Grow Lights Explained: LED vs HPS vs Fluorescent (with Elliott Gorfain)

Every grower asks the same three questions: LED or HPS, how many watts do I actually need, and which light gets me the biggest yield for the lowest power bill. In this episode James and Elliott Gorfain give you the 50,000-foot answer to all of it, from the light types to avoid to the LED features that are quietly changing commercial growing.

Elliott walks the whole lineup. Why the bulbs in your house cook a room and grow nothing. Why fluorescents got banned in California and Canada, and the one job they still do well. The HID family, HPS versus metal halide, and why red light flowers a plant while blue light keeps it short and bushy. Then the number that matters most: a 1,000W HPS and a 720W LED can put the same usable PAR on your canopy, but the HPS throws off roughly twice the heat, which means you pay for that energy once at the meter and again at the AC. That is the whole efficiency case for relighting, in one sentence.

From there it is all LED. The two fixture types and how high to hang each. What separates a commercial light from a hobbyist one. Why a 1,500W monster is useless unless your VPD, CO2 and feed are already dialed in. And the LED superpower no other light has: spectrum tuning, using UV to push potency and aroma, far-red for the Emerson effect and more yield, and channel control to simulate spring, summer and fall across a single cycle.

Then the part that pays for the whole upgrade: rebates. One customer got $60,000 of lights for around $15,000. Elliott explains why you never buy an LED before checking the rebate, what DLC and the QPL list mean, and why last year's rebate-ready light might not qualify this year.

Episode 5 of Growers MBA by Green Thumb Depot.

In this episode:

• Why household bulbs and fluorescents are the wrong tool, and the one case fluorescents still fit
• HPS vs metal halide, and why red light flowers while blue light vegs
• What PAR actually is, and why maximum PAR with minimum heat is the whole game
• The two kinds of HPS heat, and why radiative heat lands straight on your plants
• The real LED efficiency case: same usable light, roughly half the heat
• Single-ended vs double-ended HPS, and where each tops out
• How to size and hang bar lights vs high-power LEDs for veg and for flower
• Why a 1,500W LED is wasted unless VPD, CO2 and feed are in sync
• Spectrum tuning: UV for potency, far-red and the Emerson effect for yield, seasons on demand
• How growers get $60,000 of lights for around $15,000 with rebates, and what DLC and the QPL mean

Need help choosing? Green Thumb Depot can spec your lights, run the rebate paperwork with your power company, and dial in the dehumidification, CO2 and nutrients around them.

Shop and get a quote: https://greenthumbdepot.com

Subscribe for more commercial growing breakdowns with James and Elliott. New episodes every week.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, this video is for educational purposes only. Please do not break the law. Welcome back to another episode of the Growers MBAs podcast. Very excited to have Elliot here again. Today we're gonna talk about grow lights, and I don't really see much of a reason to have a bigger intro than that. So let's just hop right into it. Elliot, you know, there's a lot of questions people give us. How to select the right grow lights. What's the difference between this versus that? LED versus CMH, LED versus HPS. Questions we get on the daily. So I figured, great episode, let's answer it all right here. You know, we're gonna try to keep this about like 50,000 foot view. We'll save the super technical stuff for another episode. I know there's a lot of people out there who want to hear the super technical stuff, but this is gonna be more, you know, a little bit more beginner-friendly, but we're gonna have some nuggets in here for the DOCs that are listening as well. So yeah, we'll just jump right into it. I know, Elliot, let's just start off. Quick question. So, Elliot, why can't we use these lights that we have in here in my room? Why can't we use those to grow to grow cannabis?

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Well, essentially they're horribly inefficient. So they're gonna be generating a lot of heat and they're not the right spectrum, so you're gonna have potential plant nutrient deficiencies, certainly gonna be a lack of light. And if you used enough light bulb, incandescent light bulbs to produce enough light, it would there would be way too much heat. So they're just totally inappropriate. So, just a little bit about what is what is a normal light bulb, and it it's so this is like an incandescent light bulb. This has a filament in it and it's in a vacuum. You're pushing electricity through the tungsten, typically tungsten filament. And because there's no air, it doesn't combust, it doesn't burn. But you know, as you're pushing electrons through there, the the electrons will go to a higher orbital if you're getting technical, and when they drop back down to that lower orbital, they emit photons. And that's kind of like the basic principle for how all lights work, but how they generate that that that effect is what makes them different. So incandescent bulbs, not efficient, generate heat, don't have the right spectrum, they have a limited lifespan. Don't use them. Definitely don't use those lights.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Okay, so clearly the light bulbs I have in my house, very inefficient. Like you said, we'd probably need like you know, 500, 1000 of those running, and it would just make the grow room a complete hotbox. Probably impossible to grow anything substantial in there. Talking about the economies of scale wouldn't work. So that makes a lot of sense. Is there other types of lights that we're gonna want to avoid when it comes to growing cams?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Absolutely. So I'll I'll start with fluorescence. So fluorescence used to be used in in limited capacity, specifically for like clones, because they have that's a pretty soft, low-intensity light, and they do work well for that, but the problem is how they operate. So a fluorescent light, and and and just a little side note here it the only thing that's called a bulb is your incandescent bulbs. Everything else are called lamps because they don't have filaments. So just a little note on the nomenclature there. But the way a fluorescent lamp works is it's actually filled with mercury, and it's when you put electricity through it, the mercury vaporizes, it gets excited, and then it the electrons go to a higher orbital. When they jump back down to the lower orbital, they produce UV light. And that UV light then hits the inner wall of the fluorescent lamp or the fluorescent tube, and there is a fluorescent fluorophore that is painted onto the inside of that tube, and it will absorb the UV light and re-emit it in a certain wavelength, and it and the wavelength that re-emits it in is dependent upon the fluorophore used, and you can change the colors of fluorescent lights based on the fluorophore that you use. It's almost, it's essentially just like your old black light posters, you know, if you had Jimi Hendrix on the wall, right? You're using a UV light to stimulate that and it looks like it's glowing in the dark. Well, what you're doing is using UV light to stimulate fluorescent dyes, fluorescent molecules that then re-emit at different wavelengths. Now, the reason we don't use them anymore typically is because of that mercury vapor. So when these lamps break, they release mercury into the environment. And mercury is a neurotoxin and it's uh it's an environmental hazard. It has to be disposed of. Even if they don't break, you have to dispose of these spent lamps in a very you know careful way. So a lot of states like California, a handful of other states, Canada, they've pretty much outlawed fluorescent fixtures and at this point in time, so you can't get them. And they're just they're kind of a pain in the butt when it comes to when it comes to disposal and and for that safety hazard. I mean, you can imagine if you're if somehow mercury gets into your grow and it contaminates your nugs, and then you get, you know, you pop dirty on a test, that's no good. So yeah, so we don't really use those anymore, even though they work fairly well, especially for like clones. And certain fluorescent lamps can be tuned. You can tune them to specific wavelengths using the different fluorophores, so they'll produce a red light that you could use for augmentation or something like that. So they they have worked well in that in that instance, but now they've just been replaced with LEDs, which are much safer and much easier to deal with, don't have the hazardous waste thing, they don't break. So we generally don't use those anymore.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

And so it seems like is there ever really a scenario where someone would actually prefer to use the fluorescence versus LEDs?

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Yeah, I mean, like I said, they they they do work well for clones. So in certain states where you can still get them, some people are using them. There are some that are made specifically, like I mentioned, with the with the red fluorophores, so they'll generate a specific wavelength that you want. And yeah, we we we can still provide those to folks that are in the right states, and and they work well. They're just not what I would recommend since we have all of these LEDs now. But we do get people occasionally who do want to use these, and uh, and you know, we just sold sold some red ones, you know, last week or early this week, rather.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

All right, so I definitely we're gonna jump into LEDs. That's a huge topic, but I do want to kind of talk about a little bit of history here before we jump into those. So we had an episode last week, maybe two weeks ago, where you talked about kind of your history, where you got started. And I know you got you guys used to use HPS lights back in the day, which is like sodium, something or another, right? So before we jump into really getting into the nitty-gritty of LEDs, we do still have people who reach out to us about HPSs. You know, what's the story there? Why are why do they people kind of switch from HPSs to LEDs? And what's the benefit of LEDs over HPSs these days?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Yeah, absolutely. That's there's a lot to talk about there. So so first of all, let's let's just back it out just a little bit. So HPS is one type of uh HID light. So HID is high intensity discharge, and the the two types of grow lights that fall under that category are going to be your HPS, which are high pressure sodium, and your MH or metal halide lights. And the way that these work is they have an arc tube. So again, there's no filament, and there's a mixture of inert gases and different metallic salts in there that when you when you push an electric charge through that vacuum, or in the case of double-ended HPS, there's some inert gas in there. But essentially you're pushing an electrical arc through this vacuum and it stimulates the gases and the salts. And again, just kind of like in other ways that we discussed where it generates light, you're pushing these electrons and these compounds to higher energy levels, and then when they drop back down, they emit photons. Now, the color of or the wavelength of light or the color of the photons, depending on how you want to describe it, is determined by the compounds that are being excited. So in in a HPS light, right, we have sodium, high pressure sodium. There's also xenon and mercury in there. So you get some UV, you get some other wavelengths, and an HPS light is is a really nice spectrum for flowering. It creates so it in a flowering scenario, you you want more of red light, okay, versus vegetative, where you want more blue light. And in just the basic concept, blue light is gonna give you more bushy vegetative growth, and red light will cause some stretching, but it also stimulates flowering development. So if you were to use an HPS for vegetative, for instance, you're gonna end up getting very tall, lanky plants because during their vegetative cycle, they're getting too much red light. So now by the time you flower them, they're way too tall. The internodal spacing is far too great, meaning the distance between the nodes where the bud sites develop. So HPS lamps using HPS fixtures for flowering, they work great. They were used for many years, they're still being used because they do work effectively. But you know, they have they have great penetrated power, the spectrum is ideal for flowering, but they are inefficient and they generate a lot of heat. So a lot of that energy that you're paying for is being turned into heat rather than light that the plant can use. So typically, when we refer to light that the plant can use, we're talking about par. So par PAR is photosynthetically active radiation. Radiation meaning just photons, right? Not like, you know, nuclear radiation that can kill you or something, but it's all related. Anyway, so par is what you want because the plants can use it, and there are some wavelengths outside of the par spectrum that are also useful, like UV and you know, a little bit of a far red. But generally speaking, you want as much par light as you can and minimal heat. And so when it comes to HPS, there's two types of heat that we're we're talking about. First of all, there's convective heat, which is the heat that is typically generated like at the ballast, right? So this is heat where if you put your hand on the ballast, you're gonna feel it's really hot, right? That's convective heat. The other type of heat is radiative heat, right? And radiative heat is actually a form of light, it's infrared light. And the problem with HPS is they generate a lot of radiative heat. So they they generate the convective heat, but the radiative heat is is focused directly on those plants because it's a form of light. It's a form, it's a photon, it's a it's a wavelength of photons. So that heat gets directly transmitted to your plants. Whereas convective heat will rise off of the fixture, rise off of the ballast, and then can be dealt with away from the plant. But that radiative heat you can't get away from the plant. It's literally shining right on them. Kind of like when you're out in the sun and you feel the warmth of the sun, versus if you that's radiative heat, versus if you put your hand on a rock that's been in the sun, that's convective heat that you feel. So HPS lamps, they generate a lot of that radiative heat. They they also generate a decent amount of convective heat, and that inefficiency, you're paying for it. And not only are you paying for that heat, but then you have to pay for the AC to run to negate the effects of the heat, right? So you're paying for it twice. So you really want to avoid that. So in in recent years, there's been a huge shift towards LEDs for a number of reasons. One of them is the efficiency.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Okay, so really amazing information there. I'm curious. It seems like a home run why to just use LEDs. Like, why in the world would anyone still be using HPSs? You said earlier, some people are still using them. Seems like it's a clear move. Upgrade to LEDs ASAP, you'll get rebates most likely, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But you know, why why are some people still using HPSs?

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Yeah, I mean, uh one of the reasons to use HPSs, uh, HPS lamps, HPS fixtures, is they are typically a lower cost. You can get them pretty inexpensively now. The lamps themselves are are fairly inexpensive, but you do have to replace those lamps with some frequency. It's recommended maybe six months, nine months that you replace these. They'll start changing colors as they age, and you want to swap them before they do that. So it's kind of a lower initial expense to get HPSs, but then it's a higher long-term expense because you're replacing the lamps and you're spending a lot more on electricity. In certain areas, people might want to use HPS because they want the heat. So if you're you know up in North Dakota or Canada or something, you might actually want more heat because you would have to run a heater if you were running LEDs. So there are certain situations like that, but in general, most people are transitioning to LEDs for the efficiency. But we'll we'll touch on some of these other reasons as well when we when we talk about LEDs.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. That some of the colder climates would actually, I mean, a lot of this is just like it's a game of inches, right? And so that does make sense that a lot of these colder climate grows would probably prefer the HPSs because you're kind of killing tubers with one stone, not having to worry about in investing in a heater, you know? And earlier you mentioned double-ended HPS when you're talking there. So what exactly is that and how are those different?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah, so originally everything was single-ended. They the lamps would screw into the fixture kind of like a regular incandescent bulb. Double-ended fixtures, like the namesake, they have two ends and they they push into uh a double-ended fixture. You they are they have a slightly different composition. There's an inert gas instead of a vacuum in inside the lamp, so they can run hotter and they can be more efficient because of that. They, you know, an HPS, you typically wouldn't go higher. You know, they're like a thousand watts is the largest single-ended HPS bulb lamp. And a double end is they can go up, you can get them up to like 1100 or whatever, and they're just more efficient. There's a few different reasons for it. But generally speaking, if you're using HPS right now, you're probably using double-ended fixtures. Single-ended fixtures aren't really used much at all anymore.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Cool. And I think the last light I can't type of light I want to touch on before we move on, because I do just want to touch on all the different types, is metal halide lights. You know, what what the heck is that? And and and again, why would somebody choose metal halide over LED? You know, what are the benefits of it? Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yeah, so metal halides really aren't used much at all anymore. They're they're an HID high-intensity discharge lamp, like an HPS. The mixture is different, you know, there's a fair amount of different combinations of salts and and and whatnot in there to generate different spectrum. Typically, you know, scandium iodide or sodium iodide and whatnot. They're they're gonna be a blue light. So these are veg only. Like you don't want to use them in flour. You definitely would only use them in veg. But the problem is they have it's really the danger, right? So, so any HID light has a danger of exploding because the pressures involved, and they run very hot. So that if they do explode, they can ignite a whole grow on fire. Metal halides are actually much worse than HPS because of the pressures involved. And yeah, they're dangerous. And they're dangerous because of the explosion, fire hazard. They're also dangerous because they emit a lot of UV. So if you're working in that garden a lot, you're gonna be exposed to a lot of UV. You gotta wear protection, you know. And because of these reasons, also the lack, you know, lower efficiency, higher heat generation, you know, people generally don't use metal halides anymore. For a while, there was a trend for ceramic metal halides, which are a variant of that, but you know, that's kind of gone by the wayside too. You you really don't see too much CMH, that's a ceramic metal halide, or metal halides and grows at all. When they were being used, a lot of times people use like maybe a 600 watt for veg. But again, they've been replaced with with LEDs as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

So now we've kind of covered the big topics here. I'd like to just let's jump into LEDs. You know, LEDs are kind of the big guys here. There's a lot of questions we get all the time. There's a lot of questions I'm curious about. You know, one thing I wanted to ask is watts. Let's talk about watts. A lot of people come in, they're just like, I want the strongest thought, I want the highest watts possible. I know that's not always the best scenario, the best thing for them to buy for their grill. This is why you, it's always good for you to talk to them. But, you know, what what do people need to consider when it comes to watts? What do people need to consider with with this? You know, it's a big number, it's an important number people look for. But what why does it matter?

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Yeah, it's all about the watts. And you're paying for those watts. So the real question is, what are those watts doing for you? Um, and if you're using an inefficient system like an HPS fixture, um, you're losing about two-thirds approximately of your energy to unusable heat. Whereas if you're using a high-quality LED fixture, you might only be losing about 50% of that energy to unusable heat. Um, it might sound like a small difference, but it's actually quite a bit. So uh if you take, for instance, a 1000-watt HPS light, um that at you know about two-thirds efficiency, you're maybe producing somewhere around 350 watts of usable light. Whereas if you're using an LED system, you can actually reduce the amount of wattage off the bat to say a 720 watt light, and about 50% of that is lost due to heat. So you're generating about the same amount of useful light for your plants, about 350 watts of useful light. So even though the difference in the amount of efficiency, the amount of heat that's generated is you know 50% versus 65 or 70% with an HPS, because you can use a lot less watts to achieve the same amount of useful PAR output to your plants, it actually means that to generate that same amount of PAR, you're generating about twice as much heat with an HPS lamp versus an LED fixture. Now, there's a lot of differences in in LED. So, you know, just from a basic principle of like how it operates, it's it's still getting electrons to go to a you know a higher state and then release energy. It's a different way that it works. I'm not gonna get into it, it's really complicated. But it's basically they're more like semiconductors moving electrons around rather than exciting them to a higher orbital with around an atom. I won't go any further. But they're very efficient, they're very safe, you're not gonna have to worry about starting fires with them. And you know, the the one thing about LEDs that is kind of a can be a drawback is that, well, let me put it this way: there's two different types of LEDs. One of the the majority of LEDs they're using commercial grows are gonna be these LEDs that you typically see that have bars of LEDs, and these ones are typically, most of them, not all of them, are kept very low above the canopy because LEDs are not emitting light that has really good penetrative power. They it it doesn't penetrate as much, so you've got to keep them lower than your standard HPS. You know, on the other hand, there are LEDs that are designed to be much more powerful, and you can keep them up higher, like where an HPS would normally be. And and in that case, you know, you would get a similar waters to the HPS. So you could have a thousand watt uh LED replacing a thousand watt HPS you know high above your canopy, but it has enough energy that it will penetrate down. Those are a little bit less common, but the nice thing about those LEDs is that you can just swap them out exactly as you would with an HPS. So if you're relighting, which is a term used about you know to describe going from HPS to LEDs, you don't have to reconsider everything and how you're gonna hang your lights. You just take the HPS down, you put one of these LEDs in, and they work great. And you don't have to worry about keeping those bar lights right above your canopy as the the plants grow and get higher. So they're a little bit easier to work with, but there's loss of efficiency because they're further away from the plant. So it's it's kind of a preference there.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

And generally, one question we get all the time, we get hobbyists calling us constantly hey, you know, what type of watts do I need? You know, whatever. So generally, you know, I know it's not a hard set rule, but generally, commercial light versus a home grower light, what what what's kind of separates these? You know, if someone's just trying to grow in their closet, in their whatever, versus a commercial grower who's trying to buy a bunch of them. What are the big differences that people are gonna see between these two?

SPEAKER_01 20:29

Yeah, well, if you're a hobbyist grower in a tent, your lights are gonna be typically pretty close to your canopy because you have limited space. It's not gonna be a 16-foot ceiling in a warehouse, right? So you're gonna be using bar lighting, you're gonna have it closer to the canopy. But keep in mind a lot of commercial grows are also set up that way, especially if you're using tiered racks. So it's it's not that one is good for one and one good for the other. It's kind of how you're how you're doing it. But you know, I would say, so like for veg, vegetative phase, using like a 300 to 400 watt full spectrum light for vegetative, keeping that bar light low, you know, within you know, typically 12 to 16 inches above the canopy, that works really well. And then when you go into flower, if you're in a tent, you know, maybe using a 720-watt bar light, again, keeping it low, you know, 12 to 16 inches above the canopy. You know, and and you can you can do it differently too. Like you can use the distance between the light and the canopy, you can adjust that to keep it right, or you can use a dimmer to also adjust the intensity, or you can use a combination of that. It kind of depends on how your setup is and and whether or not you want to be able to get in there more easily or not. But that's pretty good for a tent, you know, a home grow. For a commercial grow, you're essentially doing the same thing unless you really have those high ceilings. And and you want to use a more powerful light. But there are LEDs that go up to 1500 watts and they're extremely powerful. You're going to keep those higher, you know, you're not going to have those 12 inches above your canopy. I mean, you could, but you'd have to dim them. So what's the point, right? But if you're going to go up to let's say 1500 watts with an LED, very powerful, you've got to have everything else dialed in, or you're just going to have to dim those lights because the plants won't be able to make use of all that energy. So when I say everything, I mean you're going to want your temperature, your humidity, which is essentially your VPD, which we talked about last week, right? Vapor pressure deficit. You have to have that dialed in. You have to have CO2 augmentation to hypercharge the metabolism of the plants, and you have to feed them a lot more because everything has to be in sync. You can't do one without the other. It's like if you're going to go train for a to be a triathlete, you've got to eat a lot of calories in order to do all that crazy training. If you do all that crazy training and you're not eating, you're going to just die. You're going to wither away and turn into a skeleton. So you you have to have everything has to be synchronized to make use of that wattage. And we can help with that.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

So is there anything else that people should know about LEDs versus other types of lights, you know, other benefits that come with using LEDs?

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yeah, absolutely. So there's some there's one very unique thing that you can do with LEDs that you simply cannot do with other lights, and that is spectrum tunability. So, you know, other lights, other lamps, they're they're created, they do a certain wavelength. You can make different ball different lamps for different wavelengths, and you could tune the lamps themselves. But once you make them, that's it. That's the spectrum that they're going to emit, which can change a bit over time, but it's designed to be a certain spectrum. With LEDs nowadays, the higher end LEDs, you can, there's a lot of different, so LED stands for light emitting diode. So those are the little things, the little chips on these lights that emit the these pictures that emit the light. And on a good full spectrum LED, they have all different types of diodes that will emit light in different wavelengths. So you can have blue light for vegetative growth, green light for penetration of the canopy, red light for flowering. You can also have UV light to stimulate the immune response, you know, a stress response that triggers an increased synthesis of cannabinoids and terpenes, which we all want more cannabinoids and terpenes in our flower. You can do certain combinations of far red and deep red in order to stimulate the Emerson effect, which gets both of the photosystems of the plants working at the same time, so they're much more efficient and you get more yield. So there's all sorts of fun stuff that you can do. So they can put all of these different diodes in there, but then they can put them on different controllable channels. So as you go through the growth phases of the of the plant, you can turn on and off different channels, which is called spectrum tuning, to stimulate certain effects, whether you're in veg or whether you're in flour, different phases of growth, like essentially the different seasons as you're as you're doing these synthetic seasons in your grow. And you can even tune them to emit different wavelengths at different times of the day. And so ultimately what we're trying to do in a controlled environmental agriculture grow, a CEA grow, is we're trying to simulate nature. So we want spring-like conditions in the early vegetative phase, and then going through summer conditions and then autumn and fall conditions towards the end of flower. And by simulating these seasons, it tells the plant what it's supposed to be doing, you know, and and we do those through spectrum, we also do it through temperature, we do it through photo period, right? So 18 hours in veg and 12 in flower. So all of these things are used to simulate the seasons, but we can also, like I said, within a day, simulate the the time of day because the light, when you think about it, when light rises in the morning, it's more blue and white. When it sets in the evening, it's more red. So you can you can use these tunable LED lights to actually simulate all of these effects. And this will can generate, like I said, more yield, it can reduce flowering time, it can stimulate terpene and cannabinoid production. So there's a million reasons, maybe not a million, but there's a lot of reasons why you would want these tunable lights. They are more expensive, they require specialized controllers, but every day there are more reasons that are being discovered as to why these things are are these these features are so valuable.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Yeah, that's really fascinating. The customizability is like clearly like that's that's such a a W, you know, it's such a win to be able to do. So yeah, I mean, I think most people have already decided, but like LEDs are there's a reason why they're so popular with with so many of our customers, so many growers out there, right? So the last thing I wanted to touch on with LEDs, you know, obviously we can help you guys out with a ton of stuff, but one of the coolest things is guys, rebates. We have gotten some absolutely insane deals for some customers where you know, and Elliot, you can talk a little bit more about this, but they upgraded from HBS to LEDs. I mean, there's been customers they've bought like $60,000 of lights for like 15k. They paid maybe not even 15k, some something, some absurd number, and $60,000 of brand new lights for like $15,000. And we've done this over and over again to help our customers out. So, yeah, rebates. We offer kind of like a contier service where we'll just work with the electricity companies on your guys' behalf. So I'll stop right there. Elliot, you can kind of talk a little bit more about this, but and obviously every state is a little bit different, every electrical company is a little bit different. All of them have different rules and different regulations. But Elliot, you can you can speak on this a little more.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Yeah, no, rebates are extremely valuable. Don't don't ever buy an LED until you look into the rebates because most of the time you have to be pre-approved. As you mentioned, it's James, it's it's highly dependent. The how the program works, what they cover, what they rebate, all of that is is absolutely dependent upon the power company. So, you know, if you call us up and you say, hey, this is my address, this is my electric provider, these are the lights I'm looking at. Well, before we even dive into sourcing the lights for you, we're gonna find out what the regulations are for those rebates, the conditions for those rebates in your in your area for your power company provider. Because it's they're very specific as to what they'll cover. And then there's certain types of lights that will be rebateable, and there's others that will never be able to achieve the rebates. So you definitely want to know that before you start looking at your lights, because you might identify the best light for your needs, but it's not, it's you can't get a rebate. Whereas if you get this other light, you might only pay 25% of the cost after the rebates. And it might not have been your first choice, but at a fraction of the price, it becomes your first choice. So don't go down the rabbit hole first. Check out the rebate, give us a call, we'll check out the rebates for you. We'll identify the the lights that are rebate ready that are the best lights for your particular purpose.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

That's what we do. And just to make it a little bit easy here, when you're looking at the lights, there's some sort of some sort of compliant, DOC compliant, DMC compliant, something like that, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Right. So this is a DLC is the design lights consortium. They're the ones that kind of evaluate the lights, and they're it typically it's uh it's all about efficiency. So if the lights are registered with the DLC, they have a list that's updated every year. It's called the QPL, and every year it becomes more stringent. So lights that qualify for rebates last year might not qualify for rebates this year. So that's why it's important to just and and I'll also say there's a lot of manufacturers that have a little you know DLC compliant logo on their lights, and it might have been for last year and it might not apply for this year. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt, give us a call. I can look up the lights, we'll figure out the rebates, we'll make sure that that you're dialed in before you make that purchase. And while you're at it, there are other things that are also rebateable, not just lights, but D hues, VFD, variable frequency drive, like pumps and stuff like that. So it's really important, you know, give us a call, tell us what type of equipment you're looking at right now for your needs, and we'll check the rebates for all of that. And then we'll make sure that if there are rebates, we'll provide the products that will meet the requirements to get those rebates for you.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And just to comment on that, we had a customer today who qualified for some dehumidifier rebates, right? And I think I I want to say it was like eight to ten percent off per DU on some of the bigger ones.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Yeah, actually, it was even more than that. I mean, it these are really large DHUs that they were getting, but the rebates are up to eleven hundred dollars on each DHU. So it this is not insubstantial, you know, unsubstantial. It's not like a few dollars. Sometimes it's extremely significant. So definitely worth giving us a call before you before you make that purchase.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Awesome. Well, as always, I learned a ton, Elliot. We're gonna come back to Grow Lights again one day because there's so much, so much technical stuff here. But I think for today we've covered enough. So as always, Elliot, thank you so much. And we'll be back next week.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

All right, take care, see you then.