Heliospectra LED L4A Grow Light Review & Unboxing Test
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Video Transcript:
"Hey everyone, Nate from Growers House (growershouse.com) here, and today we're showing off a really, really expensive LED light. This light (Radiant L4A) resells for $7,500 MSRP, and that's because this is a research LED light made by Heliospectra, which is a Swedish company. Their [Heliospectra] making a light for the more average user, which is going to be quite a bit less--they're shooting for 1/3 to 1/4 of the price of this light--to introduce to the indoor growing market.
We got this LED from them, which is a 600w unit, and covers about a 4' x 4' area. And one of the coolest things about this light is that it can actually be connected via an ethernet cable or wirelessly to your computer where you can actually manipulate the software of the lamp that controls the LEDs including the time that they're on, the spectrum, and their intensities.
So this unit, as you can see here, does have four distinct panels along with built-in fans and some venting on each side. Now this LED light is what I'd call the flagship model from Heliospectra/Radiant. A lot of the technology in this light including all the software is going to be used in the light they're going to make for the indoor growing market, which they're in beta test right now, and they plan to have out around the beginning of 2014.
I wanted to show you a lot of the cool technology in this light, which will end up coming into the new model that Heliospectra will be making under the brand name Radiant LED, which you can see here. So why don't we jump into me turning this light on, messing around with some of the software, and showing you some cool tricks.
Now here's the Radiant logo, and here are some pictures of the unit including the side, the front, the back, which has the ethernet cord and power cord. Here's a closer picture of it, the panels and the fans. These are some small axial fans, and here's a close up of one of the boards including the chips. And this information we also have on our website which is the umoles and light spectrum.
So let's jump into using the software for this light. I'll open the application, which I easily downloaded to my computer. And what I do with this application is scan for what lamps are available on my network, which this light is hooked up dynamically right now so it will automatically locate it. Boom--I open up the software. Now it shows me the schedule, which is running, that means the light is hooked up and ready to go.
You see how I just clicked the description--each little section of the software, you can hit show or hide description and it will show you essentially what each parameter will be doing, and if it needs any further explanation, which you can show and hide.
There's some cool stuff, like temperature of each one of the panels here, and showing you know the description of the panels. And here's the status of all the LEDs, and you can see the different nanometers, which stands for color wavelengths that are built into the light. This light has seven and they're all at intensity of zero. That intensity of zero is out of 1000, which would be full intensity.
Now if I show you the description of the tags this really shows you that you can tag each light, say you hook up multiple lights via the software, to be whether it's your Veg light or Flower light. You can also associate a value with it so that you can end up controlling your light via a name and/or value.
So here's the coolest part, where you control the intensities. Now you can use these quick buttons down here and set all intensities to zero or 1000. Add them to schedule, and I'm hitting "real time" where I can actually turn the light on in real time with this "real time update" button. And I'll be playing around with some of these spectrums here, like right now I'm in the 400 nanometers range, so we're talking about more of the blues.
I'm just entering the value of 1000 so you can see each one of these spectrums at full intensity. I'll work my way through each one so you can see what they all look like. You may also notice that some of these color-wavelengths have more LEDs associated with them, and that's usually because they are a more important LED as Heliospectra has designed this light so that essentially the spectrum is put out with the most intensity in the spectrums that make your plant grow fastest and most productively.
Another cool thing I want to show you are these little arrows above. If you hit the middle one you'll go up by 10, the top one up by 100, the one at the very bottom and you'll go up by 1. So we're talking you can adjust this light on the fly very quickly and you can be very, very precise with each one of these spectrums. One other cool think I really want to show you, and you know, I can mess around with these spectrums here in real time, and if I hit "lock ratio" and I start moving them around it actually keeps the ratio's that I had set. You'll notice that this is more red dominant, higher in the wavelength to the right than the left, and I locked the ration and brought it down.
Moving onto the next, I'm going to get rid of some of these here. This is your scheduling for the light. This is going to tell your light when to go on, and at what intensities. This system runs off a 24 hour clock, so 21 really means 9pm in the US. What I want to do is, say at 1am I want to turn all lights onto full intensity. So I just did that. And now I added that to the schedule below in green. The black part is where I can start setting my schedule and then adding it.
So let's say I'm running a flower schedule, and around noon I want the lights to slowly decrease in intensity, so I put them at 800--add that to the schedule. Let's say at around 1pm I wanted to decrease to about 400 or 40% intensity. And then, let's say at 14, which would be 2pm I'll have them go down to 200 or 20% intensity. At 15 which will be 3pm I'll bring everything to zero. So maybe this will better recreate the Sun going down at night versus just having your lights go on or off. And of course, if I wanted to I could just adjust the spectrum on each one of these different nanometers or color wavelength spectrums.
So let me go over to the configuration tab here and show you what else we have. You can set the time of your clock in case it's not right, that's pretty standard. For some of you a little more knowledgeable about computers there's some info about custom or default NTP's. For the Master/Slave, this is cool because although right now it's independent, you can have a master, which would be one light to control them all, or a slave that can be following the master or you can have them all be independent.
Let's jump over to some other things really fast, like in this....one thing I want to show you is the information tab that can show you everything that's going on in your lights. Let me mess around....I'll just do a couple random things. This spectrum won't be that intense, so maybe a veg spectrum for something like clones.
So if you come over here you can see what he panels are at in celcius. And then you can see that the nanometers are gone and just the intensity of the other spectrums. So, that's about it. That's the whole software. It's pretty awesome--you can control the light really well with this.
Keep your eyes peeled for this lamp coming out. We're going to be constantly updating our website with information about it, the development of it, how it's going to be setup, the spectrums that are going to be available. If you're interested in this, subscribe to our YouTube channel and like us on Facebook and check out our website and our blog where we post videos like this. This is Nate from GrowersHouse. Have a good one."