That's the kicker. Closer to 25c here for power, or a lot more if you have a smart meter during peak hours. I assume these things run 24/7?
And if you are a professional (or serious) grower running 24/7, you don't want to be buying Alibaba or Ebay crap.
Quality costs money, and I'd be very surprised if the pro model lights aren't the same price point as Doug's.
Prepare to be very surprised
There are dozens of high-quality grow light manufacturers using top-shelf LED's and with established name brands. Companies like Advanced LED, ProMax, Chill, California LED, Transcend and many others. The price point is around $2-4 per watt for high end lights like these, with most of them clustered around the $2-3 range. These are made-in-USA products using Osram or Cree LED's from major companies with lots of data to back up their performance and multi-year warranties.
The Plantilium light is $3.60/watt if you buy in at the KS price, which is 36% off, meaning an $850USD retail price, or over $5.60/watt. Osram themselves sell grow lights using their LED's and you can buy a 17W Osram PAR lamp bulb on Amazon for $40 with free shipping - so the Osram-made lights are cheaper than the special KS price of this one. Compare also to California LED (just one I picked from the above list). Their 880W lights are $1750, $1.99/watt and free shipping @ Amazon and a 3-year warranty. Why would a customer pay double (and that's the introductory price) for an untested product from a new company and wait weeks/months to get it?
They talk about the LED spectrum, but every company is using custom blends of LED colors and touting their output spectrums, so this is nothing different. Some are actually offering tunable spectrums to let you choose the light output over the life cycle of the plans (for grow vs. blooming).
They talk about the silent aspect of the light. IMO, this is an irrelevant point. The light is oriented towards commercial growers, so fan noise isn't an issue. Furthermore, an actively cooled light will almost always run cooler than a passively cooled one, and temperature is the enemy of electronics, so I think most buyers would rather have a fan and have the whole unit run cooler.
Next issue is that this is a "spotlight" with a circular beam pattern. Nobody grows in a circle, which means you need more lights to cover your square grow area, and you will have alot of wasted light spilling over the sides. There's a reason most all other grow lights are rectangular.
They tout a 100k lifespan, but no way will the driver last that long. Sylvania rates their drivers at 15k hours. I think any commercial organization is going to know the 100k ratings are bogus LED ratings and, IMO, it detracts from the honesty of the whole pitch.
They talk about their light being scalable. Scalable how? Because you can just buy multiple units? How is that different than any other light on the market? How is it a feature? There are lights that can be connected together to make them easy to control. That is a scalable feature. Calling this thing scalable is dishonest.
They compare light output vs HID lights. The HID ship sailed long ago... that was a good marketing angle 10 years ago maybe, but nowadays, everyone knows about LED. The question is not why should someone buy this over HID, but why should they choose this unit over the countless other products on the market.
They tout the compact design. What relevance does that have in a commercial environment?
It probably seems like I am trying to shit on the product and the effort. But I am not. I have done some designs of grow lights for customers, and I've been asked many times to do others (which I turn down because it's always people who think they should be able to make a super high quality grow light for 10% of what the others sell for). I am close friends with a few people who work managing some of the largest pot growing outfits in the southwest USA (where it's legal). I know how expensive these things are to design and manufacture, so I understand why the price is high. The problem is that the biggest single line item cost is the LED's. The housing often winds up being a close second. These are two parts that you don't get substantial savings on until your volume goes way up. Which means a new seller will never be able to compete with the established guys on price, because they are ordering Osram LED's 100 reels at a time and have rock bottom contractual pricing.
The points I listed above are why there are zero backers on IGG and only 2 backers on KS. There's no reason to buy this light.
My advice to Doug and his people (if they are reading this)... you need to dramatically re-think your feature list and your sales pitch. Your target market is commercial growers. The fan noise, 'scalability', compact size and plug-and-play nature of the light are irrelevant to them. They also know all about LED's, so there's no point in telling them why they're better than HID. You need to differentiate between the other LED offerings on the market. You should:
-Tout efficiency. I am not sure if you can be the most efficient provider, but if you can (or at least get close), then you can sell the customers on long term savings vs other LED makers
-Have a modular design. If you can make a light that is field-upgradable, people would be interested. Shouldn't be too hard to do. LED tech changes rapidly, so if your driver and LED engine and optics are modular, then you not only can sell based on your lights being repairable, but also being upgradable as more efficient drivers come out or new LED's come out.
-Have some kind of high-tech whiz-bang features for controllability. There are companies (I think Avago is one?) that make full spectrum light sensors. Some companies, Cypress Semi for one, have libraries for MCU's that interface with these sensors to evaluate the light output spectrum and offer real time control. Lights change over time. Different color LED's degrade differently. Being able to measure what's going on with the light at the output and either correcting it or at least being able to report back to the user would be a big feature, IMO. In addition, perhaps some plug-in sensors that can be spaced throughout the grow area and offer feedback to the unit so that it can increase/decrease output of the various emitters in that area to create uniform and spectrum-correct light across the grow area would be good. And/or features like temperature monitoring, failure monitoring and the ability to send notifications to a control system or maintenance tech when something goes south. I know the commercial growers I know deal with this.. they have tens of thousands of plants being grown and many hundreds of lights and every day, something goes wrong and it can be hard to monitor it all.
I type fast but this post still took 10 minutes.. Take it for what it's worth. But as designed and manufactured and advertised, this light isn't going to sell.
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