Feit Electric Grow Lights

We have not tested these bulbs. We own none of them and have measured none of them. What follows is the specification Feit publishes, our own arithmetic on top of it, and an explicit account of where that specification goes wrong.

Feit Electric is a mainstream US lighting brand, sold in hardware stores and warehouse clubs, with a small grow line of screw-in bulbs and plug-in fixtures. Like GE, it belongs to the group of household brands that publish a photon figure at all, which is more than most of this category manages. Unlike GE, it does not appear to have had anyone check the units.

What Feit publishes

That sounds like nitpicking. It is not, and the arithmetic below shows why: the number Feit prints for its A19 bulb, read exactly as written, describes a bulb that would vaporize the room.

The unit problem, worked out

Feit's A19 page states: "Photo synthetically active radiation (PAR/PPF value): 14.2 mol/s". A mole of photons is a real unit of light, and horticultural fixtures are rated in micromoles per second — millionths of a mole. The difference matters more than a prefix usually does.

So the figure is usable and the unit beside it is not. Everywhere below we read Feit's photon numbers as micromoles per second, because that is the only physically possible reading, and we say so rather than quietly correcting a manufacturer's page.

The label has a second, smaller problem. "PAR/PPF" runs together two different things: PAR is a waveband, the 400 to 700 nm range plants use, while PPF is a rate, the photons a fixture emits each second. A bulb does not have "a PAR" any more than a faucet has "a water". The distinction is laid out in PAR, PPFD and DLI explained.

The range as published

The 2 ft fixture is the worst of it: a photon figure given as "up to 90" with no unit, and no wattage row at all on the specification table, so nothing about it can be computed or checked. We also could not match it to a current Amazon listing, so it appears here and nowhere else on this page.

The BR30 is the odd one in the other direction. Retail listings for it quote a photon figure, but Feit's own specification page for the bulb carries none, and a retailer's marketing copy is a weaker source than a manufacturer's sheet. We report the absence rather than borrow the number.

What the numbers say once the unit is fixed

The A19 works out to 1.58 µmol/J and the PAR38 to 1.25 µmol/J. On this site only the SuncoGrow 40 W strip, at 1.21, is lower than that PAR38, and the LED boards run from 2.3 to 2.75. Feit's grow bulbs are therefore inexpensive to buy and comparatively expensive to run per photon delivered — the full ranking is in most efficient grow lights by µmol/J.

The 16 W PAR38 emits more photons than the 9 W A19 in absolute terms, 20 against 14.2, which is what you would expect from nearly twice the power. It is simply less efficient about it.

The PAR38 is the only one you can place

Here is where Feit does something GE does not. It publishes a beam angle for the PAR38: 40 degrees. A photon figure plus a beam angle is enough to compute intensity at a distance, which no other bulb in this range allows.

Those figures assume every photon falls inside the stated cone, so treat each as the top of its range rather than a measurement. Even so they are genuinely useful. At 12 inches the bulb reaches the high band, 250 to 450 µmol/m²/s on the University of Minnesota Extension's scale. At 18 inches it is medium, and run 16 hours that works out to about 10.6 mol/m²/day, a little under the roughly 12 mol/m²/day the University of New Hampshire Extension gives for seedlings. At 24 inches it has fallen to the low band, which suits a foliage houseplant and not much else. The general case for distance is in how far a grow light should be from plants.

The A19 and the BR30

Without a beam angle, the A19 can only be bounded. If every photon it emits landed inside one square foot, the average would be 153 µmol/m²/s; a bare A19 throws light in every direction, so the real figure at the plant is well under that. It is a bulb for one small plant in a socket close by, and not a serious option for a tray.

The BR30 is the shape you actually want — a reflector flood that pushes light forward, with a published 110-degree spread — and it is the one Feit tells you least about. Buying it means accepting that its output cannot be checked in advance, the same trade the Barrina strips ask for.

The ratings that actually differ

Feit publishes a location rating on all three bulbs, and they are not the same one. The PAR38 is rated for wet locations and for enclosed fixtures; the A19 and the BR30 are damp-rated. For a bulb going into a humid propagation area, a covered porch or a closed fixture, that distinction decides whether it is being used inside its listing. This is the part household lighting brands are reliably good at, precisely because a safety listing is tested rather than marketed.

All three are rated at 25,000 hours and carry a two-year warranty, where GE claims the same hours with three years. Neither lifespan figure is something a buyer can verify, but the hours are worth taking seriously for a different reason.

Either figure is several times what the bulb costs to buy. That is the practical case for caring about µmol/J on a cheap bulb at all: the sticker price is the small number in the transaction, and the efficacy figure decides the large one. Two bulbs of the same wattage cost the same to run, so the one emitting more photons is delivering them free.

Feit against GE, at the same wattage

Both brands sell a 9 W A19 grow bulb, which makes for an unusually clean comparison. Feit's emits 14.2 µmol/s and 680 lumens. GE's emits 16 µmol/s and 500 lumens.

The Feit bulb is noticeably brighter to your eye and delivers about 11% fewer photons to the plant. That is the whole argument against judging a grow light by how bright it looks, in two products from the same shelf at the same wattage. The GE range is covered in our GE grow lights review.

Who should buy which

• The PAR38 if you want one plant lit properly and want to know what it is getting. It is the only bulb here you can place by arithmetic, and at 12 to 18 inches the arithmetic is good. The cost is efficiency: 1.25 µmol/J is near the bottom of this site's table.
• The A19 only for a small plant in a socket that will not take a reflector bulb, accepting that its spread is unknown.
• The BR30 if you want the reflector shape at the lowest price and are comfortable buying without published output. If you want that shape with published output, the SANSI 36 W BR30 publishes both a PPF and a PPFD at a stated distance.
• None of them for a seed tray. These are single-plant bulbs; a tray wants a bar, and the options are in best grow light bars.

What Feit does not publish

No PPFD at any distance for any bulb. No efficacy figure. No spectral distribution — two peak wavelengths are named, which is not a curve. No beam angle for the A19. No photon figure at all for the BR30, and no wattage on the 2 ft fixture's specification table.

It would be easy to conclude from the unit error that Feit's numbers are worthless. We do not think that. A manufacturer that publishes 14.2 and 20.0 has measured something, and both figures land exactly where a bulb of that wattage should land once the prefix is corrected. What the error costs Feit is trust, and trust is the thing a shopper comparing spec sheets is actually spending.