Quick Grow LED vs Mars Hydro Review

There is a lot of blah written on the internet (esp Reddit) about grow lights, the majority of it is written by sponsored posters who are paid by whatever lighting company to write about how amazing that companies lights are and guide anyone new to indoor growing towards that light set up. The PAR metric is a big part of this and there is such a thing as “too much power”. This side by side grow comparison was sent in by one of our growers which pretty much speaks for itself – you get more yield for less power when the LED grow lights are engineered with the plant in mind as opposed to the manufacturing and sales process.

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Vegetative Growth

We used a normal 5×5 grow tent for each garden and as you can see below the plants were loving life in both tents during their vegetative stages. The plan was always to give the lower branches a good pruning before going into the flower stage. This does not harm the plants in any way and they bounce back in no time. As you can see the plants performed equally well under both sets of lights and were bushing out quite nicely. It was now time for their Pruning.

Lower Branch Pruning

A lot of people don’t like to prune as it feels like you are harming the plant but this is not the case. The point of pruning any kind of plant is to allow more light to hit more chlorophyll (green stuff) as the plant will grow that much foliage it ends up getting in its own way. This is especially the case when it comes to growing Cannabis indoors and when it comes to harvest time you will be thankful. In this kind of pruning we only prune the lower branches as we want all the nutrients and light to go into growing as large as possible colas at the top of the plant that are easily harvested. A second pruning was done once the plants had recovered from the first and started to grow out colas at the tops of their branches in order to ensure that all the nutrients and light were used for cola growth in the last stages of flowering.

Second Pruning

After the second pruning the plants were given full nutrients for one more week then only watered with Royal Gold and CalMag. Below are pictures of the resulting trichomes.

The end result was for the Quick Grow LEDs was 710 grams of dried and trimmed bud at 672 watts.

The end result was for the Mars Hydro Blurples was 690 grams of dried and trimmed bud at 1520 watts.

This was a straightforward side by side comparison with as little effort put in as possible in order to reflect an average grower that does not wish to engage in Low Stress Training or other extraneous methods to increease their yield.