Kessil is a division of Dicon which is a specialty company working with LEDs for imaging and medical applications. The main theme of this aside from spectrum is a dense focused light beam which carries over to the Kessil products, but this may in fact be inappropriate for most grow applications.  We find the Kessil approach to be one where they have contradicted known artificial lighting metrics and built a system that builds on technology for the sake of the technology.  Not what is in the best interest of the garden. 

In their section on “Dense Matrix LED” they give an example of a sunflower type nozzle vs. a pistol nozzle with their product more like the pistol nozzle. The advantage being an intense stream that has penetrating capability, this is all good, but you also want to get a large footprint with as even of intensity as possible. This cannot be accomplished with the high pressure nozzle approach, the problem being a high center intensity, but rapid intensity fall off as you move away from the center. They present this as a virtue, but we see it as a fault.  In the product specification they claim their ”technology enables the most powerful penetration and widest spread in its class”. This is not a practical comment at all, penetration intensity and spread are trade-offs, you give up one to get the other, or balance the two out, you cannot get a high level of both at the same time. Think of it this way.  Do you stand in a shower with the nozzle streaming narrow and beating your body or do you spread that water out over the area and let the drops fall over you in a more even wider coverage distribution? 

Now let’s look at the Light Intensity chart which shows this rapid drop off as you move away from the center point. The image showing the pattern in the rectangular tray is particularly damning, we took the point that we estimated the intensity to be 25% or less than the peak intensity and estimated that over 65% of the tray shown is at these low intensities. Once again we find it interest that they try to portray this as a virtue when it is in fact a fault. 

Another observation is that the lamp projects a round footprint, while nearly all grow areas are managed as squares or rectangles. Are they putting a square peg in a round hole?

Once again another company trying to imply an unreasonable power savings (75%). They claim their 36 Watt H150 series can “rival the light intensity of a 150 Watts of HPS light” and their 84 Watt H350 series  to that of 350 Watts of HPS Light.  What they are really saying is that the peak center intensity rivals that of the HPS which may be true since it is very focused. Then they are just letting the reader misinterpret that to be a 75% power savings.  The main fault of the comparison being that the HPS lamps would have much greater spread intensities than their LEDs.

Once again here is another company not publishing any PPF specifications. This is particularly important since their wattages are very low. It appears that you need to use several of these modules to be effective, so they offer 2 accessary products to integrate them into a single system. The C130 Spectral Carrier can handle 4 light modules and the S360 Spectral Spinner can handle 6. Below are some configurations with price and wattage.

1 ea., C130 @ $172 ea., + 4 ea., H350 @ $376.25 ea. =                       $1677                    336 Watts

1 ea., S360 @ $387 ea., + 6 ea., H150 @ $225.75 ea. =                       $1741                    216 Watts

1 ea., S360 @ $387 ea., + 6 ea.,  H350 @ $376.25 ea. =                      $2644                    504 Watts

For the wattage these are very expensive systems ranging from $4.99 to $8.06 per watt. If we were to assume a high PPF/Watt output, say 1.5 uMole/S, then we would be at $3.33 to $5.37 per uMole/S. But we are not even sure they have that output since no PPF specification is provided.  As supplemental lights the lack of a good spread distribution would make it difficult to effectively use them for this function as well.  Ultimately it will be up to the end user to decide if they want to spend this kind of money for this low of wattage and the poor area distribution unless spinners are employed.  While we admire those who would think outside the box to bring better products to our gardens we believe that when it comes to the Kessil approach the better solutions are to be found in the proverbial box and not in the cylinder.