Electronics Weekly
In horticultural lighting, the name of the game is to direct most of the electrical input power into the red and blue parts of the spectrum needed for plants to grow. On top of this are requirements for people to be able to see to work in the environment.
Aimed at indoor farming, the specialist led is the GW Q9LR32.HW, part of the company’s 5 x 5 x 0.7mm Osconiq S 5050 family.
To save power consumption, it’s phosphor has been tuned not to emit much red light (spectrum below), so that it can be paired with AlInGaP or other native red emitting leds.
“Classic white LEDs require considerably more energy than a directly red-emitting LED would for a comparable number of red photons,” according to the company. ” The led also boasts an efficiency of 2.86µmol/J and an optical output of 630mW.” µmol/J is the plant equivalent of lumens/watt for humans.
Both these values are for the M2 bin operating at 180mA and 25°C junction temperature – the devices have two emissive junctions inside: forward drop is ~5.5V at 180mA.
Operating current range is 180 to 1,050mA, and the devices are protected against over-voltages up to 8kV (HBM, Class 3B).
Which leds should they be paired with?
“Possible are in general all red LEDs,” a company spokesman told Electronics Weekly, “but mainly we see the hyper red Oslon Square and Oslon SSL products.”
Explaining the spectral emission graph from the data sheet (reproduced above) he said solid line is the power spectrum of the led and the dotted line (V(λ)) is the luminous efficiency function – the average spectrum of human sensitivity.
The GW Q9LR32.HW product page is here
I’ve often wondered at the need for all these new houses.
One batch further up the road was priced at five or six times the dwelling I inhabit, and is, as you say, glued to the side of the hill, with the concrete basement structure which no doubt cost a fortune being adorned with a bog standard timber frame above it.
The more recent 300 houses seem to be inhabited by rather richer inhabitants than those surrounding me, what with their very expensive (no doubt rented) & very noisy cars having made the road even more dangerous than it was previously.
The 300 houses also mean I’ll never again see an elephant sticking its head through the fence when the circus was in town and using that farmer’s field.
Gosh, this gives me a really really mellow feeling.
I just can’t think quite why.
Morning zeitghost
A shop burned down in our high street on account of having a relaxed attic – amazing where these things turn up.
Indeed. Rather like the attic of the house next door but one which was similarly used for growing purposes some 15 years ago.
The current owner had great fun dismantling the constructions therein.
Oddly, when my late mother offered the then owner some runner beans (there were always far too many), his reply was that “they didn’t eat green stuff”.
No indeed, they smoked most of it.
When the boys in blue hadn’t confiscated his crop as happened rather frequently.
I’m sure his electricity bill would have been far smaller with these new fangled LED thingies.
And the roof wouldn’t have glowed quite so brightly in the infrared.
Already satellites can spot suspicious heat and CO2 emissions on the ground. How soon before they also can spot suspicious O2 emissions?
Big Brother is watching your hydroponics…
Somehow zeitghost, I had you living somewhere in the countryside.
My stereotypes have now shifted you to South London.
BTW, I heard that by-passing the electricity meter is covered early in the manual.
Oh, I live in Welsh Wales, boyo, there’s tidy then.
It would appear that hydroponics is countrywide.
It was fields around here until 1935, and it’s fields a mere 300 yards up the road, or was until they built 300 houses on it, so the nearest field is now 500 yards up a different road.
I live in the catchment area of the old Siliconix factory in Morriston, a site that is, in turn, now a housing estate.
Aggh!, my stereotype was 86 years out of date. It has been sent for ‘corrective training’, so I don’t expect to see it for a while.
Nice countryside around your way. Have they discovered what is causing all these housing estates?
I have a friend up the Taff valley, where they have to glue houses to the sides to fit any more in.
Their electricity bill is usually zero 🙂
There’s a load of Asians round here who run cannabis farms and are always having to move location before they get caught. When they do, they dump the old compost near us which we use to improve the soil – after storing it for a year to make sure it doesn’t have any dubious seeds in it.
I’ve had funny stuff coming up from the bird seed.
Honest, guvnor.