Hi all
A company called Life Light Technologies (http://www.lifelighttec.com) claim to be making High Pressure Metal Halides, they cover almost the full light spectrum! No need to change bulb from veg to flower.
Anyone heard of them or used them??

Looks interesting and very expensive

Never heard of them but sounds interesting.

Metal halides, Great for veg.
They're a diff' type of bulb.
A little more expensive than HPS bulbs.
And they give a strong white light.
If you're using a number of ballasts add one metal halide bulb in with every 3 HPS.
Your plants will love you for a metal halide
My 2 cents

those sound expensive.

I have thought about this mix of HPS and MH. Say, for a 400w grow, a 250w hps and a 150w MH - don't think i'll be able to keep a 400w HPS and a 150w MH cool.

it's just a normal mh lamp? hps, mh and mv lamps are all high pressure discharge lamps

There was an article on them in the most recent edition of Urban Gardening. They don't seem to be just a normal metal halide. I don't have the article in front of me, so I can't tell you the exact spectrum it covers. As soon as I get up off my arse and find it, I'll post all the details... Shouldn't be too long now

ooooh, fancy, i take it back.

Looks good I had never heard of it either very interesting

Hi,

Do you tthink its another name for ther ceramic metal halides that our friends in the states have been banging on about?

The pic scribble posted certainly looks like one, and the specs are the same.



BaB

Not sure, but is that about the same as the new sunmaster dual spectrum lamp?

The new sunmaster lamps are in with the Grolux lamps here:-

http://www.greenshorticulture.co.uk/detail...192&cat=182

So there not the same then as "high pressure metal halide?" more along the lines of the growlux lamps but improved?

The yanks are going crazy over these, you can only get 'em up to 150w in UK at the moment.

The yanks have 400w versions, soon to be in UK and 600w versions are coming.

The spectrum from these are bang on for what we need and more energy is converted into lumens so less heat also.

Do you know where I can pick up a 150w version?

so it is ceramic metal halide? they're avaiable in the larger wattages now, been reports of quite big yield losses with em, due to too much energy wasted in the green/yellow area

i wanted to try them, but i reckon a mix of mh and hps would be far better

anyone heard of these dual arc bulbs? Ive seen them on e bay for upwards of 70 bux.
they seem to have a mh arc and a hps arc. these other bulbs you all are talking about
dont look the same.

look it up on ebay or something.
let me know

http://cgi.ebay.com/Solarmax-Dual-Arc-Tube...Q2em118Q2el1247

says its a 400mh and a 600hps in one bulb and works in a 1000w hps ballast

yup seen those before mate, but hven't been able to find them in the uk, and only have 1000watters 400 and 600 ones would be fucking perfect for me!!

my opinion
apart from this new mh, i tried halide, mh, sodium and the sodium growlux and floro

the best artificial light for summer grow is halide and mh.
the best artificial light for autumn grow is sodium. the growlux does both, but its not as good as either the other 2 as individual.

halide is MH (metal halide), what do you mean better for autumn or summer grows? what difference does it make if it's autumn or summer? if you're using lamps you're growing indoors!!

dual spec lamps generally give out more par than standard sodiums and standard sodiums give out more than halides. dual sodiums just give out more blue. they do have a small effect on the growth of the plant but it's not much, generally more blue is wanted to promote denser growth and is claimed by some to produce better quality but, dual spec lamps help and imo are better than standard sodiums, but they will never produce as dense bushy growth as a halide, as for autumn or summer, makes no difference at all, in fact, sodiums if anything would be better for summer as they give out less heat!

hmmm well maybe ill look into getting one of those bulbs when i pick up this 1000watter in the next couple days.

Right.. I managed to root out that article
First off, they claim that HPS is a very inefficient light source. They talk about the "colour rendering index" (CRI), a scale that measures the clarity and quality of a light source. The sun has 100 CRI, which is where you want to be.
However, an ordinary HPS has a CRI of no more than 22... shocking!
Now the boyos at Life Light Technologies claim that their new HPMH bulb has a CRI of over 90 (90% of the suns clarity and quality!)
If we can believe all that, seems clear to me that they're the way forward.

'Cept that's really misleading to us - CRI has nothing whatsoever to do with how good they are at growing plants, the CRI is all about how 'natural' a light source looks to us - the reason a normal, orangey HPS has a poor CRI is because of it's perceived colour and it's far from how the sun looks to us - but plants still like 'em just fine.



From Wiki.

yup, our eyes are most sensitive in the yellow/green area of the spectrum, so lamp with lots of these colours will be brighter to us and have a better cri. yellow and green are useless to plants though, so lamps that waste energy in this area of the spectrum aren't that efficient. although i reckon the ceramics may prove to produce good/maybe better quality buds, they wont produce the same yields. think i'm gonna hang out for a 400 mh/hps hybrid!

I read the same article recently. One thing they did mention in there was about plants and red light, apparently a NASA study in the '60's showed that plants use red light the most efficiently and this set a lot of lamp producers off down the HPS route for growing but the reason plants use red light the most efficiently is because it has the lowest energy levels (electron volts) so plants have to be efficient when using it as the individual photons don't carry so much energy.

Photons that comprise bluer light on the other hand have much higher energy levels (red light is around 1.8eV and blue light maybe around 3eV), so a photon of blue light is providing a lot more energy to the plant than a photon of red light. THC and other cannabinoids are relatively high energy products so there may well be benefits when using lamps that are bluer. I've noticed that plants grown their entire lives under MH do have a different quality to the high than plants grown under HPS so this may be born out.

Fair enough HPS lamps produce a whole lot more lumens than MH lamps but if it takes a lot more low energy photons to provide a plant with the same amount of energy a lesser number of higher energy quanta would then the two may balance out. Lot's of low energy quanta may not equal a lower number of high energy quanta.

S'interesting stuff, Felix. It reminded me of reading this article on SciAm:

Thanks Scribb|e, I'll have a butchers at lunch time.

Is this the article that's on the front cover of the current issue ? As I nearly bought it the other week, it certainly looked interesting.

Nice one

These bulbs are looking better and better by the hour. For big growers, 400,600,1000w will be good but i'm particularly interested in 150 and 250w models, for small grows with lst, scrog etc - ultra efficient drobes and such. looking good methinks.. can't seem even to be able to find the 150w in the UK though

the funneling process is the key to which colors the pigments select. The complex of molecules at the reaction center can perform chemical reactions only if it receives a red photon or the equivalent amount of energy in some other form. To take advantage of blue photons, the antenna pigments work in concert to convert the high energy (from blue photons) to a lower energy (redder), like a series of step-down transformers that reduces the 100,000 volts of electric power lines to the 120 or 240 volts of a wall outlet. The process begins when a blue photon hits a blue-absorbing pigment and energizes one of the electrons in the molecule. When that electron drops back down to its original state, it releases this energy—but because of energy losses to heat and vibrations, it releases less energy than it absorbed.

The pigment molecule releases its energy not in the form of another photon but in the form of an electrical interaction with another pigment molecule that is able to absorb energy at that lower level. This pigment, in turn, releases an even lower amount of energy, and so the process continues until the original blue photon energy has been downgraded to red. The array of pigments can also convert cyan, green or yellow to red. The reaction center, as the receiving end of the cascade, adapts to absorb the lowest-energy available photons. On our planet’s surface, red photons are both the most abundant and the lowest energy within the visible spectrum.

this paragraph would suggest to me that the plants use red more efficiently because it has less work to do, to use the light. dunno all a bit complex, mix of both seems best to me!

not really efficient, they waste loads of energy in less usefull spectrums, even greens who now stock them due to request say that MH or HPS lamps are far better, even though they are Much cheaper!!

This is what i found these lamps seem to have better spectrum than hps,what do u think is this possible they produce less heat they say? but strongest is 400w

they have a better spectrum in that they produce as much blue as they do red, but they also produce a lot of green and yellow that are totally useless to us. they are for people not plants, and produce less usefull light overall than either hps or a halide, even the suppliers say not to bother, get a halide, better quality and better yield

you are right we are looking for red spectrum...

Hey guys.

I thought you might be interested to hear this info on Sunpulse. They've been working on these since 1999!

These are nothing to do with "Sun Master" - these bulbs are totally new - they have been engineered right from square one, designed for horticulture - not a re-packaged street-lamp!

I believe they are releasing 4 types of Pulse Start Metal Halide (PSMH) bulbs in the UK.

3K, 4K, 6.5K and 10K.

4K is for seedlings / cuttings and for last week of veg.
6.5K is for the majority of veg.
3K is for flowering.
10K is for the last week or so of flowering.

It's the 10K bulb that's going to cause the biggest stir.

The 10K bulb has lots of UV. It's basically a "death ray" which causes the plant to stress and produce lots of resin.
Resin is basically nature's sun screen. UV fluro tubes don't have the same effect because they are not powerful enough to get UV incident energy to the leaf.

I have spoken to growers in Canada who have used the 6.5K and 10K. These guys have been at it for 20 years, they know their genetics, and they were astounded
at the frostyness!

Their website is hard to find. It's spam.com

Distributor details are available on the site.

These bulbs can screw straight into your exisiting digi or magnetic ballasts. But they also do a range of their own digital ballasts too.

They won't be cheap, but then neither are Ferraris!

Watch this space ey!

"The 10K bulb has lots of UV. It's basically a "death ray" which causes the plant to stress and produce lots of resin.
Resin is basically nature's sun screen. UV fluro tubes don't have the same effect because they are not powerful enough to get UV incident energy to the leaf."

i like that sentence HPS bulbs produce small amount of UV, if this one produces 10k and big amount of UV then it must be good , anyone tested this one?

Ikon are the UK Distributors. I've just rang them....


After 15 mins. on hold ..... they finally admitted that yes they were UK suppliers for Sunpulse.
but they couldn't tell me much else ....

.....apparently - one of the directors are going to ring me back with more info.


Laz

nice Lazlo i got 3 different bulbs to test myself and very small space to do it so this one might get its turn by end of 2009
but sure would like to see the amount of resin with that one
,for now grolux did the worst job weed with almost no smell and weak resin production
and Osram Vialox nav t (sont)Mh produced most stinky and sticky bud i ve ever smoked with no need for curing

next tests ; osram powerstar Mh , sunmaster Mh 7200k and osram son t plus hps

in a year ill post here to post my review of best bulb

the 600's go up to 14 and 20k! these look quite interesting, although you can already get MH lamps in these colour ranges in the uk, as they're used in aquatics, the really high colour temps are used for growing corals

I done a post a while back asking if there was any point going over 7200 kelvin and was told no it wouldnt make much difference.

As scraglor said you can buy these lamps now up to 20k but there designed for aquatics.

I use the 7200k sunmaster mh and have to say i love the lush growth it seems to give even if it does flicker a little in my lumatek 400watt ballast

Normally 10k are used for coral growth, the 14k & 20k are just used to make them look more pleasing to the eye and do very little for coral groth.
Iwasaki actually make a 50k MH lamp which is very blue but these are usually used side by side with 10k's
I used to culture my own corals a few years ago.

ah ok, knew that they had something to do with aquatics though! so do you know of any good brands/suppliers of lamps in these ranges?

http://www.reeflighting.co.uk/product.php?productid=12

any news on the suppliers?thses lamps sound interesting....

unfortunately don't do 600's though

the sunpulse ones are only 50 quid though, so no more than most decent halides!

Id buy one for my 400 to see what its like but i ain't sure the lumatek will run it or not.

what sunpulse or one from the link you put up? sunpulse do two types of halide of each wattage and colour, one designed for high frequency use for electronic ballasts and one designed for standard c&c ballasts

Either just more paranoid about nuking the plants near the end of flowering hence i usually just swap from hps to 72k mh for the end few weeks.

can't see it doing any harm tbh, there's nothing coming out of em, that they wouldn't be getting with sunlight