California Light Works Solar System 550 LED Grow Light Unboxing, Review, and Test
California Lightworks - Solar System 550 Charts
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Hey everyone! Nate from GrowersHouse here, and we just got the new Solar System 550 from California Light-works in and this light just came out recently. California Light-works used to have, you know the Solar Flare and the Solar Storm Light now this is the Solar System, and I asked him, George the owner of California Light-works. You know, why the name Solar System? So we got into some details about what california Light-works is doing and how they're trying to push the envelope with regard to LED's. In the indoor growing industry as most people see LED lights encroaching on the hid market and the ceramic metal halide market, and I think that most people believe led will be the primary light source and the one to go with. Eventually we're just not sure exactly what day that will be, but I think California Light-works is probably gonna be one of the company's that's going to be the first, and this light probably being the most advanced to date.
So let's go over it and show you why that is so this light is actually. If you take a look at it, it's a 400 watt light at the wall and it runs from 90 volts to 277 volt and that's totally variable. So you can run on any voltage you want like 120, 208, 240, 277 it really does not matter. This light will be able to handle all voltages and they say that this one is about the equivalent of 550 watt hid light and this light is designed with you know, quite a few different features in mind including the one that was kind of pioneered by Gavita.
Which is the in mind including the one that was kind of pioneered by Gavita which is the output which allow you to daisy chain up to a hundred lights. So if you daisy chained up to a hundred lights on one controller you can affect their lighting cycle and this you know, the controller's just as smart as the Gavita controller where you're able to sunrise sunset your actually label to do a little more since led you can affect the spectrum. So we can go over the Reds the whites and the blues and you know something that not a lot of people know about this but the reason I called the solar system is because they, California Light-works told me they plan on having UVB and IR lights too kind of drawing the line up making it kind of a system like a modular system so where is this light is your primary lighting source. California Light-works wanted to have the option for people to have a UVB, a small supplementary UVB light you can hook into your system wherever you want so rather than be attached to your fixture if you want you UVB or IR "infrared" every two lights every three lights or every other light you can do that and you can also connect it via those rj11 cables.
So that you can use the controller to take care of all the fixtures another cool feature that California Light-works told us about which not sure a lot of other controlling lights are able to do this but you can easily checkerboard these fixtures if you'd like like a fixture can be turned off. For example within a string of a hundred lights and it could be the 98th fixture and the 99th & 100th fixture will still be working as long as that rj11 cables there, so you're able to turn off you know as many lights as you want as long as they're daisy chain in each other whether on or off doesn't really matter if the signal will keep on carrying on through the lights and keep affecting the ones that are even passed it from farther away from the controller so that said I mean I wanted to go over this fixture also because you know this is probably one of the most price and cost-effective units on the market this fixture was designed in a way that California Light-works so that we need to take LEDs to the next you know to the next level where like they actually start becoming a little bit more cost effective that it could be really high quality at the same time bring down the cost. So their goal was we want to make this light less expensive and still have the highest technology available and then be able to increase the warranty and they will do that with this fixture. I mean it's extruded aluminum and the UV resistant materials they use use a green house the night of the materials will fade essentially it has a special polycarbonate material that can stand up and everything's UL certified. So any people that have facilities that are really large you need UL certification this will totally be able to be work working in those and
you know the the price of this picture it came down to the point where i think it makes it a little bit more feasible to happen a lot of these commercial spaces.
I know this one a lot of commercial scale the price can get pretty can get pretty far down to the point where you know using three of these over a four-by-eight area and you'd be able to have a lot of light i mean you're talking about
400 watts the wall 550 watt equivalent that's basically a 1650 watt equivalent over a 4x8 table with this light and you'd be able to have probably some pretty insane growth plus be able to change the spectrum to exactly what you wanted to be if you're really that boutique grower who is looking to have that spectrum really give off certain characteristics or traits of your plants. So this might be one of the primary lights for the people that are really focused on quality and trying to build that modular system that California Light-works is building out currently and you know this is the 550 model but i wouldn't be surprised if they came out with you know maybe something that was twice the strong and then have this from that's what they have often done in their Line up if you look at the solar flare like the 220 or the 110 they have the 440 880 so here's the 550 I mean you know I would I wouldn't be surprised if they have different model lineups that can help make that growing environment more modular for you and for those people that are in greenhouses really great supplemental light like how small this thing is it doesn't cast large shadow over your growing area and that's why they designed it this way so that you know if you want to make sure that you grow in a greenhouse and be able to take care of your crop very easily i mean this thing is totally weather resistant so don't worry about humidity damaging your light, it's a very ready to go so other than that I want to bust out the controller and show it to you guys so you can see how it works and then throw this guy under some light meters we can see you know what kind of spectral readings this thing gives off and also show off you know what kind of the footprint has over our five-by-five area.
So let's get started!
So here we are with the California Light-works Solar System Controller it's pretty small as you can see comes with an nice wall mount and this thing is out 3d printed so jumping into the space age as they say haha so let's turn it on and this is just the main setup screen and you can see the time is in military time the program as whatever you want to name so you can name like veg or flower propagation you know flower set A flower set B if you have different you know strains plants you can even name them so it shows you right now the Reds with whites and blues are all a zero if I jump into manual mode really fast i can edit these with this big plus to be increments of 10 and a small plus being increments of 1 or i can just go a hundred percent on which is pretty awesome so I'll just turn all those on that's a hundred percent i want to i could turn both of those off and now i can just be using white light to look at my plants and I can also hit view mode which effectively does the same thing brings it down all the white so you can just take a quick look at your plants they look natural look for any deficiencies or anything irregular and your plants if we go back I can go into the set up in this thing really has a fair amount of options like if you go to you know set time it's a calendar are pretty self-explanatory you just jump in and said what time it is in military time any programs the part that I really want to touch base with you guys about because here you can edit the steps so most people will just do something like a on at this time off at this time with the sunrise and sunset of a certain amount of time so right now this is going on in noon off it you know 12:10 and with a 10-minute sunrise and sunset feature so that means it'll take 10 minutes to go from zero intensity up to whatever intensity you have set up here so what i could do is click their change the intensity up to what i want and maybe we'll go all the way with these ones and then I can make this sunrise and sunset time a little bit shorter so that means over the course of five minutes and if I wanted to I'll will
make that two more hours and hit save and then go back to it if i wanted to i can even change how the lights change during within that time span and I can do that by going to advanced and then changing the steps so there's step one step two three four five six actually goes all the way to step 20 which twenties with off time right now and you'll see whether active or not so i can go and send these to what I won't essentially whatever I want so i'm going back to step one plus one and then activate that and then I just tell it what time i need to activate that which with this one 12-5 save and at steps cool now it's that you can see the advanced turned red which means that i have more than just an on-and-off and other than that I mean that's how the controller works like I set up 200 lights it's pretty easy to use and if you guys have any questions please give us a call or send us an email at that point let's jump into some of the specs for the light so we can see how performed in our battery of tests.
Okay so let's jump into some of these special charts let's first start off with a nanometer wavelength and you can see that now we put the chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b vertical lines in here so you can see how well this spectrum hits those peaks in this piece are really showing off if the light is most intense near those Peaks then that's the most efficient spectrums that the plant can use to absorb so you want lights if they're going to have intensity to be right around the vertical lines and you can see that this light does between the 400 and 500 nanometers in the 600 to 700 nanometers which the 600 700 is more your flowering spectrum versus the fortune 500 more of your vegetative spectrum you can see that the relative intensity is much higher in the flowering spectrum and that's where you want more the relative intensity to be. so the spectrum overall design is very well.
Let's move on to the Par footprint. So we can see how the light is dispersed from this unit so in looking at these footprints the thing that I was probably most interested in seeing was that you know this is a very rectangular light and a lot of times with these rectangular lights the footprint is very rectangular as well which is good for summers but not great for others and a lot of times people want more of a square kind of footprint and talked to California Light-works about this and they said that they designed the optics so that even though it's a rectangular light is a very square foot print so that is actually shown pretty well in our footprints that we measured at 18 24 36 inches above are five by five now this light is really more of like what i would say like up 4x4 for flower and a 4x5 for veg but when you look at it i mean i would say that the the overall intensity is is very much more like a square fashion versus some other lights we've tested kind of like some of the kind you know L 304 5600 or the units from lush lighting so even though it's a rectangle unit very square foot print that's pretty uniform and you are testing it came out 3.69 amps that basically 110 120 volts 406 watts at the wall and this unit is pretty powerful for that amount of watts at the wall you can compare to other units that we've also done this similar testing with so other than that because data should be linked below in our website if you want to comb through it a little bit more and this is Nate from GrowersHouse. Happy Growing!
California Lightworks - Solar System 550 Charts