When you walk down the street and pay attention to the windows of houses, in many of them you can see a characteristic pink light - people are growing seedlings under phyto lamps.
The reader sent a huge phytolamp for testing, on which was written "60W". I tested it and was surprised.
The lamp was quite expensive - 1,750 rubles. On the top of the box is a sticker with the name "R-LED Phytolamp prom - two spectra 60 W".
On the side there is a sticker with another name "ZW0145-00-0" and a mysterious inscription "Output power 60W".
First, I measured the power of the lamp. Instead of the promised 60 watts, only 14 watts turned out. The spectrometer showed a luminous flux of 470 lm, but this value is not very applicable to phytolamps. The peak of blue in the spectrum is at 455 nm, the peak of red at 633 nm.
I asked one of the leading experts in phytolight, Anton Sharakshane, to calculate from the spectrum how much micromol / s gives such a lamp and compare its efficiency for illuminating plants with a conventional white LED lamp.
Anton sent the following result:
"1000 lm for this spectrum corresponds to 36.5 μmol / s
At 14.09 W of power consumption, the lamp gives 470 lm, which corresponds to 17.2 μmol / s and an efficiency of 1.0 μmol / J.
Approximately the same flux is given by the "average" white LED lamp with a flux of 1200 lm".
It turns out that there is no point in spending almost two thousand rubles on such a phytolamp. If you buy any cheap LED lamp with warm light and a real luminous flux of 1200 lm for 80-100 rubles, it will give the same amount of light to plants, and will consume even a little less.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that all the blue-red phyto-lamps, which are sold much more expensive than ordinary white lamps of the same power, are a big, big swindle.
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
The main topic of my blog is technology in human life. I write reviews, share experiences, talk about all sorts of interesting things. My second project - lamptest.ru. I test LED bulbs and help me figure out which ones are good and which are not.