Don't get fooled - Why 3W bulbs are BETTER than 5W bulbs

No red light therapy panel pushes its LEDs to their maximum capacity because to do so would overheat the unit causing enormous safety issues.

This means 5W bulbs offer no benefit over 3W bulbs; their capacity would never be used anyway so output power and irradiance is watt's (pun intended) actually important. 5W bulbs and 3W bulbs will produce the same irradiance.

To make matters worse, 5W bulbs are actually less efficient than 5W bulbs because an LED's "wall-plug (i.e., power conversion) efficiency is inversely proportional to its output power”. They produce less light per unit of power as the total power increases, which is accentuated by larger LED sizes. This means to get the same amount of irradiance from 5w bulbs as 3W bulbs, you would need to expend more electricity.

We talked with our suppliers who confirmed that the Hero300 panel would produce the same irradiance while drawing:

• 455W with 5W bulbs
• 273W with 3W bulbs

That's 182W of wasted electricity if we went for 5W bulbs instead of 3W bulbs - bad for the environment and for your energy bill!

But most red light therapy panel companies don't care - they think you won't understand this and will naively think the higher rated bulbs mean a superior product when in fact the opposite is true

Running 5W bulbs makes no sense; there is zero advantage in terms of irradiance and they will cost you more to purchase and run.

So which bulbs do we use in the Hero60 and Hero300?

3W bulbs, of course!