Dave Spillman, owner of High Mountain Health in Arizona, is an engineer by education, and he challenges his cultivation practices with a scientific approach. To test the efficiency of LED lights against his traditional high pressure sodium (or HPS) lights, he transitioned three of his 12 grow rooms to an LED setup.
“We put LED lights in and measure the heat they put out. We [also] measure the light they put out,” he says. “We have just collected every bit of data since we started this facility. I’m a data-collection geek.”
After several rounds of testing, “We’ve seen remarkable results,” he says. “We haven’t seen any loss in weight or yields with LED compared to our single-ended HPS rooms.” Coming to the end of a test with similar results in both groups sounds like wasted effort, but for an engineer like Spillman, it has changed his outlook.
