Khyber's Journal: Progress and Fraud

Well, I've made incredible progress with LED. 19 days from dry seed and at a full crop, with all of the characteristics and content of sun-grown lettuce. The sun-grown lettuce takes 17 days, however that is in the summer, winter takes almost 90 days in our test solar area. This will be incredibly useful for winter production.

Now I've uncovered something a bit more dastardly in the same field and it's disturbing because I got victimized by it as well, though I've been lucky enough to not incur any damages of any sorts.

It turns out that almost every LED panel out there is nowhere NEAR pulling it's rated power. This presents several problems. The first one is pretty simple - when you advertise a lamp of any sorts to be of a certain wattage, you are promising that plus or minus a small amount, your light is consuming that much power per hour. If you have a 120w LED panel and it is only drawing 60wH, you are NOT getting what is advertised. If an advertised-as-50w panel is drawing 45wH (10% less than advertised) that is an acceptable deviation. If that advertised-as-50w panel is only drawing 25wH (50% less than advertised) that is NOT an acceptable deviation.

The second problem is just as bad, you're not delivering maximum photon flux to the plants, thus you will likely never get your advertised results.

I've found that many of my own panels are having this same problem. Certain lines (specifically my older ones) stay in specified tolerances, others are simply so far out as to be unbelievable. All of my 15w and 50w panels are well within tolerance. Everything else after that, it's a crapshoot.

In the sheds, my LED bars are pulling exactly what they should pull, thank goodness, although it would be neat to be able to say that I'm using even less power than anticipated and still competing with solar-grown crops.

This is actually a huge story I'm sitting on involving this fraud. China appears to regularly do this, and as a result many consumers are being taken for a ride while some of the more aware resellers continue to perpetuate lies to keep the product flow going. I've seen it already - "240w panel only draws 120w due to line purity."

It's very widespread. Am I the only one with a conscience? How do I handle this? I've contacted the Department of Commerce, I guess I should also contact the local or state DA. Any other people I should contact?