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Big red-blue sell

When you walk along the street and pay attention to the windows of houses, in many of them you can notice a characteristic pink light - people grow seedlings under fitolamps.

The reader sent a huge phytolamp to the test, on which was written "60W". I tested it and was surprised.


The lamp was quite expensive - 1750 rubles. On top of the box is a sticker with the name “R-LED Fitolamp Prom - Two Spectra 60 W”.


On the side is a sticker with another name "ZW0145-00-0" and the mysterious inscription "Output power 60W".


For starters, I measured the power of the lamp. Instead of the promised 60 watts, it turned out to be only 14 watts. 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 falls at 455 nm, the peak of red at 633 nm.


I asked one of the leading experts in phyto lighting Anton Sharakshan iva2000calculate from the spectrum how much micromol / s such a lamp gives and compare its effectiveness for lighting plants with a conventional white LED lamp.

Anton sent this 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 this "the average" LED white light with a flux of 1200 lm gives the flow ".

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.


Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that all the blue-red phytolamps that are sold much more expensive than ordinary white lamps of the same power are a big, big sell.

© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin

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