- Hey, guys, Nate Storey here with Bright Agrotech,
and today we're gonna talk about buying grow lights,
and clearly understanding your situation,
and how your situation basically can lead you
to buy one or another grow light.
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So there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Every different problem is different,
and every problem needs a different solution.
There are some products out there
that are a fits-most type solution,
but almost everyone is different.
And so before you buy a grow light,
or commit to a particular grow light,
make sure you think through your situation
very, very carefully and understand clearly
the problem that you're trying to solve.
So you wanna start off by looking
really carefully at your problems,
and your problems aren't necessarily obvious.
You might think, my problem is I need to light my crop,
but that's not your only problem.
Your problem could be, I only have this big of a budget.
Your problem could be, I have too much heat.
Your problem could be, I have too little heat.
Your problem could be, I'm gonna have way more money
next year than I have this year,
so I'm gonna want a different kind of light next year,
what do I do this year, right?
Those are kind of problems that are the real problems.
So lights produce a lot of heat.
It doesn't matter whether you're using
an LED light or a traditional HID,
or high-intensity discharge light,
the reality is that, ultimately,
you're gonna be generating a lot of heat.
And what that represents is a lot of wasted electricity.
Now, the way I like to think about it is,
if you're doing like supplemental lighting
in a greenhouse or something like that.
Yes, it's expensive heat, but at least you can use
that waste heat from the lights
to help heat your greenhouse, right?
But if you're indoors, then that heat can become a problem,
because unless you can get rid of it,
it costs you a lot more money
than to deal with the heat indoors.
And so thinking about heat is kind of
one of those things where you need to understand
whether it's gonna be a benefit to you,
or whether it's gonna be a negative thing to your growing.
Some good examples of approaching this,
all of these different problems is,
some friends of mine, I've been talking to lately,
they have a greenhouse, they have a limited budget this year
they wanna do LED lighting, but they just have
a limited budget for lighting on the front end.
They're in an environment that gets a little bit cooler,
a little bit colder during the winter,
and I actually encouraged them to go HID.
So I encouraged them to buy high pressure sodium,
and sell it, and use it in their greenhouses.
So these things are growing, they're producing good light.
Their electricity costs are higher,
but it's like a one-year thing, right,
because they can turn around,
there's a community of growers in their area
that they can sell their lights too,
and get most of the cost back,
buy LEDs and put those in down the road,
when they have more disposable income.
So that's kind of a great example.
They've got a greenhouse, they can use high pressure sodium
to heat the greenhouse and provide light during the winter,
and really they're mostly just heating when
the lights are on anyway, so that works out quite well.
And it's kind of a temporary thing.
There's a secondary market for these things,
and so it's not like a sunk cost.
You can get some money back out of them.
That's an example of a scenario where they're thinking about
long-term, short-term, and all of those things
within the context of a winter greenhouse.
When you're thinking about your CapEx and your OpEx,
one is capital expense, one's operating expense,
people usually try to optimize for one or the other,
or try to find some balance, right?
Usually, if you're optimizing for your operating expense,
you're gonna spend more money on the front end.
You're gonna buy something like an LED,
which consumes say, half as much electricity,
to produce the same amount of usable light for the plants.
So it's gonna cost you a lot more this year,
but over the next five years, that thing's gonna
pay itself off and reduce energy consumption.
That's an example of optimizing for OpEx.
If you're optimizing for CapEx, which is like,
we just don't have any money right now,
but we need this light.
Then going with something that's more traditional,
like an HPS or a metal-halide light
is sometimes a better option,
because they're available,
they can be had inexpensively,
and they're darn effective, a lot of people
have been growing under them for a long time.
The thing to remember is you are gonna be
generating a lot of heat, and ultimately, in the long run,
you need to understand the cost of that heat.
If you're in a cold environment,
maybe it's very, very cheap to get rid of that heat,
but if you're in a hot environment, that can be a problem.
So the type of lighting is another important consideration,
and there are a bunch of types out there,
but the big dominant ones are HID and LED lights, right?
And in the HID camp, we have metal-halide,
we have high pressure sodium.
In the LED camp, we have tons of different brands now.
I tend to anymore separate them out
into kind of like bars, fixtures,
and then water-cooled versus air-cooled.
But the type of fixture that you choose
should be solving a specific problem for you.
So if you choose to optimize CapEx,
you're probably gonna end up with an HID fixture.
If you're gonna optimize OpEx,
you're gonna end up mostly likely with an LED fixture.
The lifetime of those things, the upfront cost,
whether or not you can get a loan to cover them,
what those loan payments are.
All of these things factor into that decision
as to what type of lighting to purchase.
You need to very carefully consider
the amount of light that you need.
You know how much each fixtures can deliver, essentially.
You know that there is going to be,
the upside is the amount of light it produces,
the downside is the amount of heat that it produces.
We're talking about the amount of light.
You know what your crop needs.
If you're growing a very light-intensive crop,
let's say tomatoes or something like that, basil.
Something that you're driving at
very, very high light intensities,
you're of course going to need more fixtures,
or different types of fixtures,
compared to just growing lettuce, right,
which needs a lot less light.
And so that's something to really think carefully about.
Now, there's, you can get the same,
the same effects out of HID as LED, and LED as HID.
That's just the reality.
The thing to keep in mind there though,
is of course, all the other peripheral stuff.
The cost of it,
how many fixtures you're gonna have to put in,
how intensive you have to get it,
to get the coverage you need,
and the intensities that you need.
So that is definitely something that
you need to be thinking about on the front end.
So we haven't talked about this stuff yet,
but in the next video, we're going to.
We're gonna talk about some of the metrics
that you use for evaluating light.
Ultimately, it ends up being fairly subjective,
because we can run down through cost per watt,
we can run through PPFD, we can run through
all of the different coverage,
maps, all of these different things
for these different lighting types.
But at the end of the day we're gonna be
talking about things like maintenance labor.
We're gonna be talking about light quality.
We're gonna be talking about the user experience.
So there's gonna be some subjective elements there.
But by and large, we can nail down the big ones,
which are things like the cost per watt,
the amount of heat produced per watt of input,
which tells us the efficiency of the light.
We can talk about things like
whether it's a fixture or a bar,
how it's oriented, how it's set up,
and all of these things can help us
to make really nice objective decisions
before we start digging into things
like warranties and the user experience.
So this is an overview of all the things that
go into a decision when it comes to buying lights.
This will be the first video in a series,
in a playlist that we're gonna put together for you guys.
In the meantime, if you wanna do a little homework,
check out the free lighting guide,
we'll include a link below, leave questions for us,
and check out the Upstart University course.
We put together a lighting course on Upstart University
that has some really great information there
for beginning growers who are trying to better
understand lighting and how it all works.
So check that stuff out, and as always, please subscribe.