV-A LEDs are used in LED grow lights if UV light is used. The UV-B light sources I've seen in grow lights are still tube based because UV-B LEDs are still inefficient (5-10% range). UV-C should be considered dangerous, and in testing I have damaged a number of plants with higher amounts of UV-C.

  • The main UV light sensitive protein known about currently is the UVR8 protein which is a 280-315 nm UV-B receptor, not a UV-A receptor.

  • Apogee Instruments (Bruce Bugbee's company) have come out with a SQ-610 USB sensor for "ePAR" (enhanced photosynthetic active radiation) which counts light out to 750 nm far red, and also some UV-A at decreased sensitivity. With a long pass filter it may be possible to turn this into a red/far red light meter. They also have a new SQ-640 Quantum Light Pollution USB sensor that measures from 340-1040 nm. With the right filters, this sensor could have a lot of applications beyond light pollution measurements.

  • "Hot swapping" LEDs is generally a bad practice with constant current or constant power supplies. This is where you change out an LED with the power supply still on. By lifting the load, a much higher voltage may be found in constant current power supplies. When the LED is applied, it's possible to get a very quick and short high current pulse causing damage which is accumulative. There are LED drivers where you can dial in both the maximum current and maximum voltage to make hot swapping safer. I've blown LEDs on lab power supplies because of of hot swapping and being careless.

  • A silver mirror is fundamentally different than white although they can have the same reflectivity. The the main difference is that the mirror has a specular reflection where the phase information of the photons is preserved if the mirror surface is very smooth, and white has a diffuse reflection with photons being scattered. A mirror, being made out of a conductor, has a bunch of free electrons. These free electrons can oscillate when the photon strikes them, and this oscillation itself creates another photon i.e an opposing oscillating electric field is created that cancels out the original electromagnetic wave. Because these free electrons are not bound and have no discrete energy states, they have a broad range of energy levels they can oscillate at and a broad range of wavelengths of light that they'll reflect. This electric field interference also prevents photons from penetrating more than a few nanometers into the mirror's surface. I'm greatly simplifying all of this.

  • If you have issues with cheap LED light bulbs burning out then stop buying such cheap light bulbs. Like most everything in life, you get what you pay for, and buy cheap buy twice.



Heat sink tips

  • Only the energy input not radiated as light needs to be taken in to account for LED heat sink calculations. This is called thermal wattage. For example, a 100 watt COB that is 50% efficient would need a heat sink good for 50 watts of heat. A 100 watt COB that is 80% efficient would need a heat sink good for 20 watts of heat.

  • A heat sink has a thermal rating or heat dissipation in units of °C/W, or the rise of the heat sink in degrees C per watt of heat on the heat sink. If I have a 100 watt COB that is 50% efficient (so 50 watts of heat) and want the heat sink to rise no more than 10 degrees C, I would need a heat sink with a heat dissipation of 0.2 °C/W. If I use a fan it may be 0.4 to 2 °C/W, depending on how much air the fan pushes and the particular heat sink geometry.

  • I often size heat sinks that prevent the LEDs from going above 85-125 C for safety, and then use a quite fan to keep them at a temperature I want them to be. This provides an inherent fail-safe feature when experimenting.

  • Rule of thumb I use: I try not to go above 125 degrees F (52 C), or where I can keep my finger on the heat sink for 4 seconds. My personal do not go over temperature is 145 degrees F (63 C), or where I can keep my finger on the heat sink for an honest one second. I've had second degree burns from electronics more than once.

  • Temperature measuring tip: When working with a heat sink and a constant current power supply, you can monitor the voltage on the LEDs to see very tiny temperature variations that might not normally be measured with a temperature probe. With a constant voltage power supply, you can monitor the current to see very tiny temperature variations. This is because the I/V curves for LEDs are temperature dependent, and strings of LEDs make very high resolution temperature sensors. I use a 50,000 count data logging Fluke 287 for this purpose (I recommend a 6000 count multimeter for lower cost DIY. Every low cost meter I've ever tested reads within their listed specs when referenced to my Fluke 287, except for the occasional generic $5 meter that companies like Harbor Freight give away for free).

  • 6063 aluminum alloy is the alloy with the highest thermal conductivity (around 210 W/m⋅K), and most common in heat sinks. The trade off is that 6063 is a softer alloy so common 6061 alloy (around 167 W/m⋅K) may be used instead in some cases. I've seen sellers advertise about using "aircraft grade aluminum" like 7075 alloy for metal core PCBs for LEDs, which is inferior for our uses (around 140 W/m⋅K). For comparison, copper is closer to 400 W/m⋅K, and steel is closer to 45 W/m⋅K.

  • For a Vero 29 running at 120 watts I use a generic $30 CPU cooler with a fan and call it good. I've seen coolers half that price that should also work.

  • I can run a Bridgelux gen 7 Vero 29 at 50 watts on the COB on a 40 mm heat sink with a 40 mm fan mounted about 1 cm above the heat sink to improve airflow. To be clear, I'm saying I "can" do this, and not I "should" do this! In these sort of experimental setups I'll use a bimetalic normally closed thermal cutout switch on the heat sink that trips at 70 C (158 F). I don't recommend beginners push DIY setups this hard.

  • It is critically important that a thermal compound paste or thermal adhesive is used between the LED and the heat sink. You only want a thin layer, and I always twist the LED around a bit to get rid of air bubbles and get better overall thermal contact. If it's a heat sink/LED I'll never reuse then I'll use a thermal adhesive and just glue the LED down. Thermal pads can work at lower power levels but won't work as well as a compound/adhesive.

  • When making mounting holes in a heat sink you can use a stainless steel screw as a tap. Drill a whole just smaller than the diameter of the screw, force the screw in to the much softer aluminum cutting the threads in the process (I use a ratcheting screwdriver for this), back the screw out, take a fine file and smooth out the burs completely, and you have a drilled and tapped mounting hole.



Power supply tips

  • Get a Mean Well LED driver for DIY. The XLG are constant power and one work quite well with a Vero 18 or a Vero 29. A Vero 18 or 29 can be quickly interchanged at the same power level so you can rapidly measure the differences between the two if needed.

  • I often use lab power supplies as LED drivers. If you only get one lab power supply make sure it's a linear power supply and not a noisy switching power supply. Lower cost linear power supplies typically have a fan that will turn on at certain current levels while more expensive and much heavier ones are entirely passive cooled.

  • Power supplies have historically been the weak link in an LED grow light system and cheap capacitors are the main issue.

  • The cheap boost converters you can buy on Amazon and eBay will work, but don't expect more than about 6 months use out of them. Again, it's the capacitors that tend to fail.



MacAdam ellipses and steps

The MacAdam ellipses, or SDCM (standard deviation of color matching), as used here are standard deviations of perceived color differences in LED binning including white LEDs. The higher the step or standard deviation, the lower the binning tolerances which lowers LED costs. Sylvania has a good, simple write up on this concept with a convenient graph below.

  • MacAdam Ellipses: What are MacAdam Ellipses or color ovals?

  • To make it simple and practical, only in a 1-step MacAdam ellipse for white LEDs are any variations in the white light unperceived to most all people with a trained person. In a 2-step MacAdam ellipse variations may just be perceivable to a trained eye, and in a 3-step MacAdam ellipse variations may be just perceivable to an untrained eye. Common quality white LED lighting for residential use tend to be two or three step, but can be 4-step and still be withing ANSI (American National Standards Institute) tolerances, which was causing issues in the past (a relative of mine is a commercial/industrial electrical contractor, and didn't understand why not all the thousand plus LED bulbs installed appeared the same. He didn't understand how white LED binning worked at the time).

  • With LED grow lights we don't really care about minor variations in light, and the Samsung LM301H (horticulture) series of medium power LEDs use a 5-step MacAdam ellipse binning, while the LM301B (general illumination) uses a 3-step MacAdam ellipse binning. In other words, the LM301H has a lot more binning slop that is basically irrelevant to plant growth, but could be relevant for general illumination. The highest MacAdam step number used with LEDs is seven.

Don't worry if you can perceive slight color differences in the LEDs of LED grow lights! Your plants don't care.

14 Comments
2021/07/08
12:18 UTC

15

links to wildlife tracking, harmonic radar, energy harvesting

main links page

SAG's lighting guide



wildlife tracking and monitoring

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harmonic radar (insect tracking including flight patterns)

The basic idea of harmonic radar is to broadcast a radio signal at one frequency and a tiny diode downrange will rebroadcast the signal's second harmonic. This allows very tiny (around 30 mg) passive tracking tags that can be mounted on larger flying insects like bees. The same idea is used in technical surveillance countermeasures and mine/IED countermeasures to find electronics, powered on or off, and are also known as non-linear junction detectors. You can get the special "zero bias diodes", like the Agilent HSMS-2855, on eBay that are needed as powerless tags at around $0.60 each.

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radio direction finding (note- most papers on this subject tend to be IEEE papers which are mostly not open access)

Look up amateur radio fox hunt for information on DIY.

protip- the cheap 1N4007 silicon diode can be used as a PIN diode. This makes the TDOA (timed direction of arrival) switched antennas more accessible for DIY like in this well explained KA7OEI's blog. Actual PIN diodes are cheap on eBay (US).



energy harvesting (powering ultra low power sensors nodes and communication systems)

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0 Comments
2021/06/01
00:04 UTC

55

Green leaves and green light: what's really going on

part of SAG's Plant Lighting Guide

last update: 4 mar 2023 --added green light canopy section and safe light discussion

TL;DR - This is challenging the claim "plants can't use green light", "plants are green because they reflect all green light", or some close iteration that is so often found in biology. My counterclaim is the McCree curve is used in botany, and every paper on photosynthesis studies by wavelength when the test was actually done demonstrates most plants use green light efficiently, particularly compared to blue light and at higher lighting levels.

There are many links to open access papers supporting my claims below. quick link to the McCree (1972) paper

Please point out any mistakes or needed clarifications! I often go back and do edits for mistakes or to add more.



The claim and my problem with it

There is a lot of confusion about how green plants absorb light in biology, and the notion that "plants can't use green light" or "plants are green because they reflect all green light". It comes from biology books that are likely showing you a chart for pigments in a solvent or photosynthetic bacteria/algae, not how higher green land plants actually respond to light. Even with botany books sometimes the wrong charts are used ("Botany for Dummies", written by a PhD botanist, gets it bizarrely wrong by showing pigments that are not even in plants!).

The issue I have with the claim, coming from a horticulture lighting perspective, is that it has been used by many low end predatory LED grow light sellers, such as making outrages claims about the photosynthetic performance of red/blue only LED grow lights compared to some other grow light like HPS (high pressure sodium), by hitting some "magical wavelengths" based off misused science. I've seen a lot of people get taken advantage off (particularity early-mid 2010's) as well as a lot of disappointment.

There were claims about red/blue LED grow lights being better than HPS, by as high as ten to twenty times better growth per watt in the late 2000's, that was overpriced junk (my first LED grow lights were thousands of 5mm low power LEDs that were hand soldered). Even magazine writers were parroting the claim because of a lack of basic due diligence and not testing the lights.

These non-sense claims are where the "600w" and "1000w" "equivalent" Amazon/eBay scammy LED grow lights get their name and their reputation, and it continues to this day with shysters claiming 50 watts of low end LEDs as "600w". Don't ever do business with these type of people, because if they BS you once they'll BS you again. Don't believe their square footage claims needed for growing cannabis.

So from my niche perspective, I have seen the claim collectively cause a lot of financial harm to people, and consumers may not be making good choices by thinking the spectral output of a lower wattage red/blue LED grow light is somehow going to make up for the low lighting levels; It absolutely will not. This is particularly important as indoor growing becomes more popular. It also hurts the "good guys" in the LED grow light business because the shysters give the industry as a whole a bad name. Their hyperbolic claims are a failure every time because science.



The counterclaim and what's really going on

TL;DR- most green light is absorbed and is used for photosynthesis

Every scientific paper on plant lighting by wavelength for photosynthesis backs the claim that plants use green light, and you will never find a paper where the test was actually done say anything differently. But why this is can be very counterintuitive at first, and having so many YouTube videos and even more respectable forums (such as on researchgate.net) show so much misinformation just causes more confusion. I've seen faulty appeal to authority style arguments from even biologist PhD's who are not understanding the science.

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"plants are green because they reflect all green light or "plants can't use green light"- reflectance, absorption, and transmittance

You are likely going off the pigments dissolved in a solvent chart if you believe this, and that's a relative absorption chart in vitro (e.g cuvette), not the McCree curve that is an absolute chart of how plant leaves respond to light by wavelength for photosynthesis in vivo (living leaf). There is a pretty big difference here. Also, at no point is chlorophyll in a solvent truly at zero percent absorption of green light in higher resolution charts.

Unlike chlorophyll in a solvent, in a green plant leaf we have relatively dense chloroplasts, containing thylakoid membranes stacked as disks (grana), that holds the chlorophyll in a 3D structure called a quantasome (basic photosynthesis unit with around 230 chlorophyll, perhaps 50 carotenoid molecules, and the PSI/PSII). There is a much higher density level of chlorophyll in a leaf than chlorophyll in a solvent extract.

So in vitro, with just relatively loose pigments suspended in a solvents, there is going to be a different measurement and spectral characteristics than in a green leaf in vivo, that is in a dense solid lattice that changes optical characteristics such as broadening the adsorption bands. (BTW, ionized gases do the same broadening under higher pressure/density, and a white xenon strobe tube may be at 10's of atmospheres of pressure (3-4 more typical) giving a broad white and very high CRI light instead of narrow spectral bands (current density also plays a role here)).

You may also be going off an algae chart (first done in the late 1800's!) or some bacteria, which will show a significant dip in the green area, rather than a green terrestrial plant leaf. Hoover (1937) was the first to demonstrate green light photosynthesis in plants (he used wheat that was likely a little bit chlorotic based off the specific shape of his curve).

For absorption, here is an example of a "medium darker green" leaf showing 83% absorption (17% reflectance with how it's set up but that does not matter) from my spectroradiometer, and more typical of what's really going on. Here is a spectral reflectivity profile of a high nitrogen marijuana leaf (Jack Herer). About 90% of the green light is being absorbed although in the cannabis pic. Refer to the McCree paper above to see many more examples (I have my charts flipped because it's easier for me to work with).



The experiment on green leaf absorption with your phone

Don't take my word for it, test it yourself with your three channel spectrometer that's in your phone.

With a color balance adjusted camera (or in post processing), you can take a piece of printer paper and declare that an 88% reflective white reference standard (you want common "88 brightness" paper but can get up to 97 which is based off a 457 nm measurement). Make sure that the paper is "true white', and not "cream white" or "blue white". You can also preferably take an 18% gray card used in photography/video that may have a white side that is typically 90% reflective.

I only use paper or cloth color reference cards to insure near perfect diffused cosine response, not plastic smooth ones which may have a bit of specular reflection (ie glare). The smooth plastic ones are fine in most situations but not in spectrometer. If working with a waxy leaf it's often best to remove the wax layer with very fine steel wool to prevent specular reflections.

Now take a picture of the leaf on the paper. Try to use a more diffuse light source but most any white light source can be used with the color balance adjusted. You want to make sure that you have even lighting on the subject and the white standard.

In your camera's histogram (quick how-to), get the camera's exposure so that the white paper is as high as it goes on the graph without clipping/saturating. We want as much usable dynamic range as possible.

When you have the picture, open it up in GIMP/Photoshop, and we are going to examine a section of white paper right next to the leaf. Adjust the levels to 100% (255 for red/green/blue). Now examine the color of the leaf, taking into account that the levels had to be raised a bit, and you'll see that most of the green light is being absorbed by the leaf and can roughly measure it.

An easily falsifiable experiment is a credible experiment, and the experiment is easy enough to perform to be a good school lesson (if you measure ratios then you can get a good idea of chlorophyll content). I'm sure that there is an app that can easily automatically measure the green levels in leaves.



The McCree curve and its limitations

  • The McCree Curve Demystified -this article discusses the McCree curve from a horticulture lighting scientist's perspective. The "relative action" takes in to account the energy of the photon which is why the blue side takes such a hard dip. Blue photons have more energy than red/green photons, but it's one photon per photochemical reaction as per the Stark-Einstein law, also known as the second law of photochemistry (there are exceptions to the second law).

McCree was a physicist who in the early 1970's tested 22 different types of plants for their photosynthesis response rates by lighting level, and by specific monochromatic lighting spectrum. He took what are called leaf disks, about one inch in diameter leaf cutouts in this case, but 20mm x 20mm was being illumined, in to a machine that was able to measure how much carbon dioxide the illuminated leaf disc was uptaking. That's an accurate way to measure photosynthesis rates. BTW, the light sensor was not any sort of full spectrum quantum light sensor like we'd use today, but rather a thermopile pyranometer painted black that measured the heat generated with the illumined area, with a separate thermocouple as a temperature reference. Pyranometers are still used in agriculture.

The light wavelength was measured in 25 nm intervals, from 350 nm to 725 nm, achieved using a high power arc lamp and water cooled filters. This light gave the leaf discs an illumination level at five test points from 18-150 uMol/m2/sec. This mean was taken for all 22 plants, and the mean totality is how McCree curve was created. So, the McCree curve is a good starting point for learning about photosynthesis rates by wavelength, but the results are limited to lighting conditions that most people will never use because most people don't grow plants with monochromatic light at relatively low levels.

The McCree curve also only looks at the single leaf model of plant growth, not the whole plant model. For example, the McCree curve does not take into account that green (and far red) light can make leaves larger which increases the LAI (leaf area index) capturing more light, but can also cause excess stem elongation from a type of growth called acid growth.

McCree also tested the underside (abaxial) of leaves, and found that they were also performing photosynthesis. In many cases the underside of a leaf will have a lower chlorophyll density, and may reflect more green light than the topside (adaxial) of a leaf, which may lower green light photosynthesis. Monocotyledons (e.g grain crops) tend to have the same photosynthesis rates on both sides of a leaf.

He also found that adding white light to monochromatic light can lower absolute (but not relative) photosynthesis rates at lower lighting levels, saying he found no Emerson effect, but I believe he may have misunderstood what the Emerson effect is. The Emerson effect has to do with light that can drive the photosystem one and two separately, basically freeing up electrons between the PSII and the PSI to increase photosynthesis efficiency. This was discover in 1957 by Robert Emerson, and demonstrated that there were two separate photosystems in plants.

It's my guess that the above white light lowering photosynthesis, may be why the below paper is named the way it is.



Terashima et al has entered the chat

TL;DR- green beat red at about 300 uMol/m2/sec

When I see people mentioning this is only for higher white light conditions mentioned in the title, then I can tell they have not read the paper.

What's going on above? Well first, we are looking at net photosynthesis rates in the above paper and that is what really counts, not absolute absorption. Also, the absorbed green light can also transmit deeper through leaf material more effectively and potentially used for photosynthesis more efficiently.

This is because the top layers of chloroplasts that contains chlorophyll becomes saturated, as per PI curves, while green light can penetrate deeper into leaf tissue (sieve effect) and reflected around until absorbed by a chlorophyll molecule (scattering) or by an accessory pigment.

This efficiency can be measure through the amount of chlorophyll fluorescence or a gas exchange chamber.

Terashima et al were using chlorophyll florescence techniques to measure net photosynthesis rates. Everything you need to know about chlorophyll fluorescence to measure photosynthesis rates can be found here.

What the team found was the green light started outperforming red light at about 300 uMol/m2/sec as measure with a pulse amplitude modulated fluorometer.

You can see this going on in this pic below of light penetration for red, green, and blue light. Red and blue light gets quickly absorb by the chlorophyll near the leaf surface, but green is able to drive photosynthesis deeper.

So what really high intensity light source has a lot of green light that plants evolved to? The sun and at a full sunlight PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density) of around 2000 uMol/m2/sec would be considered very, very intense light compared to what the average indoor grower would use. With thin leaves (e.g. apple) I can measure perhaps 150 uMol/m2/sec of sunlight through an upper leaf that will illuminate a lower leaf with nearly all green light which is a very efficient lighting level for photosynthesis.

Ironically, it could be the case that plants evolved to be green because of the high green light component in sunlight makes green leaves more efficient, by absorbing most of the green light, and using the absorbed green light more efficiently throughout the leaf.



It's more than just photosynthesis- photomorphogenesis

Photomorphogenesis has to do with light sensitive proteins, and unlike photosynthesis, can be very wavelength dependent in a plant's response. The phytochromes are predominately red and far red with Pr peaking around 660 nm, the blue sensitive proteins are the crytochromes and phototropins have what's known as the "three finger blue action response" with peaks at roughly 430, 450, and 470 nm depending on the specific protein. 470 nm light can be very different than 490 nm light when it comes to light sensitive proteins and how plants respond to light. source 1 source 2

Green light used alone tends to elicit a lot of elongation (stretching) due to triggering the shade avoidance response causing more acid growth which is different than growth though photosynthesis. This is the opposite of blue light. High pressure sodium lights have a lot of green/yellow/amber light which is why they do so well and are still the most widely used in large scale horticulture even at the time of this writing.

The above means that we can get larger leaves with green (and far red) light due to the reversibility of blue light sensitive proteins. Larger leaves means a greater leaf area index which means more potential for photosynthesis from greater light capture.

Green light can also cause the stomata (gaseous exchange pores) of plants to close a bit more than normal, which is the opposite of blue light. Basically to plants, blue light is the opposite of green light, and red light is the opposite to far red light for light sensitive protein reactions (not completely accurate but fairly close).



You eyes can deceive you, don't trust them -Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi master

With plants there's also perceptual differences and our eyes have a combined sensitivity curve where the peak of our sensitivity is also were the peak reflectivity is going to be for a green plant. (The individual sensitivity of our 3 color sensitive cone cells in our eyes is this.).

So, it's true plants do reflect more green light than red or blue, but the way we perceive light is naturally much higher biased for green light with a 555 nm sensitivity peak, which is the same as a green plant's reflectivity peak. This allows use to notice very tiny variations of green which can be use to more precisely diagnose a plant if a gatherer. Coincidence? It's also why in cameras there's a ratio of one red, one blue, and two green pixels.

It should be noted that the maximum absorption wavelength for chlorophyll in leaves in vivo is 675-680 nm (chlorophyll A), and not 660 nm as often cited (chlorophyll B is about 645 nm). This can be seen in this spectrometer shot of a chlorotic (yellow) leaf as a dip in the 675-680 nm range from small amounts of chlorophyll A left over. The blue absorption seen are carotenoids which have perhaps a 30-70% efficiency at transferring the absorbed light energy to a photosynthetic reaction center through chlorophyll A. Chlorophyll B is an accessory pigment and higher land plants do not contain chlorophyll C, D, or F (there is no E type). Depending on the plant, there may be 2.5ish-7 or so chlorophyll A molecules for every chlorophyll B molecule but mostly around a 3:1 ratio.

The 30-70% efficiency claim (depending on type and the paper) about carotenoids is why I've always thought it odd that any grow light seller would brag about targeting carotenoids. Carotenoids are there to help the plant with intense lighting and shunting some of the higher energy blue photons absorbed away from chlorophyll through non-photochemical quenching. From a thermodynamics perspective this makes perfect sense for plants to have evolved carotenoids, and we can measure their activity to high light through the photochemical reflectance index by taking ratiometric measurements with a spectrometer.


And that is what's really going on with green light and green plants, and how you perceive them.



Why not use green LEDs?

Green LEDs are electrically inefficient compared to red and blue LEDs, and this problem is known as the "green gap" (google image link) in physics/engineering. The most efficient green LEDs that I known of are actually blue LEDs with a green phosphor.

The above is why white LEDs, blue LEDs with phosphors, are used instead that have a strong green light component. I've done pure green grows, but was using green COBs in a small space, and just to prove a point.

But the above, with our enhanced green light sensitivity, is why we can use green LEDs in red, green, blue lighting strips, for example, and we won't notice the inefficiency in the green LEDs.



green light penetrates deep into the plant canopy?

Many research papers or online sources will say stuff like an advantage of green light is that it can penetrate deep in the plant canopy and drive photosynthesis in lower leaves. The reality is that green light usually doesn't penetrate through cannabis leaves, but green light can penetrate deeper into individual leaves and drive more photosynthesis in that specific leaf.

Outdoors in many plants there will be much more green and far red light in the lower canopy because leaves from nearby plants reflect higher amounts of green and particularly far red light from sunlight. This is likely where the myth comes from and is true for certain growing conditions.

A thin leaf like an apple tree leaf will have about 100-150 uMol/m2/sec of green light penetration through the leaf under full sunlight (2000 uMol/m2/sec) but we're not going to get this with a higher nitrogen and thicker cannabis leaf to any significant degree.

So yes, green light can penetrate deeper into a plant canopy, but that's not really going to happen in a typical cannabis grow chamber like a grow tent to any significant degree. We may use green light for multiple reasons but it has nothing to do with canopy penetration in nearly all indoor grow setups.



green light as a safe light <----not necessarily as safe as thought

We might use green as a safe light (a light for inspecting cannabis photoperiod plants in darkness) due to our eyes being more sensitive to green light and the lower sensitivity of the cryptochrome proteins involved with photoperiodism to green light.

The point that Bugbee makes about cryptochrome (light sensitive protein that plays a role in photoperiodism) is that green light has the potential to trigger more of the cryptochrome proteins deeper in the leaf since green light can penetrate deeper in leaf tissue. But, a point he may not be stressing enough is that cryptochrome also has much lower sensitivity to green light so it could be a combination of the two which allows low levels of green light to be used for short periods in the dark period of photoperiod cannabis plants.



Links to open access papers on green light and plants

photosynthetic pigment complement-- Nishio 2000](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-3040.2000.00563.x)

  • [Effect of green light wavelength and intensity on photomorphogenesis and

photosynthesis in Lactuca sativa-- Johkan et al](https://www.plantgrower.org/uploads/6/5/5/4/65545169/1-s2.0-s0098847211001924-main.pdf)

Green Light: Interactions With Photon Flux](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0163121)

assimilation efficiency of lettuce as revealed by 'knock out' of the 480–560 nm spectral waveband](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hui-Liu-106/publication/301719010_Green_light_enhances_growth_photosynthetic_pigments_and_CO2_assimilation_efficiency_of_lettuce_as_revealed_by_%27knock-out%27_of_the_480-560_nm_spectral_waveband/links/5a2e2533aca2728e05e2fc64/Green-light-enhances-growth-photosynthetic-pigments-and-CO2-assimilation-efficiency-of-lettuce-as-revealed-by-knock-out-of-the-480-560-nm-spectral-waveband.pdf)

7 Comments
2021/05/31
23:35 UTC

34

Directed energy weapons links

Directed energy weapons links

main links page

SAG's plant lighting guide


high power microwave


vircator


marx generator


flux compression generator


pulse power


nanosecond pulsers


electromagnetic pulses


laser weapons


railgun and coilgun

21 Comments
2021/05/10
14:27 UTC

20

TEMPEST and compromised emissions

main links page

SAGs lighting guide



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3 Comments
2021/05/06
21:43 UTC

55

Arduino links for the botanist

last update: May 2021

main links page

Part of SAG's Plant Lighting Guide

this will be edited as needed



quick notes on sensors

Don't use resistive moisture sensors for soil like shown in many of the papers below. You want to use capacitive moisture sensors instead. Resistive sensors tend to not last long due to damage from electrolysis. If you do use a resistive moisture sensor then power on the sensor through a digital pin as needed, wait perhaps 1 mSec for everything to stabilize, do your A/D measurement, and then power down the sensor again until the next measurement is needed. This will minimize electrolysis damage long term and you will quickly kill a resistive sensor that is left powered on.

Capacitive soil moisture sensors can be left on all the time and do not have the above electrolysis issue assuming they are properly sealed including the all of electronics. They are not affected by soil (fertilizer) salts content unlike resistive sensors. The orientation and placement of a capacitive sensor will make a difference in their output in soil containers so you may have to play around a bit to get the more ideal reading range you want. I've seen this cause issues and you generally want the circuit board side facing inwards with the common generic capacitive v1.2 soil moisture sensor.

I would avoid the DHT11 humidity/temperature sensor shown in many papers below. I prefer the BME280 because I can set a bunch up and actually have them read the same under the same conditions consistently, which can be a problem with very low cost humidity sensors like the DHT11. The BME280 on protoboards are pretty cheap out of China, if in the US then check out eBay for US sellers at a pretty low cost (around $4 and you get an air pressure sensor in addition). The MCP9808 is one of the better lower cost temperature sensors that I also tested.

The Arduino type lux sensors that I've tested are pretty close to cosine correct (this is so, so important and why your phone makes a poor light meter). Assuming you know the lux to µmol m-2 s-1 PPFD conversion value for your light source, then a lux sensor can be used for plant lighting. I discuss this more in my article on using a lux meter as a plant light meter with links to supporting literature. Be sure that you can verify the lux measurement readings with a calibrated full spectrum quantum light meter for higher academic use. The TSL2591 can also be used for ultra high dynamic range two channel spectrophotometry.

Most of the latest spectral sensors like the $16 10-channel AS7341 spectrometer are not cosine correct so may need a secondary optic depending on your application (probably not as a general purpose spectrophotometer). The AS7341 could be made in to a full spectrum quantum light meter saving you >$500, when cosine corrected with a thin piece of white opaque plastic spaced properly, and a great sign of where lower cost spectrometry and light measurement is headed. The AS72652 can be used as a low cost red/far red light sensor also saving you >$500. The TCS3200 color sensor is being used as a SPAD meter replacement in some papers saving >$1,000. The TCS34725 color sensor is cosine correct and can fairly accurately measure color temperature with the AdaFruit library.

For carbon dioxide measurements, you ideally want to use dual channel NDIR type sensors although most of the lower cost ones are single channel. When first working around CO2 sensors, you need to be aware that you are constantly breathing out about 45,000 ppm CO2 and this is going to affect the sensor on the lab bench. It's a good idea to give lower cost NDIR sensors a several day burn-in period before relying on them. The MH-Z14A is an example of a lower cost but fairly accurate CO2 sensor with official library support.

The $7 VL53L0X laser range finder can be used to monitor plant growth or for cheap 3D scanning with a small tube over the sensor reduce the FOV. You may want to do some averaging with the sensor output.



grow related systems



farming and agriculture



measurements and lab gear



misc

21 Comments
2021/05/02
20:01 UTC

19

Misc links

Misc papers

last update: April 2021 -added aeroponics section

main papers link page

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide main page





aeroponics

2 Comments
2021/03/14
14:56 UTC

7

Machine vision/learning and plants

Machine vision/learning and plants

last update: March 2021

main papers link page

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide main page


Machine vision (also check out the NDVI links)


Machine learning

3 Comments
2021/03/14
14:55 UTC

4

Chlorophyll fluorescence and NDVI

Chlorophyll fluorescence and NDVI

last update: March 2021

main papers link page

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide main page


Chlorophyll fluorescence

the sequel](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Frequently-asked-questions-about-chlorophyll-the-Kalaji-Schansker/a05e0ee7d0d9c1f0bee60d996415dfb227b8161d) -This goes a bit beyond the basics including specific protein profiles.

In Vivo](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/32dc/109c20cbaf1ac4055eecbb25f110119d0d82.pdf)

as a measure of plant photosynthesis](https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/113186/1/2015_Rossini_red_and_far.pdf)


NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index)

0 Comments
2021/03/14
14:54 UTC

10

Far red, blue, green, and photosynthesis studies

Far red, blue, green, and photosynthesis studies

last update: May 2021

main papers link page

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide main page

note- in most papers, blue is counted as 400-500 nm, green is 500-600 nm, red is 600-700 nm, and far red is 700-750 nm (or so). This means in many papers that cyan and yellow/amber will count as green light although their photosynthesis rates are different. Cyan has lower photosynthesis rates compared to green/yellow/amber due to the higher absorption of cyan light by carotenoids, which is only 30-70% efficient at transferring energy to chlorophyll, and only through chlorophyll can absorbed energy be transferred to a photosynthetic reaction center. You'll see in the McCree curve that yellow/amber light is very efficient.


Far red

implications for re-defining photosynthetically active radiation.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/pce.13730)

photosynthesis in leaves in State 1](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005272813002144)


Blue

Cryptochrome Regulation of Flowering in Arabidopsis](http://www.plantcell.org/content/plantcell/20/2/292.full.pdf)


Green

photosynthetic pigment complement-- Nishio 2000](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-3040.2000.00563.x)

  • [Effect of green light wavelength and intensity on photomorphogenesis and

photosynthesis in Lactuca sativa-- Johkan et al](https://www.plantgrower.org/uploads/6/5/5/4/65545169/1-s2.0-s0098847211001924-main.pdf)

Green Light: Interactions With Photon Flux](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0163121)


Photosynthesis

OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN CROP PLANTS-- McCree](https://www.vegenaut.com/pl/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/07/PPFD_essential_article.pdf) -This is the McCree curve!

Action Spectrum for Photosynthesis- McCree 1971](http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/plantphysiol/49/5/704.full.pdf) Note- the action spectrum is different than quantum yield

development: The importance of radiation capture](https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1765&context=psc_facpub)

  • [Photosynthetic response of Cannabis sativa L. to variations in

photosynthetic photon flux densities, temperature and CO2 conditions](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550641/pdf/12298_2008_Article_27.pdf)

Performance and Photoprotective Capacity](http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/plantphysiol/175/4/1634.full.pdf)

and Pulsed Irradiation Using Light-Emitting Diodes](https://www.hst-j.org/articles/pdf/R91O/kshs-2018-036-04-9.pdf)

CP43 and CP47 of Photosystem II](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82683784.pdf)

convert solar energy into biomass?](http://sippe.ac.cn/gh/2008%20Annual%20Report/Zhu%20X-G.pdf)

the below gets in to quantum photosynthesis


3 Comments
2021/03/14
14:53 UTC

31

Cannabis, basil, lettuce, tomato, pepper lighting

Cannabis, basil, lettuce, tomato, pepper lighting links

last update: March 2021

main papers link page

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide main page


Cannabis lighting


Basil lighting


Lettuce lighting


Tomato lighting


Pepper lighting

5 Comments
2021/03/14
14:52 UTC

37

Light Measurement, LED Grow Light Systems, and Spectral Characteristics

Light Measurement, LED Grow Light Systems, and Spectral Characteristics

last update: March 2021

main papers link page

SAG's Plant Lighting Guide main page


light meters and measurement


LED grow lights and systems


Spectral measurements and characteristics

(PRI) – a measure of photosynthetic light-use efficiency](https://hyspiri.jpl.nasa.gov/downloads/2010_Symposium/09-Gamon-PRI.pdf)

concentration in rice under stress from heavy metals using four spectral indices](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221088946_Estimating_leaf_chlorophyll_content_of_rice_under_heavy_metal_stress_using_neural_network_model)

Euglena gracilis](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285634885_Chlorophyll_a_b_Ratio_Increases_Under_Low-light_in_'Shade-tolerant'_Euglena_gracilis)

  • [Nondestructive Estimation of Anthocyanin

Content in Grapevine Leaves](https://calmit.unl.edu/people/agitelson2/pdf/2009/2009-AJEV.pdf)

  • [Reflectance spectral features and non-destructive estimation of

chlorophyll, carotenoid and anthocyanin content in apple fruit](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222515624_Reflectance_spectral_features_and_non-destructive_estimation_of_chlorophyll_carotenoid_and_anhocyanin_content_in_apple_fruit)

  • [In situ measurement of leaf chlorophyll concentration:

analysis of the optical/absolute relationship](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/pce.12324)

3 Comments
2021/03/14
14:51 UTC

53

links to scientific papers

Open Access Scientific Literature (more than just plant lighting)

part of SAG's Plant Lighting Guide

last update: 19 july 2024- added far red 2024 page



Links by subject and video series


Non-lighting open access papers



Quick links to some favorite papers/videos

3.4 µmol J−1 for white + red fixtures, and 4.1 µmol J−1 for blue + red fixtures"*

  • [THE ACTION SPECTRUM, ABSORPTANCE AND QUANTUM YIELD

OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN CROP PLANTS](http://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/conteudo_thumb/mini/The-action-spectrum-absorptance-and-quantum-yield-of-photosynthesis-in-crop-plants.pdf). This is the McCree curve used in botany (fig 14). It's the average CO2 uptake (quantum yield) by wavelength for 22 different plant type leaf samples at lower PPFD levels (15-150 µmol/m2/sec or so) and in monochromatic light, not multiwavelength or white light. This paper is only the starting point on understanding photosynthesis rates by wavelength, however, anyone that has anything to do with plant lighting should at least know what the McCree curve is.

  • [Why are higher plants green? Evolution of the higher plant

photosynthetic pigment complement](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-3040.2000.00563.x) -This is a fairly easy read and very thorough.

1 Comment
2021/03/14
14:49 UTC

22

xpost on newest gen 8 Bridgelux Vero now in stock at Digikey and some stuff I'm up to

2 Comments
2020/08/01
23:20 UTC

32

Bridgelux phosphor guide

Spectrum charts, conversion factors, and color ratios of the Bridgelux COB array LEDs

updated 11 June 2020

part of SAG's Plant Lighting Guide

Using a lux meter as a plant light meter (only use a lux meter with white light sources)


The conversion factor is luminous flux (lux) to photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) in uMol/m2/sec (micro moles per square meter per second) of PAR (photosynthetic active radiation 400-700 nm). This is so that low cost lux meters can be used as plant lighting meters.

The color ratios will not add up to 100. Blue is 400-499 nm, green is 500-599 nm, red is 600-699nm, far red is 700-799nm.

This is the second order derivative of the Bridgelux phosphors. This was specifically a CRI 97 COB. Each of the major downward dips is a different phosphor and is way more complex than I thought it would be. The saturated one on the far left is the phosphor pump blue LED (the wavelength is downshifted or shifted to the right slightly with this technique). Derivative spectroscopy is a powerful analytical chemistry technique that allows one to look at chlorophyll A and B separately in living leaves in vivo, for example, that may not show up very well if at all with more traditional spectroscopy techniques in vivo.

The average wavelength of phosphor pump blue LEDs in my samples was about 453.5 nm.

Vero 10's, Vero 18's and Vero 29's were tested here. In many cases multiple samples of the same phosphor type were tested.

The below backs my claim that you can use 70 lux = 1 umol/m2/sec for CRI 80, and 63 lux = 1 umol/m2/sec for CRI 90 and be within 10%. That 1750K LED is an exception.


1750K cri 80 -This is an oddball LED

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 49 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:08....green:25....red:57....far red:06


2000K cri 65

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 70 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:05....green:41....red:49....far red:02


2700K cri 80

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 72 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:11....green:42....red:36....far red:02


2700K cri 90

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 63 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:06....green:19....red:22....far red:02


3000K cri 80

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 73 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:16....green:45....red:37....far red:02


3000K cri 90

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 65 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:09....green:22....red:23....far red:02


3000K cri 97

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 59 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:14....green:36....red:41....far red:04


3500K cri 80

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 74 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:20....green:47....red:31....far red:01


4000K cri 80

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 74 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:11....green:24....red:14....far red:01


4000K cri 90

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 68 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:20....green:40....red:31....far red:02


5000k cri 70

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 75 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:13....green:22....red:09....far red:01


5000K cri 80

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 76 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

blue:26....green:50....red:21....far red:01


3 Comments
2020/05/26
17:44 UTC

79

A strong warning about removing the domes from LED light bulbs by an actual electrician

A strong warning about removing the domes from LED light bulbs by an actual electrician.

edit- here is how to use some low cost LED lights safely in a space bucket

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceBuckets/comments/gn4iut/a_low_cost_no_hassle_lighting_setup_for_a_five/

This is in response to a really good and highly upvoted /r/hydroponics thread that had highly upvoted bad advice in the comments section. I'm not going to link to the thread because it's no my intention to cause embarrassment.

Longer discussion

This will be archived in my lighting guide

Full write up on electrical safety can be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceBuckets/comments/crqdsj/line_voltage_cobs_and_a_discussion_on_electrical/

Testing some smaller lights:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HandsOnComplexity/comments/d5nu5p/evaluation_of_tiny_grow_lights/

It's also in response to profoundly stupid people like Shane (MIGRO) for promoting stuff like this.


Not. Isolated. From. Ground.

Removing the plastic translucent dome from an LED light bulb is a way to get more light on your plants. This is just factual. What you are also doing is exposing potential lethal voltages that are not isolated from ground.

With an isolated power supply, like any of the Mean Well LED drivers, I can take the wires meant for the LEDs and take them right to ground potential with no problems, no damage, and no current flow (it is the current that kills). This is a safety test I do with most everything I analyze if I'm actually digging in to a light fixture. Non-isolated means that the current would flow.

At 120 volts AC input you can have up to 170 volts DC exposed by removing the dome (because of the full wave bridge rectifier and capacitor), which does depend on the voltage drop of the LEDs, and in every case where I have simulated ground faults with the domes removed I get sparks flying off the LED light bulb and the LED driver smoking. This is partially because cheaper capacitive power supplies are being used much more often. From the wiki:

"The second is that due to the absence of electrical isolation between input and output, anything connected to the power supply must be reliably insulated so that it is not possible for a person to come into electrical contact with it."

If you are in a country that has 230 volt line voltage there is a possibility of up to 325 volts DC being exposed (230 * 1.41 because the capacitor can be charged up to the peak voltage rather than the RMS voltage). Once dielectric breakdown of the skin occurs it's not one hundred kiloOhms resistance or whatever you measured with a multimeter- it's much, much lower which allows much more current to flow. BAMN!

I want to emphasize that people saying that you can not get a severe shock because your hand has a very high electrical resistance typically do not understand the subject matter because all the matters is the resistance when a higher voltage is being applied. It is not the same and dielectric breakdown in non-linear. Your skin is a dieletric (insulator) that is easy to breakdown.


Bulbs used to be safer

When I was first experimenting with LED light bulbs for growing around 2010 many were about $20-25 for a 450 lumen light bulb that used externally clocked isolated switching power supplies (I could tell they were externally clocked from the low phase noise measurements). They were using less LEDs so the exposed voltage was around perhaps 30-35 volts that were usually isolated from ground.

Right around 2012-2013ish or so I started finding more and more capacitive and linear power supplies and another big difference was that the switching power supplies were not being isolated even with a UL label. But they didn't and still do not need to be isolated because the plastic dome is your ingress safety protection and are perfectly safe if unmodified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code

By removing this built in safety feature you are allowing higher voltages to be exposed in an environment that has a lot of highly conductive liquids around (i.e. hydro solution) that may be on a conductive surface like a damp concrete floor or a grounded metal rack system (which ideally should be grounded).

If you were to touch the exposed LEDs with one hand and your other hand came in to contact with ground potential, or if you were standing on a damp concrete floor, for example, you can get a lethal amount of current flowing through your body. The "can't let go" current is only about 10-20 mA (as low as 1/100th of an amp). If you start getting up to 50 mA through the heart then you are in deadly current level ranges. Your heart rhythm can be so easily thrown off with current flow and heart tissue can be damaged from burning. You can also get permanent nerve damage from electrical shocks.

In many LED light bulbs that I've opened they'll be two prongs sticking out and that is a great way to get snagged up on an energized light bulb.

I'm just warning everyone, as an actual industrial electrician, some of you people are giving some really, really dangerous advice and most everyone here does not understand electricity or how dangerous it can be. No sane professional is going to crap on their own reputation by telling others to do something inherently unsafe. Why take advice from an amateur pertaining to electricity and electrical safety issues? That doesn't make sense...

But...but...but...I use GFCI/RCD. Good, you should protect yourself like this but that's not an excuse to be unsafe or to encourage other to be unsafe. Are they using GFCI/RCD, too? The reality is likely not. Use GFCI/RCD protection with hydro setups in particular, people!

But...but...but...I've never heard of anyone getting shocked off a modified light bulb. Well hmmmm, perhaps that person is not around anymore. But would you leave a small piece of bare wire sticking out of an energized receptacle? Removing the dome is basically the same thing from an electrical standpoint.

But...but...but...I saw it on YouTube. Well...YouTube has a lot of idiots. I've seen people grab energized circuit boards on and people were having to point out in the comments that he was going to get himself killed while also encouraging people to remove the cover. I'm specifically talking about how foolishly unsafe MIGRO can be. Fuck Shane for being the clueless dumb ass that he is because he's going to get people killed if he has not already (why anyone would take him seriously is beyond me- he does not not know theory to the point that he makes up his own units like PPFD/W, and doesn't even know the difference between efficacy and efficiency).


Reflectors

If you want more light on your plant then use a proper reflector. You can make your own aluminum foil reflector (for the last time, aluminum foil will not burn your plants). The problem with DIY aluminum foil reflectors is that in many instances (I've seen this so many times...) you'll have a reverse polarity of the hot and neutral wires and in many cases with a light socket there may be some metal exposed where the light screws in to the light socket. If there is a reverse polarity then that exposed metal is going to be energized. If the aluminum foil reflector comes in contact then the whole reflector is going to be energized at line voltage. I just want to throw this out there and it's why I've never done a DIY guide on making your own aluminum foil reflectors for LED light bulbs.

I've designed aluminum foil reflectors, optimized them (they can actually lower the bulb temperature if designed properly by acting as a heat sink), saw the very obvious safety flaw, then moved on with another project.

There are also many instances of Amazon grow bulbs I have bought and tested that also had exposed energized parts (see above link on small light testing). In addition, some of these cheap line voltage COBs I've bought on Amazon and tested had the ground wire simply clipped off even though the light had a metal housing and was advertised for outdoor use. Holy shit....

Every UFO light I have tested was safe with isolated power supplies. I think they are garbage using crappy LEDs and a noisy (RFI or radio frequency interference) LED driver(s) but at least they are safe garbage. Most all high end quantum boards appear safe with isolated Mean Well LED drivers.

Use lights like this below as an example that broadcast all their light in one direction and still have ingress protection. (this is a really good light that I now use as a lab bench light). There are lights by Sansi I've tested that were safe and directional although not as efficient as that name brand GE light.

https://www.amazon.com/GE-Lighting-93101232-Balanced-Spectrum/dp/B07NNT3G7J/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=ge+grow+light&qid=1582885031&sr=8-4


Who are you listening to on safety?

I write a lot about electrical safety on Reddit, particularly on the /r/spacebuckets subreddit where there are a lot of beginners, and due to my past professional on the job experience I've seen (of know) a number of people have been injured by electricity including life altering injuries (I know someone who has such chronic nerve pain from a severe electrical shock that he was put on ketamine at one point to keep him from killing himself from the never ending pain he was in and ten years later is still taking pain killers most every day and wearing a brace- that's a no bullshit story).

I've established my reputation as to knowing what I'm talking about with electricity and lighting (go through my post history or read my lighting guide) and people need to start questioning who they are receiving advice from pertaining anything to do with modifying electrical devices where that device now becomes inherently dangerous or anything to do with electrical safety because it's not some game. I utterly condemn people encouraging others to do things that are obviously unsafe, particularly when most people do not understand the dangers like most all beginners, and so should you.

There are a lot of good electricians and engineers on Reddit. Listen to them. Just be careful of the software engineer saying he's an "engineer" that does not understand Ohm's/Watt's Law and says the he's going to do a write up on electrical safety (I shut that shit down fast). That guy didn't even understand how LEDs worked like that there is a voltage drop across the LED and an I-V curve.

I also really condemn some of these YouTubers suggesting that people do unsafe stuff like removing that cover from LED light bulbs or showing electrically unsafe practices or being clueless about their unsafe recommendations like promoting ungrounded line voltage COB lights. Just because you see a person waving a light meter under a light in a video does not mean that person knows what they are talking about.

Finally, cheap and safe rarely do together. Cheap means that corners are being cut and the last thing you ever want to do is listen to someone emphasize how cheap a light is if they are not qualified to test the light for electrical safety. Blow. These. People. Off.

10 Comments
2020/02/28
10:37 UTC

81

Evaluation of Tiny Grow Lights

Evaluation of tiny grow lights

This is part of SAG's Plant Lighting Guide


This is a look at some tiny grow lights mainly from Amazon. If I gave the light a fail for electrical safety then the full test is not being published since I do not recommend buying the light. Some of the shots from my spectrometer may be a bit different from others since I'm showing raw images from “scope” mode.

The conversion factor is how you change the lux reading to PPFD in umol/m2/sec which is the unit of light intensity used in botany. This is so people can spend $20 lux on a light meter rather than hundreds on a quality quantum PAR meter. Some of the lights are using white and red LEDs so the standard conversion factor I tell people to use of 70 lux = 1 umol/m2/sec does not work.

More on how lux meters can be used for some plant lighting can be found in my guide here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HandsOnComplexity/comments/17nxpy/using_a_lux_meter_as_a_plant_light_meter/

For this guide you really do not need to know all the core concepts which can be found here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HandsOnComplexity/comments/bhmb22/core_concepts_in_horticulture_lighting_theory/


What is watts equivalent with white LED light bulbs?

It's common to see LED light bulbs sold as a watt equivalent rather than the true or actual wattage. The “equivalent” is the equivalent light given off by an incandescent light bulb in lumens in this case. The following is fairly close to what the lumens rating is for different wattage equivalent light bulbs and also applies to CFL light bulbs. This is not a linear scale!

  • 40 watts equivalent is about 450 lumens

  • 60 watts equivalent is about 800 lumens

  • 75 watts equivalent is about 1200 lumens

  • 100 watts equivalent is about 1600 lumens

  • greater than 100 watts equivalent is not very well defined

For a space bucket we want 3000-5000 lumens for a five gallon bucket for cannabis in flowering. At the time of this writing a 100 watt equivalent bulb draws about 15 actual watts so we would want about 40-45 actual watts of LED light bulbs. LED light bulbs are not nearly as efficient as high end COBs or quantum boards.

This convention of equivalent watts is not going away any time soon and is useful since we can choose light bulbs based on how much light they give off rather by how many watts they actually use.

Some low cost Chinese grow lights use "equivalent" to HPS lighting. It's all a lie.


A quick note on modifying normal LED light bulbs

long rant on modding light bulb

A popular hack is to remove the protective case of an LED light bulb directly exposing the LEDs. This hack actually does work well but by doing this you have removed all ingress protection and have now exposed potentially dangerously high voltage levels that are not isolated from ground. This is normally an instant safety fail.

In a 120 volt AC system, the voltage is going through a circuit called a full wave bridge rectifier/capacitor which will boost the voltage up to about 170 volts DC (the capacitor is holding the peak voltage). This does not necessarily mean that this voltage will be present since the actual voltage will be determined by the voltage drop of the LED string(s) which can still be fairly high. It still presents a very real electrical shock hazard that can in certain cases be fatal. If an LED burns out in an open condition then the voltage will float up to 170 volts.

The above paragraph becomes even more important in 230 volt AC countries where the voltage can float up to 325 volts DC or so.

To learn more about electrical safety and in particular dielectric breakdown of skin please refer to my electrical safety guide.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HandsOnComplexity/comments/crqe8m/line_voltage_cobs_and_electrical_safety/

Unmodified LED light bulbs can be made much more efficient if a reflector is used. Get a wider reflector like this. LED flood lights can also be used that do not need a reflector (note- the "equivalent watts" is often different for flood lights).

I found 100 watt equivalent with a reflector will work with veging cannabis when optimized using a five gallon bucket aeroponic system.

https://imgur.com/a/fs9ohSL

Foil wraps can be very efficient with nanogrows and tiny lights.

https://imgur.com/a/Rx2JmvJ


A type of light not to get

Do not buy this style of light

I want to make something very clear about most Amazon products that are of very poor quality yet have very high reviews- it's mostly bullshit and shady merchants can buy ratings/reviews.

These types of lights are very dangerous. The two I bought had exposed higher voltages and a heat sink that was not completely isolated. The LEDs were also rather inefficient.

I have no idea what the wattage is equivalent to. The “100 watt” light drew about 20 actual watts.

Many of these lights are going to be dual spectrum red/blue LEDs only which do have a history of poor performance. One I bought was dual spectrum, the other was not.

Since I strongly recommend against this type of light I will not post my measurement results.

I am writing about this type of light here

This is a 20 watt LED light, not a 100 watt light. There is exposed non-isolated high voltage DC so if you grab the LEDs and came in to contact with ground potential you could get a fatal shock. I did take the LEDs to ground potential through a jumper and all the sparks and arcs did confirm that the LEDs are at a high voltage and not isolated from ground. This was tested before with a Fluke 287 but I really wanted to see the sparks so I also used a jumper straight to ground. For this reason alone I would not buy this light.

In one of my tests I will reverse polarity the hot and neutral wires and then test the heat sink to see if it is energized. Yes, I was getting leakage to the point that I could get the LEDs to light up dimly even with the light switch turned off. In the test the neutral was being switched on and off and the issue is that the light will appear to be off but can still be a safety concern. This is another reason I would never buy this light.

These LEDs are also less efficient than a normal UFO LED or a normal white LED light bulb watt for watt when I did lighting level measurements with an Apogee sq-520 quantum light sensor in a five gallon space bucket. It may work for earlier veg growth but it's not going to cut it for robust flowering.

Mine was a tri-band 450, 630, 660 nm which is less than ideal for flowering. Being tri-band at these wavelengths will suppress acid growth so even at lower lighting levels there still won't be as much excessive "stretch". This is different than good growth from photosynthesis.


COB grow lights

Amazon has plenty of low cost line voltage grow lights hitting the market. The cheapest ones I tested were ungrounded and very dangerous. A write up can be found here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HandsOnComplexity/comments/a8hqm3/safety_notes_on_low_cost_led_cob_grow_lights/

There are COB work lights that one can buy from Walmart which should be safe to use.

Here is a spectrum shot of a line voltage "blurple" COB.


GE 32 watt grow bulb

The balanced spectrum version was tested.

light bulb spectrum

Lux to umol/m2/sec conversion factor is 61. CCT is 5250K.

PPFD measurements:

  • 100 umol/m2/sec 30 inches (seedlings)

  • 300 umol/m2/sec 22 inches (basil, lettuce)

  • 500 umol/m2/sec 17 inches (cannabis, tomato, peppers)

  • 1000 umol/m2/sec 13 inches (cannabis)

The GE bulb draws 32 actual watts and has a PPF of 50 umol/sec. The PPE is 1.6 umol/joule.

Is it safe? It is electrically safe but as a warning do not put this light on a bed or the like since in some cases it can be a fire hazard. Here is a pic of a hole it burned through my cover after about 30 seconds.

This is a white light bulb with 665 nm red LEDs although the light may appear to just be white.

While fine for most forms of smaller growing, its higher power output and narrow beam angle would make this unsuitable for five gallon space buckets unless you can keep them far enough away.

With a heavy heat sink that only gets a bit warm, it's important to only hang this light vertically and not use this light horizontally like one might do for supplemental lighting.

One of the few small grow bulbs that is UL listed for safety.

Use for one square foot of higher performance growing and two square feet for lower performance growing like lettuce.


GE 9 watt grow bulb

The light bulb that was tested

light bulb spectrum

Lux to umol/m2/sec conversion factor is 54. CCT is 4000K.

PPFD measurements:

  • 100 umol/m2/sec 8 inches

  • 300 umol/m2/sec 4 inches

This bulb draws 9 actual watts and has a PPF of 16 umol/sec. The PPE is 1.8 umol/joule.

Is it safe? Yes! This is the safest bulb I have ever tested and only gets mildly warm. It is one of the few LED grow bulbs that is UL listed for safety.

This is a white light bulb with 665 nm red LEDs although the light may appear to just be white.

At a PPE of 1.8 umol/joule this light is as efficient as a modern HPS watt for watt. But its small size makes this light usefulness very limited and is rather expensive.

A major issue with this light is its wide beam angle so the light must be very close to the plant.


SANSI 15 watt grow bulb

The light bulb that was tested

light bulb spectrum

Lux to umol/m2/sec conversion factor is 65. CCT is 6000K.

PPFD measurements:

  • 100 umol/m2/sec 20 inches (seedlings)
  • 300 umol/m2/sec 12 inches (lettuce, basil)
  • 500 umol/m2/sec 9 inches (cannabis, tomato, peppers)
  • 1000 umol/m2/sec 7 inches (cannabis)

Is it safe? Yes but the light does have fairly poor ingress protection compared to the GE bulbs and does run much hotter. Do not let any water get around this light. The light is not UL/ETL listed.

The light draws about 15 actual watts.

This is a white light with an enhanced 640 nm red phosphor. Although I can not do CRI measurements, it is going to have a high CRI and particularly a high R9 red value. Having a high R9 value, this is actually a very pleasant light to look at for such a high color temperature.

Its more narrow beam angle limits its usefulness in five gallon space buckets.


150 watt UFO with Cree COB

note- I will be doing more tests on this light next week when I have my hands back on it

This is the light that was tested

spectrum of this light

PPFD measurements:

will be done

This light draws about 55 actual watts.

Is it safe? Sure, why not. It was grounded. This light is not UL/ETL listed.

I kind of doubt that this light uses a real top end Cree COB and is more likely a marketing gimmick.

This is really just a generic UFO light sold by many vendors under different labels.

Inside a five gallon space bucket this light will read about 1200 umol/m2/sec of light.


Review of a $15 60 watt garage light

Light tested: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W53Y4DL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

archived

TL;DR fine for a garage, get a UFO or small quantum board light instead for growing. Will not fit in a five gallon bucket!

Price at the time bought: $15

Electrically safe: yes but not ETL/UL listed

True power: 47 watts

Power Factor 0.61

Color temperature: 5600K (measured)

PPFD over a five gallon bucket: 580 umol/m2/sec

spectrometer shot of LEDs

oscilloscope shot of power supplies

light opened up

close up pic of power supplies

All plastic construction with metal core printed circuit boards (MCPCB) for the LEDs and as the heat sink. No further heat sinking. Translucent covers blocked one third of the light output. No obvious shock hazard. Some Amazon reviews were showing the socket separating from the rest of the light fixture.

The oscilloscope measurements were showing a highly chaotic waveform of the power supply noise with the fixture enclosed at about 57 KHz. Upon opening the fixture I found two internally clocked switching power supplies which is a configuration I've never seen before. Two MCPCBs of the arms and half of the MCPCB in the center were being fed from separate power supplies. The slightly different switching power supply frequencies that were entrained explains why they were operating so chaotically. No flickering noticed.

When placed on top of a five gallon bucket lined with aluminum foil I read a PPFD of 580 umol/m2/sec at the bottom of the bucket using an Apogee SQ-520 full spectrum quantum light sensor. This is very poor and a 55 watt true UFO would read about 1200 umol/m2/sec. With the covers removed I read about 830 umol/m2/sec (you can expose yourself to a shock hazard doing this).

The light is rated for up to 265 volts so this is not rated for a three phase 277/480 lighting circuit. The power factor of 0.61 is awful and the apparent power (reactive power plus true power) was about 75 watts with the true power of 47 watts (residential customers only pay for true power).

The light got warm to the touch with about a 45 degree F rise in temperature above ambient. The light did not get hot enough to warranty a full thermal review.

CONCLUSION: pass on this and get a real grow light. Even a cheap UFO will far outperform this light. With the translucent covers on this light is about half as efficient as a cheap UFO grow light and far less efficient than a quantum board with Samsung LEDs. For growing this light is a waste of power, waste of time, and waste of money.


Pair of 120 watt equivalent flood lights

This is a simple and easy, no hassle solution to getting the lighting done in a five gallon bucket. I got the two PAR38 flood lights for $10 at Walmart. They are "Great Value" brand, rated for damp locations, and have an ETL Mark (they have been extensively tested for safety).

They are "120 watt equivalent" that have a clear(ish) cover, not a white translucent cover. Equivalent watts actually means something unlike low end cheap grow lights but flood lights are measured differently than regular light bulbs. I recommend using 120 watt equivalent flood lights.

the type of light

Place the lights on the lid and trace the lights with a sharpy. Then cut out the hole with a razor blade so the lights will not fall through the holes (duh).

cut the holes

What it looks like with the lights on. The lights only get a bit warm. You always want the lights at least six inches away or more from the plants. Measured with an Apogee SQ-520 full spectrum quantum sensor in a five gallon bucket lined with aluminum foil (shiny side out), at six inches I got about 1200 uMol/m2/sec (about as intense of light as you want to go) directly under a light and about 800 uMol/m2/sec (good level for budding) in the rest on the bucket area at six inches under the lights. Towards the bottom of the bucket it was around 800 uMol/m2/sec fairly even.

A single light in the middle got about 750 uMol/m2/sec in the middle of the bottom of a bucket and about 450 uMol/m2/sec off to the sides. This may be a bit much for veg growth. This was with aluminum foil. White paint or just an unpainted white bucket will have significantly lower measurements.

You'll have to come up with a way to seal the light leaks if needed. The lights only get a little warm so duct tape may work. You can use some epoxy to keep the lights in place.

lights on


Characteristics:

actual wattage: 15.5 watts per light

claimed color temperature: 3000K

measured color temperature: 3491K and 3546K

lux to PPFD conversion factor: 74 lux = 1 uMol/m2/sec

flood light spectrum

1931 CIE chromaticity diagram

18 Comments
2019/09/17
21:51 UTC

33

line voltage COBs and electrical safety

Part of SAG's lighting guide.

The best 3 minute video on electrical safety on the Internet.


Why I'm writing this

This is written in response to people using or wanting to make DIY line voltage AC driverless COB "suicide lights", and a discussion on electrical safety in general.

This is also a very strong critique of a few people not taking line voltage electrical safety seriously. I've seen naive people telling others that line voltage is not dangerous and people like this should be condemned. I've also seen "experts" who are not. People saying they don't touch their dangerous lights when they are plugged in (sigh...). People who use a faulty appeal to authority are a particular danger and an example will be articulated below.

It only takes a single mistake to have a life altering injury from line voltage.


The problem

People have posted about their line voltage COB lights before on /r/SpaceBuckets and literally wondered why their heat sink is being energized. I don't know but it only takes a single strand of loose wire to energize a conductor like a heat sink or there could be some some sort of internal fault in the COB packaging with your heat sink that has no grounding. These line voltage COBs are being made as cheaply as possible and you can expect corners to be cut. They are electrically inefficient compared to name brand COBs and tend to have a shorter life span.

Even in my testing of a commercial line voltage COB light I found that they can be unsafe. Why in this case? Because the manufacturer snipped off the grounding wire. The son of a bitch was so cheap that they would not spend ten cents to actually do a proper ground bond in a light fixture with a metal housing. And this was a light being advertised for outdoor use and advertised as water proof. Electricians just looooove metal fixtures that have no grounding. /s in case it was not obvious and an electrician starts swinging a pipe bender around.

Just because you can find it on Amazon does not mean that the electrical device is safe. In US/Canada at least Walmart, Home Depot and the like will only sell stuff that is UL/ETL/CSA listed for safety because they understand lawsuits from selling dangerous devices. Good luck trying to bring legal action against a Chinese importer for an injury or death. CE is not recognized in North America, only nationally recognized testing labs are. I absolutely do not trust a CE mark and below you will see why.

Just because it is sold on Amazon does not mean it's safe. It is quite likely that a COB light from Walmart and the like are safely grounded and should be safe as long as they are not modified.


Cavalier attitudes and electrical safety

To those who say and tell others online that line voltage is not dangerous- would you strip back a line wire and a neutral wire, because “it's not dangerous, lol”, energize the line wire and hold it in one hand, because “it's not dangerous, lol”, and with your other hand grab on to the neutral wire? How about grabbing those wires really tight and then get back to me.

Grab on to that energized line wire with your hand wet from hydroponic solution and stand barefoot on a damp basement concrete floor because “it's not dangerous, lol”.

If you are not willing to do the above then you need to start reflecting on what you are telling people online that line voltage is not dangerous assuming you have a certain level of self-awareness. I know a person who did accidental grab the energized line wire while barefoot on a damp concrete floor with a hydroponic setup. Did it kill her? No, it just dropped her ass and she learned real quick (she also did not have GFCI protection). As an electrician I've got all sorts of these anecdotes. I know a person who became part of a neutral wire in series and ended up with nerve damage from the electrical shock.

But...but...but...I got shocked once and it didn't kill me! (I had a person use this argument once) Well, I've been in a car accident once and it didn't kill me either. It does not mean that car accidents are not dangerous. And it's arrogant to think that your one experience applies to everyone else.

But...but...but...I don't touch the suicide light when it's plugged in! Then you know how dangerous it is and you're a complete fool. You can't fix stupid but others can learn from the stupid person by not doing what they are doing.

But...but...but...in my country! I honestly don't care how things are done in your country and standards are not going to be lowered for everyone else because "that's the way we do things in my country". That is complete non-sense. If I write about electrical safety in my country while proclaiming expert status in the field, which I do to an extent I can claim that status as an industrial electrician, I also assume certain liabilities and will not hesitate to go before a judge if it came down to that. Will the anonymous person telling you that these line voltage COBs are not dangerous be willing to do the same? Talk is cheap and your safety should not be.


Faulty appeal to authority

When people discuss electrical safety in particular it's never a bad idea to do a call out and question what their credentials are. An "engineer" is not a professional electrical expert when they are a software engineer, as an example, and is a faulty appeal to authority when they do not understand the subject matter.

A person on /r/SpaceBuckets was once claiming to be an "engineer", messed up a guide on Ohm's Law including a simple problem example because he did not actually understand the material (the LED has a voltage drop, yo), didn't understand how LEDs work (I run LEDs constant voltage without a resistor all the time on a lab power supply when testing them and they have a specific I-V curve. You also can not model an LED as a resistor. And the actual internal resistance of an LED is so low it's usually not considered in almost all circuits), and stated that he was going to be doing a write up on electrical safety. In the comments section he revealed that he was a software engineer rather than an electrical/electronics engineer. This is misleading rubbish because when you talk about electronics and claim to be an engineer people are assuming a type of engineer.

And the "engineer" said he was going to be writing an electrical safety guide....there is a good reason I won't hesitate to do a call out. Why would a layman who does not know the material write a guide about electrical safety when bad information can get people injured or killed? It's stuff like this where I live up to my user name.

When people discuss electrical safety it's never a bad idea to question their credentials. The sources of my information are coming from electrical engineers along with my training as an electrician and not some anonymous person on the Internet with no established history. I do strongly encourage more professional electrical engineers and electricians to bring up electrical safety when dealing with the layman.


Ohm's Law and how almost everyone is measuring body resistance wrong

An argument I've seen is one can take a multimeter, grab the probes, and measure their hand to hand resistance. Hey, I'm reading 100,000 ohms so I can not have a dangerous level of current flowing through me! But that is not how body resistance actually works at higher voltages or how insulation is tested. For that you do a dielectric withstand test and measure the resistance of the body or insulation under test closer to the voltage where the wires or your body will be at with line voltage or at higher voltages.

Electricians/field engineers/some technicians may use a special tool called a “high pot tester” or “high potential tester” where potential means voltage. If you are an electrician you may know them by a trade name of Megger and you may “meg out the wires”. An example of where I did extensive megging was in parking lot lighting with splices directly in water. There was also lots and lots of megging going on when I spent three months rebuilding the Seattle Monorail trains in 1998 as a newer journeyman (that was a surprisingly complex 700 volt DC four speed electromechanical motor control system fused at 10,000 amps).

You need to measure an insulator, like human skin, at a higher voltage to take in to account dielectric breakdown and dielectric breakdown of skin/tissue is a non-linear process as it is with any other insulator. Just because you measure that 100K ohms hand to hand at one volt on your multimeter does not mean it's still going to be at 100K ohms at 230 volts, as an example, because the higher voltage is able to punch through the insulation which is going to change the resistance hand to hand. The amount of time being shocked can also affect dielectric breakdown conditions and the amount of current flow.

Once dielectric breakdown occurs the resistance can be as low as 500 ohms and possibly lower. At 200 volts, for example, you just went from 2 mA which is a very mild shock to perhaps >400 mA which is deadly if the current path goes through the heart. Are you always going to get a complete dielectric breakdown at this 200 volts example? No. Should you treat electricity with enough respect knowing that you can have such a dielectric breakdown? Yeah, you should particularly if you understand ventricular fibrillation.

What makes line voltage so dangerous is that there is a very low electrical system impedance. If you do not understand the previous sentence then you have no business working line voltage. Current is what kills but the voltage drives the current as per Ohm's Law. And the resistance can change by voltage levels.

One way I can instantly tell if someone understands electrical safety is if they do or do not understand the dielectric breakdown of the skin issue at different voltage levels and understanding that it is a non-linear problem. People saying that you can just measure skin resistance with a multimeter, which may output only a few volts for a resistance test, and apply that to line voltage electrical safety do not know what they are talking about and should be ignored as a source for electrical safety information. I see this all over the Internet.


Ingress protection

Ingress protection has to do with the mechanical protection of the electrical device. Less ingress protection may mean you can't stick your finger on energized parts. Really high ingress protection will be water proof.

A line voltage COB with the line wire exposed has no ingress protection. That means that it is unsafe. Period. If you do not understand ingress protection then you have no business as a beginner building line voltage electrical devices like line voltage COB lights.

Kapton tape is not line voltage ingress protection for our purposes. I've seen people posting pics of line voltage COBs with Kapton tape as their "ingress protection". Just no.

But...but...but...what if I make the DIY line voltage COB safe with good ingress protection? You are still showing off something that is inherently dangerous to make which other people will follow. Is their AC line voltage COB setup also safe? There comes a point where a line needs to be drawn in the sand.

Good ingress protection means on a practical level that you would let a two year old toddler play with the energized device unattended without risk of electrical injury. I'm not saying that you should do this, and it does depend on the electrical device of course, but that is the practical standard that you should be going for.

Remember that electrical codes and safety guidelines are typically written in blood.


Soldering and line voltage

I can look back at the quality of the soldering I was doing from +20 years ago and cringe at those circuit boards. Sloppy with cold solder joints partially from using a $5 Radio Shack soldering iron that was not temperature controlled. If you have no experience with soldering then you should gain some experience with something that is not a safety risk like a line voltage COB. There are soldering practice kits made with the absolute beginner in mind.

Cold solder joints in particular are problematic because they may work for awhile before failing. If I want to troubleshoot a circuit board the first thing I do is check for power then I'm looking around for cold solder joints (the third thing is check the capacitors). I have seen wires with cold solder joints pop off of circuit boards. The last thing you want with a line voltage COB is your wires popping off and dangling around.

BTW, if you have issues with solder balling up then you may want to try using an eutectic 63/37 solder instead of more common 60/40 solder beyond proper use of solder flux (you don't always need solder flux since there is already flux in most common electrical solders. For surface mount soldering you probably should use solder flux).

I have seen cold solder joints more than once before when people have posted pics on /r/SpaceBuckets of their line voltage COB light.

The two hurdles for beginners getting in to electronics are learning how to solder and learning while also intuitively understanding Ohm's Law. There are good temperature controlled soldering irons in the $30 range but I've used a Weller WTCPT for 15 years now without problems with the tips lasing for many thousands of solder joints. I've seen cheap tips give out after a few hundred.


What about lights that plug in to a light socket? They have no ground.

E26/27 light bulbs and the like have no ground since they use a two conductor lighting socket. They are supposed to have an insulation rating to ensure that there is no electrical shock hazard. Remove the cover of a light bulb to get more light on your plants and you just removed the protection. The line voltage circuit board found in LED light bulbs are not isolated from ground and there can be well over 100 volts exposed.

Even then I have found lights that failed my own safety inspections. A test that I do is to reverse the polarity of the line wire and the neutral wire since reverse polarity is a common problem with receptacles particularly in residential environments where the layman is more likely to do their own electrical work. You can buy a receptacle tester to make sure this does not happen or to test your own house.

Here is a light bulb I bought off Amazon that is on reverse polarity with the light switch turned to the off position. Notice how by merely touching the heat sink how I can get the LEDs to light up dimly. This is because there is an AC electrical fault somewhere and illustrates how these cheap no-name Chinese light bulbs can still be problematic when plugged in. In no way should this ever happen and the cheap bulb can light up like this due to body capacitance.

That bulb also has a CE mark on it, with exposed line voltage electrical, which is why I think the CE self-certification program is non-sense when misused like this. An engineering joke is that CE really stands for "China export" rather than "Conformité Européene" ("European Conformity") and a CE marking does not indicate that a product have been approved as safe by the EU or by another authority. CE usually does not need to be tested by a third party for safety. Here's a UK study on CE mark with an important point of "Whilst we are pleased to report that all of the branded chargers passed the conformity tests, not one of the unbranded chargers were considered to be safe, yet all carried the CE mark."

With that same bulb I can hook up line voltage to the heat sink and get those LEDs to light much brighter. In no way should this ever happen that the LEDs light up since the metal heat sink is supposed to be completely isolated.

An issue with some LED light bulbs that have a heavy heat sink is that this puts extra stress on the base itself and I've had numerous instances of the base breaking. This is very unlikely to happen with small LED light bulbs from Walmart etc but could be a major fail for some of these larger LED lights that simply plug in to a light socket particularly if they are not vertical.

Amazon is selling cheap and dangerous lights. And the CE mark is utter non-sense when it is so easily misused from products out of China.


But my phone charger does not have a ground.

Your phone charger is in a plastic case and is double insulated so does not need a ground. There literally is nothing to ground. Look for the square inside a square for a double insulation mark. The output should also be isolated from ground potential.


What about external LED drivers?

External drivers like the Mean Well LED drivers, as opposed to the onboard drivers found in line voltage COBs, are almost always isolated from ground with their DC outputs. You can ideally take the positive or negative leads used to drive the LED(s) to ground and have no current flow. The danger from them would be at higher voltages and getting a shock from the positive to negative skin contact.

External LED drivers keep you off line voltage which is the compelling reason to use them for DIY use. The better ones are "UR" marked, with a reverse "UR", which means it has been tested for safety for a factory install component of an electrical device (as opposed to a UL marking for a field install of a complete electrical device although there are plenty of ANSI/UL 8750 listed LED drivers).

Good external drivers like by Mean Well can also have up to a five year warranty and the drivers usually fail before the LEDs do. You can forget about a warranty on cheap, generic Chinese made products.

It is a misnomer to say that most "driverless" COBs have no LED driver. The ones that I've examined have an on board constant current linear power supply as the driver. In the mid 2000's I was building 5mm LED grow lights (before high power LEDs were available) that were line voltage using an LM317 linear voltage regulator as a constant current source since the LM317 can float off ground which is why it can work directly off line voltage through a bridge rectifier/capacitor. That line voltage driver would be considered "driverless" in modern parlance. I don't do this anymore since LED drivers are now so cheap, common, reliable, and safe.


What's a safe voltage?

30-50 volts AC, 60-75 volts DC (or is it?)

The answer above was after researching various sources such as the National Electrical Code, peer reviewed engineering sources, European safety directives, and a whole lot of guessing from various potentially unreliable forums like Quora.

There has never been a known case of a person dying from a shock of 50 volts to ground or less outside welding equipment. expert source. There have been cases of <80 volt electrocution deaths. source

The US military considers 50 volts the maximum voltage one can work with without de-energizing the system. source

Article 725 of the National Electrical Code states that a class 1 power limited circuit may only be up to 30 volts AC or DC. source

The EU's extra-low voltage directive says 50 volts AC, but as high as 120 volts DC. source Or is it 30 volts RMS AC and 60 volts DC. source

A line phone system is a higher impedance 48 volts DC on-hook but 90 volts AC 20 Hz current limited when being rung. I've been mildly shocked off a phone system back when electricians sometimes worked on 66 blocks.

As a journeyman electrician (I've been out of the trade for awhile) I would hesitate to let a new 1st year apprentice work with energized 48 volts AC which you'll find with some low voltage transformers. If you're on a ladder and get a mild shock you can still fall from the ladder due to reacting to the shock. My ass would be complete toast if a 1st year apprentice got hurt like this.

AC is considered more dangerous than DC. This was determined experimentally in 1956 by CF Dalziel of the U of CA (Berkeley). source It can take perhaps five times the current in DC to have the same affect on the body as AC for electrical shocks. But this does not mean you can have five times higher DC voltage and be safe because of the non-linear dielectric break down problem.

This is another reason to use an external DC LED driver as the DC output of the LED driver is simply safer to work with than AC.

Even those 50 volt AC, 60-75 volt DC numbers above can be bit controversial. There's a good reason why lab power supplies typically do not go above 30 volts.


Modifying LED light bulbs

You can remove the white translucent case from an LED light bulb to directly expose the LEDs to the plant for roughly 50% more light. You are also now exposing yourself to potentially dangerous voltage levels that are not isolated from ground by removing this electrically insulative cover. That cover is part of the bulb's ingress protection and now you have none.

The removing the case trick is something I started doing back in about 2010(?) when LED light bulbs were just hitting the market. Back then you were paying about $25 for a light bulb that was much less efficient than CFLs. They were also using much higher quality LED drivers that were safer to use.

Today it is common to find capacitive power supplies that are not isolated from ground. You can have dangerously high voltage levels that can also have dangerously high current levels in a ground fault.

People need to be aware that a deadly condition can exist that if you were to grab the energized circuit board with one hand and your other hand is at ground potential that it is possible for a lethal amount of current to flow through your heart.

I've only seen a single example of people modifying LED light bulbs and also providing proper ingress protection by using a glass shield. I strongly encourage people who modify these bulbs to at least have some sort of clear plastic or glass shield covering the exposed line voltage circuit board.


Is GFCI/RCD going to save my life?

Yes.

Ground fault circuit interrupter, often called a residual current device, measures the current between the line (hot) and the neutral wires. If there is a current imbalance that means that there is a ground fault and the GFCI receptacle/circuit breaker will turn off typically at 5 mA (if you have a 220-240 volt system then it typically turns off at 10 mA). In an industrial environment GFCI circuit breakers frequently can be adjusted for the ground fault current trip point.

If you are growing in a garage then you need GFCI/RCD protection. Damp concrete floors are notorious for conducting electricity (pure water is an electrical insulator- it's the dissolved stuff in the water that makes it conduct electricity).

GFCI/RCD does not rely on the grounding wire to work and will work even if only the line and neutral wires are going to the receptacle. There is an input and an output to a GFCI receptacle- every receptacle that is wired to the output of a GFCI receptacle will also have GFCI protection even if they are not a GFCI receptacle.

If you do not have GFCI protection then you can always buy an adapter if you do not want to replace the receptacle.

It is really important to note that GFCI will not protect you from a hot to neutral electrical shock, only a line to ground shock.

Pro tip- both the grounding wire and the neutral wire are grounded conductors but only the third grounding wire is referred to as such (usually the green, yellow and green, or bare wire). The grounding wire is typically referred to as the ground wire or as "earth".


Is AFCI going to help keep my place from burning down?

Yes.

Arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) is different than GFCI in that instead of detecting ground faults the circuit detects series and parallel electrical arcing. If you bought a newer place in the US/Canada then all of your commonly used circuits will have AFCI interrupters (except for maybe the bathroom because the bathroom is not considered a habitable room).

Series arcing can be from loose or corroded electrical connections and there may be a few hundred electrical connections on a home.

Parallel arcing is often from damaged wire insulation such as found in an electrical appliance power cord. The damaged insulation can allow the line voltage wire and the grounding or neutral wire to slowly come in contact with each other which can cause arcing.

An AFCI works by detecting high amounts of broad band electrical noise, or radio frequency interference, on the wires or electrical device caused by arcing. Many AFCI devices, particularly the earlier AFCI devices when they first came on the market, will also have a built in 30mA GFCI circuit. This higher 30mA current trip point is more to protect equipment rather than people.

regular circuit breaker- protects the wires and equipment from over loads and short circuits

GFCI- protects you from electrical shocks due to ground faults

AFCI- helps protects everything from fires

A circuit breaker that incorporates GFCI and AFCI will cost about $50.


Should I trust a non-contact voltage tester?

No- test it first.

As an electrician I always had a non-contact voltage tester on me but I've seen false negatives before with them. You must keep test them on a known live circuit.

I've also had a Wiggy solenoid voltage tester basically fly apart in my hand testing a 480 volt AC three phase circuit but this is a rarity and I do trust this type of voltage tester. You can test wires without looking at the tester.

BTW, some higher impedance multimeters can give false readings in some cases. A common test is a neutral to ground voltage test to insure that there is less than two (or one) volts from the neutral to ground. A lower impedance multimeter like a Fluke 117 can be used instead.


Why aren't more people dying from tasers/stun guns?

What kills people with electricity is the current path, amount of current, and the duration that the current is flowing.

Tasers/stuns guns reach about 40-50,000 volts, which is limited by the distance between the electrodes in the spark gap, and then quickly drops down closer to a few thousand volts when in skin contact. But these are short duration pulses of tens of microseconds making the average current fairly low.

Stun guns are not reaching "a million volts", or what ever, and claims like that are deceptive advertisement.


A cheap and safe five gallon COB grow light

30 watts of LEDs is more than enough to properly light up a five gallon space bucket with a high quality COB. A Vero 18 ran at 28 volts and one amp can drive the top of the plant canopy to about 1400 umol/m2/sec which is saturating a cannabis plant. Keep the light 6-8 inches above the plant or perhaps a little more.

Vero 18 gen 7 3500K 28 volt version

Lower cost Mean Well driver for Vero 18

Then you need a heat sink that is rated for 15 watts of heat (assuming that 30 watt COB is 50% electrically efficient) and material to mount the LED to the heat sink. This will outperform any cheap AC COB and is safe enough for the beginner.


Some of these YouTubers are being ridiculously unsafe!

A call out I'm going to do here is the Migro channel on YouTube and his complete disregard for electrical safety.

The video in question that I'm critiquing is this one on an AC driverless grow light.

You can see in the video that the grow light is not even being grounded. Any competent person skilled in the art should have given that grow light an instant fail and stopped the testing until the manufacturer spent ten cents to correct the problem. To reiterate, your safety is not even worth ten...fucking...cents to the person who designed this light. And this person is apparently not giving a damn here, either, judging how he is ignoring the safety warnings being given in the comment section.

And then he is grabbing the energized exposed line voltage device on the circuit board itself in his hand like it's nothing. This is profoundly reckless conduct that other people who are also very naive about electrical safety will emulate and why I'm so vocal about line voltage COBs and these very foolish people like this person who are so cavalier about electrical safety.

This person getting watts and joules confused in the video to the point I can't understand what he is trying to convey is one thing, his made up measurements like "PPFD per watt" don't make any sense at all nor does his odd "159 PAR claim" (is that 159 watts/m^2 of PAR? I've been rightly called out in an academic setting by a full professor for saying "micro moles" instead of "micro moles per square meter per second" and the correct terminology should be used), it just shows that he lacks some very basic understanding on the subject matter that he is presenting himself to be an authority on. But the lack of basic electrical safety practices should be utterly condemned.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: IF YOU ARE GOING TO PLAY THE ROLE OF TEACHER THEN YOU HAVE AN ETHICAL DUTY TO PUT OUT ACCURATE AND SAFE INFORMATION WHILE SHOWING SAFE PRACTICES. PERIOD. ffs

Anyone can look like they know what they talking about to a layman on YouTube by waving a light meter under a light. Plenty of people on YouTube do it, and Migro is actually better than most, but watch out for people trying to sell something or if they are receiving free stuff. People who are receiving free stuff often will never do a negative review.

BTW, I've never seen anything remotely close to a legit side by side grow test on YouTube and take them all with a big lump of salt. The plants need the exact same conditions and your population number needs to be at least nine for a basic test (power=0.8, P<0.05) or 20 for a more accurate test (power=0.8, P<0.01) or 75 for a larger field test (power=0.9, P<0.01).


Driverless line voltage COBs are the now and the future

At the end of the day the wallet talks and AC driverless COBs are going to become more popular. There is going to come a time where a 100 watt driverless COB that is 80% electrically efficient (an efficacy of above 3 umol/joule) and is going to cost around $5 for the COB itself. It is inevitable.

But these cheap ass COBs are still going to be cutting corners particularly in the on board driver itself and it is usually the driver that gives out rather than the LEDs.

So the danger is going to increase as these DIY "suicide lights" become more common. This type of work should be rejected for the DIY hobby community and people encouraged to use external LED drivers that are much safer for the beginner to use which will isolate you off ground from potentially deadly shock hazards. As mentioned above, DC is safer than AC.


In conclusion

I understand that many people want to go as cheap as possible on their lighting but there is a point where you need to put a price on your own safety. What's it worth to you?

If you want to be unsafe yourself then all I can say is do it before you breed and have at it. But most people simply are not going to understand the dangers particularly when most people online have never even heard of the dielectric breakdown of the skin issue and higher voltages.

Just say no to DIY AC driverless "suicide lights" and use a proper external LED driver with a high quality COB instead. If you post about them on /r/SpaceBuckets I'll respond if you need help but my no PM policy for helping people build their own grow lights unfortunately needs to stay in place due to the amount of people who were asking for help and the time involved.

So, in conclusion....your wife is cheating on you, your mother is lying when she says she loves you, your children view you as a meal ticket, your dog secretly wants to move in with your next door neighbor, your cat just threw up on your bed (again), nobody on Reddit likes you, but SAG actually cares.

Just say no to DIY driverless AC COB "suicide" lights.


A few sources

Ohm's Law Calculator

Big Clive on YouTube. I believe Big Clive is a lineman (a type of electrician) and he does a lot of testing of cheap Chinese electrical devices as well as discussing electricity in general.

Electroboom on YouTube. Mehdi Sadaghar is an electrical engineer that talks about electrical safety with his own brand of humor thrown in.

Dave Jones and EEVlog is the best electrical engineering forum on the Internet. His videos on free energy and solar road ways are funny with how frustrated he can get with people's rubbish.

Mike Holt electrical forum. This is a great resource for electricians.

A COMPLETE ELECTRICAL HAZARD CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM AND ITS APPLICATION This in an industry wide paper on electrical safety.

EFFECTS OF ELECTRICAL SHOCK ON MAN Dalziel (1956). This is an earlier very complete study on electrical shocks. It has a bunch of pictures of people getting electrical shocks for science, which is nice.

COMBINATION AFCIs: WHAT THEY WILL AND WILL NOT DO This is a really interesting paper on the development of AFCI that also get a bit in to the politics of the NEMA and UL.

What's in your socket? This is a good UK study on the safety of electrical sockets.

8 Comments
2019/08/17
19:03 UTC

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