Greeting Fellow Dudes,
I’m curious to know if anyone is mixing HLG R-Spec & B-Spec 288 Boards on Same light/Driver? I have a few 320XL`s and am thinking about picking up some B-Spec boards to replace a few red boards on my lights. The 320XL`s have 3 boards, I was thinking red-blue-red for flower and blue-red-blue for veg. I’m thinking there’s got be some benefit in having a bit of blue in flower and mostly blue in veg. Please let me know if you’ve attempted this, how it went or why you didn’t. Anyone know if that’s safe to do on the same driver?
You need about 3% blue light to prevent issues with plant morphology such as plant height. Blue light also signals to the plant to produce antioxidants and other protective processes. Typically even the red spectrums still have enough blue in them to achieve this.
I have two different 2×4 flower spaces and one has a 3500k spectrum (240 watt) and the other 6000k (300 watt). The 3500k light although is less wattage consistently outperforms the 6000k light. I believe this is due to the increased amount of blue light in the 6000k spectrum.
Blue light is short wavelength and high energy. Blue light is less efficient at providing energy for photosynthesis which can limit your potential. Some blue is necessary, but I don’t know if I would add blue to the flower room if I had the option. You will be paying for a less efficient light technically. Using the Bspecs for veg is just fine, and maybe 1/3 in the flower space wouldn’t hurt either, but you would be leaving some potential energy off the table.
I imagine that using them on the same driver probably shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve never had direct experience with that to give you an answer with high certainty.
Thanks for you input, I have decided to not mix red/blue boards for the flower tent, leaving it all R-Spec boards. Save some money there, but I think I`m going to try straight blue boards for the veg tent. At some point I`ll have to try a side by side to see the growth differences in veg between a R-Spec tent and a B-Spec tent.
I contacted HLG via phone and e-mail, both said it was perfectly fine to mix the B-Spec & R-Spec boards on the driver I`m using (HLG-320H-C1750).
Yea I agree with Dr. Phill. Best to be in that 3500-4500 kelvin range for flower. Your basically sacrificing efficiency by putting that b-spec in the middle. If you wanted to add some blue, maybe go the uva route, with some supplemental bars. Like mentioned above you only need that 3% of blue, and with the rspec’s you already have it.
Pretty sure HLG has said not to do this. I don’t remember the exact details but I think they said the different boards have different resistances, so mixing them on the same driver is a no no.
Also the spectrums are already tuned for veg/bloom, so there probably won’t be any benefit to mixing them anyway.