Heliospectra LX601C LED Grow Light Review & Unboxing PAR Test

Hey everyone, Nate with Grower's House here and today I have the new Heliospectra 601C LED grow light. Now this thing is probably one of the most technologically advanced grow lights available, and it's really designed for the person who wants to make their grow room basically a scientific growing lab environment. In that way I mean you can design the spectrum of this light so that it can be anything that you want.



Essentially it has four different types of diodes that are built into the light. It comes with a CAT5 Ethernet cable which you plug into your computer and control all of the spectral makeup that comes out of this light. Which I actually don't really know any other lights that does that. There are a few other LED's out like href="/california-light-works">California Lightworks, Kind LED, and LumiGrow that have different dials and modes for a veg and a bloom, and you can change it up, but this light in particular allows you to change the intensity with a crazy degree of accuracy. I know that the University of Arizona is using this light in some of their greenhouses and doing some testing with it.



I wanted to show this to you guys because this 600W lamp is pretty cool for a number of reasons: 1) its tiny, it's like the size of a shoe box. This is the unit compared to me, it's tiny. You can see here all of the diodes compacted into this small area.



Heliospectra makes two different kinds of units, the 601 and the 602. The 601 model is designed more for indoor growing as a primary light source. It covers about a 4 by 4 foot space and you hang it up approximately 18 inches above your canopy. Heliospectra also has the 602 which is made for more supplementary lighting or greenhouse lighting and one you hang up about 6 feet above your canopy and it covers a larger area as well, about 6 feet by 6 feet in that respect.



So what I wanted to do was show you this unit and show you some of the cool features. And I actually wanted to plug it in to my lap top and show you guys exactly what the software does.



But before we jump into that I want to show you a couple more things about this light because you guys probably already noticed there are these duct couplers on them. This is actually an air cooled LED light and the cool thing is its air cooled out of the box you don't have to hook it up to any ducting. It actually has, which it will be kind of hard for you to see over here, there's a fan built into the unit. So you turn the unit on this fan will exhaust the heat out from the heat sink in the LED and exhaust it into whatever space is there. But if you hook ducting up to it then it can actually take that heat and exhaust it out of the room.



I spoke with Heliospectra about designing this light, they said they were really focusing on bringing as much light with as little heat into a growing environment as possible. A lot of commercial growers influenced the design of this light. They wanted something where none of the heat stays in the growing environment, but you get all the benefits of being able to precisely dial in a spectrum. Let's say that you have plants that are one strain versus another that are very similar and you want to design a spectral regiment for the plant that is going to be most optimal. Well you could set up different rooms with different spectral regiments and see what characteristics you could get out of the plants by growing with different spectral make-ups.



Many boutique growers focus on growing the highest quality plant they possibly can and the Heliospectra 601 LED light, I think will be a powerful option for people who are really looking to design a growing environment that is as consistent, scientific and replicable for what they what to do in the future. Another cool feature about this LED light is that you could control this from your smartphone. You can be 1,000 miles away and change the lighting spectrum of your light or you could change the light cycle. It's like, Oh yeah it's time to flower but I'm a thousand miles away turn it from 18/6 to 12/12 I can just use my smartphone to switch my timing over, and that is a pretty amazing feature.



So let's jump on a computer and then I'm going to show you how the software functions and then I'll show you some of the PAR readings we got off of this guy on our spectral radiometer.



So let's jump into using the software for this light.



I'll open the application which is downloaded onto my computer. Then, with this application, I scan for what lamps are available on my network. This light is hooked up dynamically right now so it'll automatically locate it and Boom I opened up the software control panel for this light.



This first screen shows me the schedule which is running which means the light is hooked up and is ready to go, the status is okay. Now you see how I just hit the description each little section of the software you can click show or hide description and it'll show you essentially what each parameter will be doing and if it needs any other further explanation, which you can show and hide.



And there's some cool stuff like the temperature of each one of the panels, and the status of the panels. And here is the status of each of the LEDs you can see the different nanometers (which stands for the color wavelengths) that are built into the light. This light now shows seven and they're all intensity of zero, that intensity of zero is out of a thousand which would be full intensity.



Now if I show you the description of the tags this really this explains that you can tag each light let's say you hook up multiple lights via the software to be the veg light whether it's your flower light and you can associate a value with it. You can end up controlling you light via a name and a value. Here's the coolest part, where you control the intensities. Now you can use these quick buttons down here set all intensities to zero, a thousand add them to schedule, and I'm hitting set now where I can actually turn the light on in real time with this real time update button. I'll be playing around with some of these different spectrums here, like right now I'm in the 400 nanometers range so we're talking about more of the blues. And I'm just entering in the value of one thousand so you can see each one of these spectrum at full intensity. So I'll work my way through each one so you can see what they look like. You'll also notice that some of these color wavelengths have more LEDs associated with them, and that is usually because they are a more important LED as Heliospectra has designed this light so that essentially that the spectrum put out with the most intensity in will make your plants grow the fastest and most productively.



So another cool thing I wanted to show you are these little tiny arrows above if you hit the middle one you'll go up by 10, top one up by one hundred, the very bottom one you'll go up by one. So were talking you can adjust this light on the fly really quickly and you can be very very precise with the intensity of each one of these spectrums.



One other cool thing I really want to show you is you can mess around with these spectrums here and you can see them in real time, and if I hit lock ratio and I start moving them around it actually keeps the ratio that I had set, so you'll notice that this one is more red dominant, higher in the wavelength to the right than the left and I locked the ratio and brought it down.



On the scheduling screen, you can tell your light when to go on and at what intensity. If you see that clock in the top right, this system runs on a twenty-four-hour clock so twenty one really means 9 pm in the US. And what I want to do let's say at 1 am I want to turn all the lights on complete intensity. So I just did that, and now I have that added back to the schedule below which is in green, the black part is where I can start setting my schedule and adding it. So let's say I'm running a flowering schedule and around noon I want the lights to slowly decrease in intensity. I put them at 800, add that to the schedule. And let's say at around 1 pm I want them to decrease to 400 intensity or about 40%. And then let's say at 14 which will be 2 pm I'll have them go down to 200 which is 20% intensity. And then at 15 or 3 pm I'll bring everything to zero. So maybe this will actually better recreate the sun going down at night versus just having your lights go on and off. And of course if I wanted to I could adjust the spectrum on each one of these nanometer ranges or wavelength spectrum as well as the intensity for each time setting.



The spectrum for the Heliospectra LX601C which is probably going to be what makes this the most popular light for indoor growers. This spectrum can take you all the way from when your plants are first sprouting as seedlings or clones or going all the way through harvest. You can see that the spectrum is a little bit more red dominant and that's where more intensity lies and then there is also some good intensity in the far reds and in the blues of course.







So the spectrum that you are looking at now is at full intensity 100% on all the LEDS. Now when we put this under our spectrometer we noticed that the light actually has a really even footprint. Most LEDs direct the light down pretty intensely over the center and then it wanes pretty quickly as you go to the 1 by 1 3 by 3 and especially the 4 by 4. But we noticed that compared to most LEDs we've had the ratio of what the intensity is at the center versus what you have at the perimeter is actually pretty good.



If you take a look at some of the other lights we've tested especially LEDs they don't have quite as even of coverage as this light does, and I guess that's because of the optics in this light which distribute the intensity over the desired grow area 4 by 4. On our PAR chart below, you can see the intensities measured with the light over the different heights at 12,18 and 24 inches, you can use these readings to hang your light at the height that you think is going to be best for your specific grow room environment.







Some closing thoughts: I think this light is a pretty big game changer in our industry, I think it shows our industry is really growing up and getting more advanced. A light like this with 600 watts of LED photosynthetic energy light energy and have all of your heat exhausted out of your room is totally novel. I don't know of any other LED that has this right now. I think other manufacturers will soon follow. But right now this might be one of best ways really to get the exact desired light energy down to your plants and have no heat in your room.



So that's it for our test of the Heliospectra, this is Nate from GrowersHouse, have a good one.