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Was upgrading to a better light actually worth it?
Ran a blurple LED for my first two grows and figured it was fine. Plants looked healthy, got decent yields, wife stopped asking why the basement glows purple at night. Then everyone on here kept talking about quantum boards so I finally caved and grabbed a mid-range Samsung QB setup last fall. Now i'm second-guessing whether I just convinced myself it was better because I spent the money.
The buds do seem denser and the trichome coverage on my last run of Zkittlez looked noticeably better than before. Cure came out great too, which i'll be honest might have nothing to do with the light. Hard to isolate one variable when you're changing little things every grow.
For the folks who made a similar jump, did you see a clear difference or is this one of those things where the returns are real but subtle? Trying to figure out if my next upgrade should be another light for the veg tent or if that money is better spent somewhere else.
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Experienced2d ago
The trichome and density thing is real, not placebo. I noticed the same jump when i ditched my blurple setup. But here's the part nobody talks about -- the bigger difference for me was in terp expression. The Zkittlez you mentioned is a perfect test case because that strain is supposed to reek of candy and tropical fruit when grown right, and blurples just don't push those aromatic compounds the way a full spectrum QB does. My last pheno hunt under the QB pulled out notes i genuinely never got from the same genetics under blurple. Sweeter, more complex, louder on the nose.
So yeah the density gains are nice but if you're growing something with real terpene potential you're probably leaving the best part of the plant on the table with older lighting. That's the upgrade that actually mattered to me.
As for your next move, depends what you want. If the veg tent is the bottleneck on your current output, sure, light it up. But if your flower space still has corners getting shortchanged on PPFD, i'd fix that first.
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