Hortilux SE Ceramic HPS 600w Grow Light Test & Unboxing Review

So the Hortilux SE Ceramic HPS 600w Grow Light is a 600 watt lamp and they built a specialty fixture and ballast to go along with it. You can buy this lamp separately, but it is recommended that you buy it with the fixture because the fixture was specially designed; Not only the reflector but in particular the ballast to effectively run this lamp to its optimal performance.

So one of the most interesting things about this is Ceramic Metal Halide has been taking off, I mean we probably sell more ceramic metal halide fixtures than any other fixture, LED, HPS, or anything. So at this point, a lot of people are just having issues taking those 315 watt lamps and penetrating through the canopy as far as they might want to go, as they are used to, with maybe a 1000 watt double ended or 600 watt normal HPS and this helps combat that.

The Hortilux SE Ceramic HPS 600w Grow Light gives you that amazing spectrum that ceramics give you along with the intensity of the high pressure sodium 600 watt. So what I want do is turn it on and kind of show you guys the spectrum and what to expect out of this thing because it's able to actually put out a much wider spectrum than a normal 600 watt HPS lamp and it encompasses a lot of the reds and it looks almost white to the eye, but you also still get a lot of blues in it.

I mean you can end up using this lamp all the way through your growing operation from veg through flower, although it is a 2500K lamp which for those of you who know the Kelvin scale and spectrum color it is more of a flowering lamp. I want to show you what the spectrum looks like as we turn this thing on and compare it to what a traditional HPS would look like and your gonna see the huge difference on that spectral graph. So let's take this lamp, throw it in the fixture and take a look at those spectral readings.

When looking at lumen output of the 600 watt ceramic HPS versus a traditional 600 watt HPS you will notice a dramatic difference. The lumen difference between the two lamps is very misleading because the majority of the light energy produced by a traditional 600 watt HPS is focused in the area of the spectrum that is most sensitive to human eyesight. The 600 watt ceramic HPS rather produces the same amount of total overall light energy as the traditional 600 watt HPS, but it is spread over a broader range of the spectrum that does not get measured by a lumen meter. The actual total amount of energy, Total Radiant Energy, measured between 350 to 800 nanometers produced by the ceramic HPS is slightly higher than traditional HPS at 275 watts for the ceramic HPS versus 261 watts for the traditional HPS.

In this spectral overlay, you can see how the focus of light energy has been shifted to the red portion of the spectrum. Now keep in mind the lumens may be lower with the ceramic HPS but the total amount of light energy across the entire spectrum is roughly the same as the super HPS if not slightly higher. Also for those of you watching note that the spectral chart above is not normalized rather it's just showing the intensity of watts per nanometer. In conclusion, overall the ceramic HPS will provide plants with slightly more Total Radiant Energy than a traditional 600 watt HPS. Just really make sure you don't pay attention to the lumens as they are a bad indicator.

So here's the actual physical fixture itself, which I wanted to go over, as far as the size I mean it's kind of more like the complete fixtures that you might be familiar with like Gavita for example, or a Nanolux, or an Agrolux and as far as size though it's 12.7 inches wide, 23.6 inches long, and its height right here is about 7.1 inches. So, not too high, although there are these hanging instruments that you can use that might add a few inches depending on how you hang it.

So that said, I mean this fixture weights we're looking at about just over 20 pounds. I think it's about 23 or 26 pounds if I remember correctly. The way you want to hang this thing is, really it's made for a four by four foot area and it's made to hang about three feet above the canopy. That's the recommendation, but of course if your vegging versus flowering you might want to change that up a little bit, I would say like, you know young plants into veg I would probably be hanging this thing closer to about four feet, maybe even slightly higher and then going into flower probably closer to three feet, you might even be able to drop a little bit lower than that towards the end of flowering as the plants get used to it.

Lastly I really just wanted to thank Hortilux for sending this out, I bugged them quite a bit to get this fixture, I just really love ceramic metal halide lights, I love the way the plants produce under them, they are really always full and healthy, I just helped outfit a really large growing operation full of ceramics by my recommendation and design, I kind of wish this fixture was out so that I could have done a little side-by-side comparison to see which one I like more but that aside there will be more grow operations in the future and I just wanna get this over some plants and you know hopefully maybe in some of your gardens. Other than that this is Nate from GrowersHouse, Happy Growing.