What are the best led lights available currently?

First post and I want to point out a few things. Good luck on your search.

The best you can do for the money right now is building your own fixtures from white mid-power LED strips. You customize the spread and density and you save a boatload by building yourself - they’re easy and there’s plenty of exact tutorials on the web.

The most cost effective DIY build on the market are the Samsung F strips with LM561C S6 bin in 3000k. Look at the various builds on www.LEDGardener.com for various sizes using various brands of strips, but consider my recommendation of the proper strips.

Spectrum doesn’t improve performance outside of the 3000k - 3500k for these mid-power white LEDs. Maybe a half percent here, 3/4 percent there, but overall don’t listen if people try to tell you to buy 5000k blue LEDs or 1700k ultra red. Also don’t bother with UV, IR, far red, etc. Total waste of time until your grows are 100% perfect.

Most of the LED lights you buy on Amazon or Ebay or from places like Mars Hydro are total garbage compared to these strip builds. I don’t know about the Sol Strips; I bet they’re good, but beware the profit motive of forum advertisers. They’re more expensive than the Samsung strips, and at what benefit?

If you don’t want to DIY, the top 5 retailers in the US for complete plug-and-play LED lights right now (if price is no object) are probably:

Fluence
Gavita LED
ChilLED
Pacific Light Concepts (PLC)
Horticulture Lighting Group (HLG)

Honorable mention to Timber COBs and the Chinese QB knockoffs that have started doing their own thing…and quite well.

The first two on that list are basically commercial DIY strip builds like what I recommended above. They use the exact same parts as you would in a DIY strip build, and the output is the same, at 2-3x the cost of DIY.

ChilLED and HLG and PLC off-the-shelf products are basically high density diode boards. I don’t like these as much as strip builds because canopy coverage is less, and you lose some of the benefits of distributed multi-point light sources because they act like smaller brighter single light sources. They still grow great weed, efficiently, but it’s not as effective IMHO as strips.

Timber and the Chinese boards are towards the bottom here, but still WAAAAAAAAAAAAY better, LIGHT YEARS ahead of your Mars Hydros of the world in performance and efficiency. Timber’s COB builds are on their way out, but still a decent option. They’re good but they’re being replaced by thousands of small led diodes distributed across the entire canopy. Chinese boards run low power without heatsinks are great if you buy from the right manufacturers, but the lack of warranty only feels worth the price of admission if you buy enough to get a large price break and cheap shipping.

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