In the world of LED Grow Lights, the most common LED chips are 1W and 3W diodes. The labeling of these diodes however, confuses most people as they expect the name of the product to match its power consumption. With LEDs however, this is not always the case. The wattage of a LED is determined by the amperage they are driven at, with 1W LEDs driven at 350mA, and 3W LEDs driven at 700mA. Despite the fact that 3W LEDs are driven at double the amperage of a 1W, and normally consume only 2W of actual power, LED manufacturers have labeled them a 3W. It’s easy to ask yourself “then why did LED manufacturers name these LEDs 3W instead of 2W?” Perhaps it is simply a marketing trick, or just a label meant to confuse us. Whatever the reason it is important to note that anything labeled a 3W LED, is by all intents and purposes a 2W LED.

Because manufacturers have used confusing labeling on their 3W LEDs, anyone reading the data on them is lead to believe they are horribly inefficient compared to their 1W counterparts. The truth however, is that 3W LEDs are only marginally less efficient than 1W LEDs when you compare the actual power consumed to lumen output. Hydro Grow has done extensive testing on 3W LEDs to implement their use in our Penetrator PRO Series LED Grow Lights. Our 3W LEDs are driven at 550mA, or about 1.53W per LED. The reason we do not operate our LEDs at 700mA as they are rated, is that it reduces the efficiency, increases heat, and reduces lifespan. At 550mA our 3W LEDs test 5% more efficient in terms of lumens per watt than at 700mA, run up to 15 degrees cooler, and last tens of thousands of hours longer.

Be careful however, of companies using 3W LEDs to trick you with their marketing. For example our 345W PRO uses 345 x 3W LEDs, consuming about 540W of power. A competitor's 540W LED Grow Light however, will likely consist of only 180 x 3W LEDs, meaning you get about half the output with their product as you do our own. These companies are using less LEDs, rather than simply replacing their 1W’s with 3W’s to increase performance. Beware of this shortcut taken by many companies, as you’re going to pay a lot more to get a lot less.

Different manufacturers specialize in different colors, which allows for many "#1" titles. At present Cree holds the #1 output for white LED's, while Showa-Denko of Japan holds the #1 output for 660nm red LED's. However, just because a company best output in the world for one color, does not mean that all of the other colors they produce follow suit. In fact many LED manufacturers produce only a small # of different colors, and outsources other colors from multiple manufacturers to create today's complex spectral configurations for LED Grow Lights.

In the world of LED's there are only a few major players who stand out as having incredibly high efficiency, and a lot of smaller players who are trying hard to keep up. Some of the most recognized LED manufacturers throughout the world are: Cree, Luxeon, Osram, and Seoul. These companies focus on creating LED's with the highest lumen per watt outputs in their class, and are constantly competing with each other to own the title of being #1. Over the past several years the company who has owned the title of "highest lumen per watt LED manufacturer" the most, is Cree. Cree continuously achieves unmatched levels of light output throughout the industry, and is recognized as one of the leading pioneers of current LED chip technology. When companies are only interested in having the best, Cree is what they use! The only downside with companies like Cree, is that they have one of the highest cost to performance ratios in the industry, and a very limited spectral offering.

2W-2Chip and 3W-3Chip LEDs are classified in the "Multi-Chip Emitter" category. These LED's are not your traditional 2W or 3W LED, which function with a single emitting diode. Instead multi-chip LEDs use multiple 1W diodes under a single lens. Since 1W LED's are the most efficient of any LED in use, most people assume that these chips are just as efficient, if not more efficient because they utilize multiple 1W diodes. When you start to break down these LEDs however, and examine exactly how they are being used, higher efficiency is certainly not the case.

Due to heat restrictions, 2W-2Chip LED's are presently being driven at 400mA and 3W-3Chip LED's at 500mA. Now since each LED contains multiple 1W chips, the amperage being supplied must be divided by the # of chips to determine the amperage of each chip. For 2W-2Chip LED's this equates to 200mA per chip, and with 3W-3Chip this is just under 170 mA per chip. In relation to the amperage a 1W is supposed to be driven at (350mA), each of the chips in the 3W LED is receiving under half the rated amperage, with the 2W LEDs coming in slightly above half! So instead of using a single 1W LED at full brightness, many manufacturers are now using multiple 1W LED's at half brightness under 1 lens in order to create the illusion of more light! As can be seen in the image above however, more light is most certainly not the case, and dimmed LEDs will never deliver the levels of penetration achieved with full brightness LEDs.

The reason why each chip is run a such a low amperage is because when the amperage to each chip is increased, the lifespan and output is greatly reduced, or the LEDs would burn out completely! These heat issues are brought about primarily due to limitations in grow light product design, as all of today's LED Grow Lights made in China were originally engineered for 1W LED's. They were not developed to handle the cooling needs of higher amperage LED's, or multi-chip emitters, which limits the type and amount of LED's that can be used in any of their products. Unfortunately this does not stop companies from using multi-chip LEDs in their products, or what affect it has on their customers! Our fully-packed evaluation model with 2W-2Chip LEDs tested 45 degrees hotter (150F) than the same panel with 1W LED's. Likewise the model with 3W-3Chip LEDs tested a full 55 degrees hotter (160F)! Needless to say our fully-loaded evaluation models create far more heat in the grow room, and their light output is degrading at a much faster rate than any of our 1W Penetrator LED lights.