Reply To: Best led lights quantum board or bar style

[Somatek]

Always a pleasure, I come from a very “opinionated” family so I’m happy to share my point of view.  Your comment reminded me of one of my favourite sayings “always follow the trailing edge of technology, not the bleeding edge”.  I heard that back when I was really into photography and buying lots of gear when generation to generation there wasn’t much difference in quality but a lot of people would buy the newest gear just to flex.  Which meant you could always get great, barely used 2nd hand bodies for a fraction of the cost which leaves more money for buying lenses and other equally important gear that doesn’t change much as the tech is stable.

Now to make that rambling story relevant to the post lol…  I’d make exactly the same choice, start with a quantum board and save spend the saving investing in a good pH meter, data loggers and whatever other gear you need to accurately measure and record everything in your grow chamber.  That’ll have a bigger benefit then having the best light with the “perfect” spectrum but little other data about the grow.  Plants will only ever grow as much as the biggest limiting factor allows them to, building a grow room is all about creating balance within your climate and understanding how to meet the plants needs.  LED tech is a lot more stable then it use to be but even if it was perfect the key issue at this point is that we don’t understand how spectrum affects dope growing as we’re just starting to study it.  I wouldn’t be surprised at all if in the future we see manufacturers offering LED’s with heavy blue spectrums for growers who want those deep purple buds as they are likely directly linked.