I need to go back to an HPS or CMH for the heat properties during the winter. I need it to dim, hit 600 watts and handle 120v. Can i get some suggestions from folks that have run these please? I can spend up to 400.00.
I use LED currently but not getting enough heat. Also heater options scare me a bit so i’d rather focus on light sources
Plants LOVE CMH.
Why do you need to dimm ?
Your destroying the bulbs…
Buy a switchable ballast 400/600/1000 or a lower one 250/400/600 and separate bulbs for each watt.
HPS bulbs cost so little, budget is not really an issue.
Go for Philips bulbs if you can find them, Solistek and Osram are also good.
About ballasts, try to buy the 400V ones with matching bulbs, their the best bulb in the market today.
Don’t buy CMH, it’s a waste of money for 35+% less output at any given watt.
I’m in the same boat/am going to do an HID grow this Winter after struggling across the board last Winter with LED’s/heaters/etc.
I never really used the dim feature on these ballasts in the past. I haven’t seen the charts but some say that just dimming down a 600 changes the spectrum and may be rough on the lamp. It seems the consensus (if there is one these days…LOFL) is to buy a 400 lamp to dim the 600 down. Some packages out there come with both lamps. You just don’t want to go the other way and overdrive a lamp. (IMO)
With the hard swing to LED folks are dumping HID stuff for pretty cheap. I bought 2 big cool tubes off ebay for $50…new/shipped. I see ballasts all over for a hundo or a bit more. If you shop around you can save a bunch of $$$.
Output is king in indoor growing, second is spread.
A 120V Ballast with 400V Bulb option is your best friend, 600 or 1000w, Philips.
Spectrum is not a dominant factor, sure plants love CMH and the sun but results show over and over again that the same clones come very very close in quality with HPS and CMH, but the HPS is way better for yield as it got 40% more light.
I can go HPS. I just saw a crazy deal on a Grower’s Choice 500 w ballast. With bulb i’m looking at like 275 total. Anyone have and suggestions on brands or better a link to something you are using and recommend?
500 w ? Sounds too limiting
And also too expensive
Don’t buy brand name ballasts unless its actually a brand name like Lumatek or Adjusta-Watt
There’s a Chinese company that makes 400v ballasts aswell and I used it for years without problems
Right now I’m running the lumatek 400v 400/600w ballast with a Philips 400v El 600w bulb
That’s the best light setup today in hps.
Not 600 but it’s by far imo one of the best cmh lightgrow
400 v, i have a 120v outlet and no nothing about electrical. Is there a kit i need to plug this into my outlet?
I’m looking into the Lumatek today
I know these are not top of the line but i live in a colder climate and use hps in the winter, i have had this for two years and has produced great yields. I dim down to 600 for the first 24-48 hours as the plants come out of LED veg and then up to 1000w and let er rip bud. A decent value at 200$.
The ballast input rating is 120v like your outlet, and the output is 230-400v which enable you to run 400v bulbs
Just make sure you buy the 110-120v version.
Buy lots of extra bulbs the HPS have always been a maintenance item. MH are way more reliable IMO they last a lot longer on average. HPS are great if heat is what your after. Cheers !!!
Parabolic reflectors are nice but lacking when their up against normal reflectors.
In a normal reflectors only 40-50% is reflected light, in parabolic that figure goes to 90%
Light intensity which is the strength of the wave is also important for good levels of saturation, reflected light has less intensity and drive behind it making less penetrating down in the canopy.
Imo the best solution is a dimmable ballast with 250w MH (not CMH) light for veg and a hps (not AGRO) for flowering.
Lumatek, Lumii are chinese stuff but they work
MH is a waste of money/time
40% less output for a few more colors.
Ok I’ll try to explain better.
Between CMH and HID I prefer HID. If you buy a ballast for HID, imo it’s to use the HPS in bloom, while the MH in veg. It’s true that MH have a lower lumen/watt ratio than HPS but the effectiveness of a light has no longer been measured by the l/w ratio, but by PPFD, PAR and light spectrum. HPS practically haven’t blue spectrum (350-500nm). So all that power is useless in veg because plants need a blue spectrum. What you lose in lumen power you recover twice as much in appropriate light spectrums.
This is what a plant needs:
HPS spectrum:
MH spectrum (not the best ma for sure better than HPS)
The mw/m2/nm irradiance values speak for themselves
You are wrong, you don’t lose 40% light and gain it in ppfd or par lol
Spectrum still won’t change 40% less light.
Measure light output however you want, lumen, par, ppfd, if you even know what each measurement say but let’s assume you do,
It still won’t change the total output.
Ppfd is a space related measurement and has no relation to total light source output
Par is the spectrum band which plants best absorb light, again, no relation to total light output
MH and CMH are no competition to HPS, not in veg and not in bloom.
In the HID world there is one clear winner, HPS.
This is just your opinion, science is something else. The fact that you neglect the light spectrum, you are neglecting all the study that has been and is behind the LED technology. Why are LEDs better than HIDs despite sometimes having the same l/w ratio? The light spectrum.
A simple example: if you fire tons of Watts at your plant but the spectrum is green, it’s as if her was in the dark. You don’t get results even if the light spectrum shifts towards UV or IR. The functions that a plant has vegetatively (chlor A and chlor B) develop better with an MH than with an HPS.
The measurement of light in nw/m2/nm is not my invention, it’s science and it’s the unit of measurement that all agronomists use, including myself
