iGrow 400 watt Induction Grow Light Review & PAR Test

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Video Transcript:



"Hey everyone, this is Nate with Growers House and today I have a very new light fixture on the hydroponic growing market. This is the iGrow Induction Light. Now this is iGrow's 400 watt unit, and this is going to be their flagship and it came out about 30 days ago. The numbers coming out of the research on this unit show that it could possibly be knocking out your 600 to 1000w HID fixtures, which means your High Pressure Sodium (HPS) and Metal Halide (MH). Although this fixture you'll operate about 6 inches above your canopy rather than a 1000w, which will be 18 to 24 inches above your canopy depending on what stage of growth you're in.



Some of the cool features about this induction light is that induction technology is relatively new, yet the blend of spectrum they have on this light is patented--there never has been an induction light like this one in terms of spectrum. The iGrow light I have here is the blooming spectrum, but that's just the bulb I have inside. With this induction light you can switch out the bulbs if you'd like. iGrow offers a vegetative bulb and a flowering bulb.







And another thing about these bulbs is that they're rated at 100,000 hour life--that's basically 10 years of growing. Imagine buying one bulb for 10 years of growing. As long as it does work for 10 years, that's very cost effective. With iGrow's fixture, you don't necessarily have to buy another fixture, you can switch these bulbs out and snap the vegetative bulb in if you wanted to change your cycle up.



This fixture and bulb from iGrow both come with a 5 year warranty on both parts. This light is said to cover about a 4' x 4' area. Considering the light is about 4' long, 27" wide, the way the reflector is built, we put it over a 4' x 4' canopy and it does cover it pretty well.



You'll also notice there's white paint in here, and I asked iGrow about that. Why not go with a metalized or pebbled aluminum. They said that they worked in concert with Sherman Williams to come up with a 94% reflective white paint that is proprietary. I said you know what, this might work as well as the pebbled aluminum we have in our traditional reflectors.



Another thing about this unit is induction lights, although they do have a ballast, they can turn on and off immediately. There's no warm up period. It's on or it's off. You can turn it on and off as many times as want and it doesn't reduce the life of the bulb and it doesn't have any negative effects from how long you have it on, or how much you turn it on or off.



There's actually a button on the backside, and I'll actually turn on the light here for a second so you can see what the blooming spectrum bulb looks like. Here it goes turning on. You'll notice it's a little of a yellowish, orange, peachy color coming off of this bulb. Right now this is operating 400 watts, full capacity, and you'll notice one thing, can you hear anything? .... Cricked sounds, that's about it. So this iGrow fixture is quiet. Very very quiet. You won't hear any sound coming off of this unit, which is a pretty convenient feature.



Another thing I want to mention is that before this light came out they were doing about 3 years of research in conjunction with a few state universities in testing this light against 600w HPS and 1000w HPS and taking PAR measurements making sure plants grew better under this light than traditional HID lights. That has spurred people, even before it was offered to us end users, to start commercial greenhouses with these units. I've seen greenhouses with 80+ units of these already where they switched out their traditional HPS because they found this would be better savings on energy and increased plant production.



More test like that coming out should also help develop induction lighting as a primary lighting source in the hydroponic industry. Let me turn this light off, flip it over, and show you a couple more features.



A couple more features of this light is that it's pretty flat. This light can be put right up against your ceiling if you want, although you do want to keep it close to your canopy if it's going to be your primary light. From the base of the of the light to the top of this piece, which is actually the ballast for this unit, is 7.5".



Now these brackets here come with the light, although they can be taken off so that you can hang the light in whichever way you'd like to hang it. Also notice they're adjustable so you can move these brackets for people who may want to hang them directly from the ceiling as supplemental light, or move these and hang the iGrow directly on a vertical wall so they can shine it in a horizontal fashion or even angle it a certain way, which is a pretty cool feature.



Like I was mentioning earlier, this light is only 400 watts. The lumen output on this is 44,600, which doesn't sound like a lot compared to say your 1000w HPS, which usually is about 140,000-150,000 lumens. The thing is with a 1000w, you have to keep it pretty far above your canopy, so by the time if actually reaches your plants the light intensity is not as strong as it is right next to the bulb. With this fixture at 6" above your plants is supposedly as intense as a 1000w 24" above your plants.



What we want to do is put this under a PAR meter because the spectrum this gives off is supposedly very dialed-in. So we want to see this light 6" above our light over a 4' x 4', and we'll compare that to a 1000w and see if this light is truly as good as they say it is. So let's hook this up on our rig get the PAR meter out and test this guy.



So here are the PAR tests we ended up running and iGrow was right, their light about 6" above the canopy is equivalent to about a 1000w 20" above the canopy from other PAR tests that we've actually done with HID lights.



Another interesting thing is that if you look across the center horizontal readings, the intensity really barely drops off--this is a pretty consistent light in intensity, but you'll notice a little bit less so if you look down the vertical center. Although these are really even footprints for grow lights and this light looks very promising.



Another thing to note is that this light is 90% efficient after 70,000 hours, which is about 7-8 years of vegetative growth time or almost 15 years of flowering time. Your normal HID bulb (HPS or MH) degrades more than that in 6 months. The value of this light is pretty ridiculous if you plan on using this in the long term. So we look forward to corroborating those, but they look like some pretty promising specifications for this light."



Cool iGrow Links:



1. iGrow Cost Calulator (Help you figure out if you'll save money)



2. Chef's Garden 700 iGrow light grow



PAR Test Infographic:




iGrow 400w Bloom PAR Test Infographic