Black Dog LED PhytoMAX-3 12SP Review, PAR Test, Pros/Cons | 4+ LBS PER LIGHT?!

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Defoliation Method:
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Gorilla Grow Tent 4’ x 4’ x 6’11”: https://bit.ly/3dyP3Ao
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Review by Erik from www.LEDGrowLightsDepot.com
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Notes with from Black Dog LED about this review (mostly their words except context changed to third-person and text cleaned up a little bit):

3:02 The wattage should settle down to 615-620 watts if you let the light warm-up for 10-15 minutes. It takes a bit more electricity when it is cold, and since we keep our LEDs nice and cool our light takes longer to warm up and reach a stable operating temperature than most lights on the market.

4:10 The diodes will last hundreds of thousands of hours, but they should still be putting out well over 70% of their original intensity at 70,000 hours (almost 8 years of continuous 24/7 use).

4:15 Black Dog LED can provide PAR charts for any of our lights and for a specific footprint, but they feel it is misleading how PAR charts are often made.

5:40 Black Dog LED has a hanging height calculator on their website (https://blackdogled.com/height) that will tell people their exact setup what height they recommend for the light, and what their average PPFD will be for the light over that footprint.

They can also generate PAR maps for anyone for any specific footprint that shows the PPFD levels down to every square inch. While the extreme corners of the footprint may be low, even just a couple of inches higher and the uniformity gets a lot better.

7:30 As the test showed, raising the light helps immensely with uniformity. For growers with only a single light, if they raise the light up even just a bit (such as 6 inches) the uniformity goes way up, with only a slight decrease in average PPFD. In addition, even though silver-lined tents seem like they should be the most reflective, those silver tent walls are only about 75% reflective, and flat white is about 93% reflective.

7:38 The only lights on the market that truly have 3.2 umol/j do so by having a lot of red in their spectrum and very little blue. This is because red photons, having a longer wavelength, are lower energy. You can make more of them per watt (or joule) so it is how you can pump the numbers up to 3.2 umol/j.

Black Dog knows how they can design a more efficient light: leave out the UV, leave out the violet, switch to 450nm blue LEDs underlying the “white” LEDs, and they’d actually have a light that gets 2.8 to 3.2 umol/J. But they’re not interested in designing the most efficient light in terms of photons per watt, they’re designing a light that maximizes flower yield per watt and per square foot.

This video compares Black Dog LED’s 615 watt light’s photon output (which is lower because they are putting more of the energy into high-energy photons) to lights that pull 630 or 650 watts- this is a bit unfair as if you added 15 or 35 more watts, their fixture will generate more light.

9:27 Black Dog LED since changed their wording to include their lower expected yields, so for the 12S it is now 2 to 4+ pounds, and for the 24S it is now 4 to 7+ pounds. Can customers get less? Of course- if you forget to water your plants you can get 0, and if you don’t grow decently at all you can get poor yields. But anyone that knows what they’re doing should be able to get 2 pounds from the 12S, and if they don’t, Black Dog LED is happy to help. The numbers they put out are also based on growing with the lights themselves; their last in-office R&D harvest yielded 2 pounds per light from the PhytoMAX-2 630 watt lights (with 41% fewer total photons than the PhytoMAX-3 12S) and it wasn’t even defoliated. Their spectrum makes the light more efficient for growing plants- so they need fewer photons to get good yields.