What does the advancement in cars teach us about grow lights?

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a long-time “gear head”. I have worked on cars all my life. Yesterday, I was thinking about our PXL grow light wondering how I could explain the science and theory behind it. Then, I thought of a similarity between the history of grow lights and automobiles.

Automobiles:
From World War II until about 1970 auto manufacturers were competing by making cars with bigger engines and carburetors for more power. Dealers had a slogan “win on Sunday, sell on Monday”, so began the start of stock car racing. Back in those days gasoline was cheap, so people didn’t really care about MPG. All the American manufacturers made “Muscle Cars”.
Then, starting in the early 1970’s, gas prices started going up because of gas shortages, and the public started importing and buying foreign cars because of fuel economy and the American auto manufacturers follow suit by making smaller cars with smaller engines. People didn’t care for this since they were used to powerful cars, Corvettes need to go fast. So, around 1990, with the advent of computers in cars, the invention of high-pressure fuel injection was implemented to make the engines more efficient making cars go faster, increasing the MPG. The whole key to the problem was making the engines more efficient.

Grow Lights:
When growers with greenhouses and grow houses started supplementing sunlight with artificial lighting, they always wanted to have more light to produce bigger and more crops. They went from incandescent light bulbs (100W) to fluorescent light bulbs (40W) to be more efficient. Then they wanted more light, so they went to 600W and 1,000W HPS and HID fixtures which are still used by many. When Light Emitting Diodes (LEDS) became practical the manufacturers started making panels to compete, but they still consume 600W to 1,500W to compete with the HPS lights. Just like cars, it takes more energy (gas / electricity) to make the plants grow faster and produce more yield. Just like the “gas crunch” of the 1970’s, in the 2020’s we are experiencing a worldwide “electricity crunch” for growers.

Looking at the history of the automobile and applying that to grow lights, what have we learned? The cars had to make the engines more efficient to be acceptable and affordable to operate. In comparison, even though LEDs are becoming more efficient, they still are “electricity guzzlers” both for what they use and cooling systems to remediate the heat they put out. The solution to these “electricity guzzlers” is to use a low-wattage light that makes the plants more efficient to accept light.

Our Firefly-One PXL lighting systems does just that: a 29W strobe light will “open up” the plant through the hormesis process by providing from UV-A and UV-B light, the complete visible range, and most important, the IR range (800nm to 1,200nm) to promote the hormesis process as a signaling device. The strobe light flashes light in microdoses of 150 microseconds at a rate of 80 times a minute producing an instantaneous burst of full-spectrum light. This combination of low wattage, very low heat, with an intense microdose pulse makes the plant itself more efficient producing more yield at a faster rate. This is why we say the Firefly-One line of fixtures is the next generation of grow lights that solves a growing problem.

I hope this helps in understanding our theory.

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