Lifted LED VS Cirrus LED Grow Light

Why Grow with COBs?

COB LEDs are more powerful than traditional 3 Watt and 5 Watt diodes, giving you stronger canopy penetration. When growers claim that LEDs "don't work" it's usually because they don't see the same kind of canopy penetration as an HPS bulb. COBs fix that.

Including greater electrical efficiency, a higher spectrum, and longer lifespans, chip-on-board (COB) lights are high quality grow lights that have many advantages. However, the primary benefit is that they emit less heat than standard LED bulbs. This means you’ll be able to get more light in less space. In other words, they’re more efficient than traditional LEDs. When compared to standard LED and HID grow Lights, LED COB lights create less heat and have a higher spectrum. This enables you to reduce grow room hot spots because the overall light distribution is greater.

Lifted LED City14 COB Grow Light

Known as the City 14 Grow Light, it’s a true 1000 watt HID replacement that’s been proven to provide more effective lighting with cooler temperatures, an incredible lifespan, an advanced spectrum, and full connectivity through your tablet or smartphone. We had an opportunity to check out one of these powerful fixtures to see what it truly offers.

SPECTRUM

The general consensus among horticulturists is that the blue range of the spectrum is crucial for vegging, and the red range is ideal for blooming. While this is true, this simple generalization doesn’t provide all of the wavelengths of the spectrum to really make plants flourish. By incorporating both reds, blues, infrared, ultraviolet, and multiple full spectrum COBs, Lifted LED provides one of the most ingenious arrangements that we’ve ever seen.



By taking one glance at the City 14 Grow Light, you’ll see fourteen different modules that each contain ten individual diodes positioned around their own COB. This arrangement provides a full, balanced spectrum with an incredible amount of intensity – 2700 PPFD (μmoles/m2/s) at 12″. Proven to consistently outperform a 1000w HID, each module emits 11 different bands of light with peaks in the red and blue range.


WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY

One of the coolest, most unique feature of the Lifted LED City 14 Grow Light is the ability to connect and control your fixture with your phone or tablet. Although it’s currently only available for Android users, the iOS app will be released soon.



The Lifted App is designed to give you a full insight into your grow room as it presents to you a user-friendly interface that acts as a dashboard for your LEDs. With it, you can refine your spectrum, set timers, check the temperatures, and the overall status of your fixtures. It even lets you fully calibrate your lights so that they’re operating properly at all times. With access like this, we’re quite impressed with the amount of flexibility it can offer for commercial, agricultural, or large-scale growing areas.

Cirrus Titan T500 COB LED Grow Light

The T500 is about equivalent to a 1200 watt HPS light, but most first-time LED growers will probably get lower yields than they did with HPS. Much of that is due to the differences in growing with HPS light and with LED grow light.

Once you've gotten used to the differences, you can expect yields well above those of a 1000 watt HPS bulb. More importantly, the quality will be much higher, with an increase in resin production of up to 20%.

The best news?

The Titan 5 only uses 500 watts of power. That is far below any other 1200 watt equivalent LED fixtures and even below almost all 1000 watt equivalent lights.

This low power usage is one of the biggest strengths and is due to the unique mCOB array, which I will talk about in more detail below in the section on LED types.

Cirrus T500 LED Grow Light Spectrum


Titan lights emit a full-spectrum light that includes infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. Most of the light is in the red and blue ranges, which is exactly the light plants need most.

Moreover, each mCOB array emits the complete spectrum you see in the image above. Other LED fixtures are made up of many diodes that each emit a single wavelength. Some diodes emit a blue light, some emit a red light, etc.

As you can imagine, this leads to an uneven light distribution. One part of the canopy might be getting far more blue light than another part, for example, because it is located beneath more blue diodes than another part. By alternating colors, manufacturers try to minimize this problem, but they can't eliminate it entirely.

With their proprietary mCOB arrays, Cirrus has eliminated the problem. Each LED emits every wavelength, and every part of the canopy gets the exact same spectral makeup.

It sounds good in theory, but does this spectrum actually make a difference in real life?

It does.

The ideal color ratio and the uniform spread of full-spectrum light increases bud quality (this is something you see with all quality LEDs, just to a lesser degree) and the addition of UV and IR light stimulates resin production, which increases THC.

Finally, Cirrus' Leaf app lets you control the spectrum (or choose one of the many presets) from your smartphone or tablet. You can control the brightness of each part of the spectrum. If you want to turn off UV light and turn down the reds during vegging, you can do that. If you want to have the UV light come on for only two hours every afternoon, you can do that, too.

PAR and Coverage Area


The image above shows the PPFD (PAR) footprint for the Titan 5 at 24 inches from the top of the canopy. You've probably noticed that the highest value in the center is far lower than many competitors.

If you've looking for the highest PAR value, the T series of lights are probably not for you.

Cirrus has chosen to spread the light out more than most other manufacturers. This gives you a larger coverage area of 5 by 5 feet and a more even light spread. Whether this is good for you, depends on what you're doing with the light.

If you're growing a single plant or have a different reason for needing a lot of incredibly intense light directly beneath the fixture then there are far better fixtures out there for you.

The T lights are meant to maximize the amount of light that hits every part of the coverage area. If you've got a garden that measures 5 by 5 feet or larger, you actually don't want a very intense light in the center. You want the light distributed as uniformly as possible throughout the coverage area. That way, even plants on the outside of that 5 by 5 area still get plenty of light and don't go hungry.

Another reason for the lower PAR values is the inclusion of infrared and ultra-violet light. The mCOBs used in the Titan emit more IR and UV light than most other LED fixtures. This light does not contribute to PAR at all, but it does make your plants happy. The sun contains both UV and IR light, after all.

A common complaint about LED lights is poor canopy penetration. Most LED fixtures use 3 watt diodes, which simply don't give you the same penetration as a powerful 1000 watt HPS bulb. 5 watt diodes give you better penetration, but emit far more heat.