hello and welcome to the Migro YouTube channel my name is Shane and I'm the
founder of Migro in this video we're gonna look at how to size your grow
light for your own grow area and will give you a tool which will allow you to
do this calculation for all types of grow light systems including the CFL HBS
cmh LED the whole lot really and for any grow area we have detailed explanations
this calculation tool on our blog on our website www.migrolight.com
and there's also an explanatory part of the video after this calculation piece
so if it's there's a lot of new stuff comin at you just watch the video after
the calculation tools and hopefully that will help so the first thing to do is
we're going to look at the first step in our error calculation tool which is
sizing the grow area so it's the first step to calculating our grow light size
we need to grow area size so we take the width of the area in meters and we
multiply it by the depth in meters and that'll give give us our grow area size
in meters squared the second piece of information we need to input into our
calculator tool is the amount of par light we want across our grow area and
this unit of measurement is called ppfd photosynthetic photon flux density and
it's a complicated way of of defining the amount of para light that lands on a
meter squared area so looking at a chart you can see that there are different
rates of growth associated with different levels of power and you can
get up to a level of around 800 to a thousand par before your growth rate
will fall off and that's particular to medicinal herbs in the flowering stage
so the high level of power for good growth rate and a good yield would be
750 micro moles per meter square per second I'll be upright at the high end
so use that in this example for a cow halation now we know the size of our
grow area we know the amount of life we need on our grow area we know the total
amount of ppfd our power required from our grow light system not all grow light
system manufacturers specify their ppfd output a lot of them specify their PPF
which is the amount of light that comes out of the grow light but not the amount
of light that actually reaches the grow area which is ppfd after this
calculation tool there's a video and a guidance how to assess the efficiency of
your system and some of the fundamental principles so stay tuned to watch that
but for now if you haven't got your manufacturers ppfd number if they don't
publish it or give you a good guidance we're going to show you some
approximations which we've worked out from doing extensive tests on all these
different technologies in different environments so let's look at this tool
here is the table of all the major grow light systems and their associated
efficiencies and that's efficiency not in PPF per watt but in ppfd per watt
again this is the amount of par light reaching the grow canopy per watt
consumed so starting off the cfl the lowest efficiency up through HPS CMH a
little bit more efficient than HBS for the same set of budget LEDs not really
more efficient than HBS not really much point higher spec boxed red blue LEDs
can get up to reasonable efficiencies of 1.5 and just pipping your high
efficiency HPS system then we get into full spectrum LEDs and carbs where they
start off at the mid range at 1.2 to 1.5 very similar to the rep lose but then
you could get some systems such as our own micro which are designed
specifically for high efficiencies higher cost but
efficiency now we know the efficiencies of a grow light system we've chosen it's
a fairly simple step to calculate the grow light size so we have the grow grow
area in meters squared in our example it's one point four four
meters squared for a four by 2/10 we also know the target ppfd level we need
for our grow and in this case we're targeting 750 micro moles in our example
we multiply these two together to get a total amount ppfd you require for the
grow area next we divide this total amount by the efficiency of our grow
light system in this case an efficient HPS system setup with silver walls and a
relatively high efficiency HPS system at one point four micro moles per watt so
divide one by the other and we get a target grow light power consumption
rating of 770 what's I hope you find this too useful and easy to use if you
have any feedback on it please let us know now we're going to show you some of
the detail behind this tool and how we came about these efficiencies for
different grow light systems and give me a better understanding I hope the
principles behind it where you have efficiency losses and hopefully you can
help you to optimize your own grow light system and get the best out of it we'll
start by looking at a calculation sheet we've done of all the major grow light
system technologies and the effects that different choices of systems can have on
the overall efficiency of that grow light system so let's take a look you
can see here in the table on the top row we have all the PPF per watt outputs of
all the major technologies these are derived and averaged from manufacturers
data sheets and pretty established in most cases so starting off to CFL and
the metal halide and the lower end of the efficiency scale HPS and ceramic
metal halide very close together some people think ceramic metal halide
is significantly more efficient it isn't in power terms it's it's it's five maybe
ten percent more efficient than the the worst HPS single-ended bulb really
it's it's desired because of its full spectrum the HBS double-ended is the
pinnacle really of HPS technology and is a high-efficiency output of 2.1
micromoles per watt just to touch better than the LED where standard LED the red
blue panel 3 to 5 watt LEDs which are in and around the 2 micromoles per watt PPF
efficiency LED carbs now are starting to pull ahead significantly and they as the
highest efficiency really available commercially at 2.4 micromoles per watt
the most interesting part really of the efficiency story is looking at the next
two part which is the optics and the grow area or the grow environment so we
put in a very average efficiency for the HID technology with a reflector at 85%
we could plus hour - this by maybe five or seven percent see the way poor
reflector or a very high efficiency reflector so you could very maybe 80 to
90 we put in 85 percent there just as an average with the standard leds as in the
panel leds they tend to use plastic lenses over the LEDs to direct light
these lenses are not highly efficient they are cheap to manufacture which is
essential whose you have so many of them and but they're there they're fairly
inefficient at 80% of the life making it through them a lot of their high
efficiency carbs now use the glass lenses and it's because of that high
efficiency they deliver 95% the light to the directed area next we have the grow
area probably the most significant effect here so with no walls you got a
light a lot of light over spill and you can lose up to 30% of what light you're
reflecting down with a grow tent the budget grow tent or matte white walls
you get about 80 percent the light and with mine our silver miner either
the diamond diffusion or the plain silver is an excellent reflector of the
light downwards onto your grow and you'll get 90% of it 10 micro uses
another high-efficiency carbs use optics and in general they'll use these optics
to direct light down onto the grow without the need of bouncing it off the
reflective walls and this really is a big advantage over the other
technologies is not allowing so much light to escape they get the power
supply is then for the different technologies and you know shouldn't
really be using magnetic ballasts these days they're they're highly inefficient
and old technology we've put them there just in case digital ballasts generally
most of the major quality manufacturers they'll be up in the 93 95 % it's a
mature technology now and they've squeezed a lot of officials here in
those systems your standard LED panels it's one area where you can save a lot
of money is on lower specification drivers and quite often you'll get a
relatively low efficiency at 85% out of those drivers the higher-end
manufacturers then probably the higher priced ones would have have higher
efficiency drivers in them with the micro it's up to 93% driver efficiency
so to calculate your overall efficiency let's look at an example our example is
the same one we used earlier which is the HP s single ended with a I just
doing defender reflector so medium-sized medium priced reflector in 1/10 which
has been optimized by lining it with silver minor and with a high efficiency
digital driver so in this example you get about 1.4 micromoles per watt a high
efficiency setup for your HP s so that's it for our grow light sizing
video I hope you enjoyed and got some use out of it if you did please
subscribe and share the video and take care we'll see you again