SANSI vs GE Grow Light Bulbs

We have not tested either bulb. What follows is the manufacturers’ published specifications, our own arithmetic on those figures, and the one number each brand leaves out.

This comparison is unusual on this site because both sides publish a photon figure. Most grow bulbs give you lumens and a color temperature and leave you guessing. SANSI and GE both state output in micromoles per second, which means the comparison can be arithmetic rather than opinion.

The published figures

The surprise: efficiency is a tie

The instinct with a 36 W bulb against a 9 W bulb is that the big one must be the serious product and the small one a compromise. The arithmetic says otherwise.

That matters because it removes the usual reason to prefer one fixture over another. Neither bulb is cheaper to run per photon delivered. Buy four GE bulbs and you have spent 36 W to produce 64 µmol/s — almost exactly the SANSI’s 65.6 µmol/s from the same 36 W.

So the question is not efficiency. It is where you need the light to arrive.

One socket, or several

A bulb concentrates its output into a cone beneath it. Four times the photons from one socket is a genuinely different tool from the same photons split across four sockets in four places.

• SANSI puts 65.6 µmol/s over one plant. At its published one-foot distance that is 265.58 µmol/m²/s, which is the high band on the University of Minnesota Extension’s scale — enough for a herb pot, a monstera, a bonsai, a flytrap.
• GE puts 16 µmol/s over one plant, twice, because it comes in a two-pack. Even if every photon landed inside one square foot — which no bulb manages — the ceiling is 172 µmol/m²/s. That is the right size for a pothos, a calathea, a peace lily being kept rather than bloomed.

Put plainly: the SANSI is one bright light, the GE is two dim ones. Neither is better in the abstract, and the mistake is buying the wrong shape of answer for the plants you own.

The disclosure difference, which decides close calls

When the efficiency is a tie, the tiebreaker is what you can know in advance.

SANSI publishes a PPFD with the measurement distance attached: 265.58 µmol/m²/s at one foot. A PPFD without a distance is meaningless, and attaching one is rarer than it should be. Because that figure exists, the bulb can be placed by arithmetic — light falls with the square of distance, so 15 inches gives about 170 µmol/m²/s and 20 inches about 96.

GE publishes no beam angle and no PPFD at any distance. The best that can be said about the GE is a ceiling: 16 µmol/s over one square foot is at most 172 µmol/m²/s, and in reality less, by an amount nobody has published. You can buy the GE and find out, or you can buy the SANSI and calculate.

Color, and the room the plant lives in

Both are white-light bulbs rather than the purple-pink kind, which is the right choice for a plant in a room you occupy. GE publishes CRI 90; SANSI publishes a CRI close to 100 with a stated 400-780 nm range.

Those are both high enough that foliage looks like itself. The SANSI figure is the better one on paper, and in practice the difference between CRI 90 and CRI 98 on a green leaf is small next to the difference between either of them and a purple fixture. The research on white against blue-plus-red is summarized in full spectrum versus red and blue.

Running cost

Where each one wins

The honest downside of each

SANSI: it lights one plant and no more, it is four times the wattage on the meter, and at 25,000 rated hours it is rated for less life than several fixtures on this site. If your problem is three plants in three rooms, buying three of these is an expensive way to solve it.

GE: it publishes no beam angle, so what actually reaches the plant cannot be computed, only bounded. And it is genuinely not enough light for anything in the medium or high bands — we say so on the GE review and it is worth repeating here, because the two-pack makes it look like more light than it is.

The short answer

If you have one plant that wants real light, buy the SANSI: same efficiency, four times the output in one place, and the only published PPFD-at-a-distance of the two. If you have two undemanding plants in two spots, buy the GE two-pack and put the light where the plants are. The brands are not really competing — they are selling different amounts of the same thing at the same efficiency.

GE sells the same output in two shapes

One wrinkle before you decide. GE publishes identical photometrics for its BR30 and its A19 grow bulbs: 9 W, 16 µmol/s, 500 lumens, CRI 90. The difference is the glass.

A BR30 is a reflector flood — the bulged shape with a mirrored interior that pushes light forward. An A19 is the ordinary household bulb shape that emits in every direction. Same photons, different destinations: in an open socket a good share of the A19’s output lights the ceiling, while the BR30 sends most of its cone downward.

For a plant, that makes the BR30 the default and the A19 the fallback for fixtures a BR30 will not physically fit — a table lamp with a narrow harp, a pendant designed around a standard bulb. It is worth knowing because the A19 two-pack is often the cheaper listing, and the saving is real only if your lamp cannot take the better shape.

The lamp problem, which the price tags hide

Neither of these is a complete fixture. Both are bulbs, and a bulb needs a lamp that points down at a plant and looks acceptable where it sits. That is a cost and a constraint the listing price does not show.

The SANSI concentrates a lot of light into one socket, which means the lamp has to be somewhere useful — directly above the plant, at a workable height, aimed down. A clamp lamp on a shelf edge does this well and looks like a workshop. The GE pair asks less of each lamp, because 16 µmol/s does not need precise placement to do its modest job, and two ordinary lamps in two rooms is an easier thing to arrange than one perfectly positioned one.

If the fixture itself is the obstacle — a plant in a room where a clamp lamp is unacceptable — then neither of these is really the answer, and the comparison worth reading instead is SANSI against the Soltech, where the whole argument is about what a fixture looks like.

What neither of them publishes

Both brands are unusually forthcoming for grow bulbs, which makes the remaining gaps worth naming.

• Neither publishes a beam angle for its BR30. SANSI gets around this by publishing a PPFD at a stated distance, which is the more useful disclosure. GE publishes neither, so its output can only be bounded rather than placed.
• Neither publishes a spectral distribution. SANSI states a 400-780 nm range and a CRI close to 100; GE describes “blue and red” and publishes CRI 90. Those are descriptions, not curves, so the actual balance of wavelengths is unknown for both.
• Neither publishes a location rating on these bulbs. If the plant lives in a kitchen or bathroom, that absence matters — it is the subject of grow lights for bathrooms, where the only rated bulbs come from a third brand.

None of that changes the recommendation. It does mean that the honest basis for choosing between these two is the two figures they both publish — output and wattage — and the one SANSI publishes alone.

What changes once you have three plants

Both answers on this page assume one or two plants. Past that the arithmetic turns against bulbs of either brand.

Three plants on one shelf is not three cones of light; it is a strip of shelf that needs lighting evenly. Three GE bulbs deliver 48 µmol/s from 27 W in three overlapping circles with dark gaps between them, and three SANSI bulbs deliver 196.8 µmol/s from 108 W with the same geometry problem and a much larger bill. A single 4 ft bar publishing 52 µmol/s from 30 W covers the whole run evenly instead, which is why this site keeps pointing shelf owners at grow light bars rather than at more bulbs.

The switch-over point is roughly two plants. One or two, buy bulbs and put them where the plants are. Three or more in a row, stop buying bulbs and buy the right shape.