As a budget grower I'm always looking for little things to add to my grow room to improve stuff, especially if it's a nice price. Obviously, cheap is actually often rubbish and complete waste of money, but it's always interesting to look and evaluate what is out there. I remain healthily sceptical, but budget LED lights - while initially scorned and mocked, have found their niche with hard up growers like myself - lots of new growers are appearing on this forum and having a bit of success with their Mars LED's and a host of similar brands at lower prices. Yes, I do believe you still get ultimately what you pay for, but if the most you've got is around £80-100 then have become a viable option.
So, with that backdrop, I've been looking on Ebay and Amazon and noticed that lots of cheap COB LED lights are for sale. Now, I've actually got a CRX Sunny COB unit that is pretty good, but attention has been drawn to low cost, single COB units. Here is an example I've found on Amazon UK - search ref: B078H9SW95
It's advertised as 50W - which is probably crap - as we're all familiar with cheap LED's having their true power somewhat exaggerated - sadly I can't find a value that indicates it's true power, but I'm wondering if these have some benefit as a supplementary light? I remember when I switched to LED from a CFL light that I was often encouraged to utilise the CFL as a supplementary light - to get extra lighty goodness on the plant, especially in terms of lighting the lower canopies of my plants in the latter stages of a grow. This turned out to be impractical - mostly for space reasons, however - these lights are small, have built in stands so they're designed almost perfectly for that purpose - i.e. getting light onto the lower reaches of a plant. I appreciate they won't be powerful - but at close range, will they compliment the bigger lights from above and get good extra light to the lower buds that might ordinarily end up as pretty useless popcorn bud? At £20 I'm slightly tempted. What do you guys think?
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