VIVOSUN LumaLight 100W

We have not tested this board. We do not own one and have measured nothing. What follows is VIVOSUN’s published specification, our arithmetic on it, and a clear account of what its spec sheet makes impossible to work out.

Most LED boards on this site publish a PPF in micromoles per second and an efficacy in micromoles per joule, and then either skip PPFD altogether or print one with no measurement distance, which makes it useless. The LumaLight does the opposite. It publishes a PPFD with the distance attached and publishes neither a PPF nor an efficacy figure. That inversion is the whole review.

What VIVOSUN publishes

A PPFD figure is worth having only if you know where it was measured, because intensity falls with the square of distance. A great many manufacturers publish a large PPFD number with no distance at all — AC Infinity’s “1098 PPFD” is the example this site keeps returning to — and those numbers cannot be used for anything. VIVOSUN attaching “at 12 in” to its figure puts it in a small group alongside SANSI and Soltech.

The number it does not publish, and what that costs

This site ranks fixtures on photon efficacy, in micromoles per joule, because that single figure tells you how much plant light you get for your electricity and it is comparable across every form factor. It requires a PPF.

The LumaLight publishes no PPF, so it has no efficacy figure, so it cannot appear in the µmol/J ranking at all. Not at the bottom — absent. That is a real cost to a buyer trying to compare it against the boards that do publish one, and it is the main mark against it here.

Why we will not back a PPF out of the PPFD

There is a tempting calculation, and it is worth walking through it in order to reject it.

This is the same discipline the site applies elsewhere: we do not carry an efficacy figure across models, and we do not convert lumens into PPFD. A number that looks computed but rests on an assumption nobody has tested is worse than no number, because it travels.

What can be computed

For context, the University of New Hampshire Extension puts seedlings at about 12 mol/m²/day and Iowa State University Extension puts high-light plants at 12 to 16. Directly beneath this board at a foot, on a 12-hour schedule, you are well past both — which is why a board like this spends most of its life dimmed or hung higher when it is lighting houseplants rather than a crop.

Against the one fixture it can be compared with directly

Because SANSI publishes a PPFD at a stated one foot as well, the two figures can be set side by side without any conversion or assumption — a rare thing on this site.

The board delivers roughly twice the intensity of the bulb at the same distance, from a little under three times the wattage. That is a fair summary of what a 100 W board buys over a 36 W bulb: more light over a wider area, at a worse ratio than the wattage alone suggests — though without a PPF we cannot say how much worse, and we are not going to guess.

The IP65 rating is the genuinely unusual feature

VIVOSUN publishes an IP65 rating for this board. Almost nothing else on this site publishes an ingress rating at all: most manufacturers say nothing, and the ones that do go as far as “damp” or “wet” location.

IP65 means dust-tight and protected against water jets. That is a meaningful claim for a fixture hung over a propagation dome, a hydroponic reservoir or a humid grow space — the situations where this site otherwise has to tell readers that the manufacturer published no rating and the absence should be treated as information. It is the clearest advantage this board has over the alternatives in the hydroponics guide.

It is not a license to get it wet. An ingress rating describes resistance to water arriving from outside, not immersion, and it says nothing about the mains connection you have made at the other end of the cord.

Dimming, and a cost the listing does not show

The board dims in four steps — 25, 50, 75 and 100% — with an off position. Four steps is coarser than the continuous knob on the Spider Farmer SF1000 and comparable to the 20% increments on the AC Infinity IONBOARD S22.

For houseplant use, four steps is enough: 25% of a board this strong is still a great deal of light. For a grower trying to hold a precise DLI through a crop cycle, a knob is easier to land on the right setting.

VIVOSUN also advertises app control and scheduling — but that requires the GrowHub controller, which is sold separately. Bought for the app, this is a two-purchase fixture, and the listing price is not the whole cost. Bought for the manual dimmer, it is one purchase and the app is irrelevant.

A lifespan claim worth reading properly

Most fixtures here publish a bare hours figure: 50,000 for the IONBOARD, 55,000 for the SF1000, 25,000 for the SANSI bulb. VIVOSUN publishes 36,000 hours to Q90.

That is a smaller number and a better disclosure. Q90 means the point at which output has fallen to 90% of its original value — a maintained output claim rather than a time-to-failure one. LEDs rarely fail outright; they fade, and a fixture quietly delivering 70% of its original light is a real problem for a grower relying on a DLI calculation. A manufacturer stating the hours to 90% maintenance is telling you something more useful than a larger number with no criterion attached.

Whether 36,000 hours to Q90 is better or worse than 55,000 unqualified hours cannot be determined, because the second figure does not say what it is measuring. That is not VIVOSUN’s fault.

It has replaced the VS1000, and swapped which numbers it gives

VIVOSUN’s previous 100 W board, the VS1000, is the version this site has covered until now. When we searched Amazon’s catalog on September 27, 2026, the VS1000 did not appear; VIVOSUN’s current 100 W boards are the LumaLight and the AeroLight A100.

The interesting part is what changed on the spec sheet. The VS1000 published an efficacy of 2.75 µmol/J — the highest figure on this site — and no PPF. The LumaLight publishes a PPFD at a stated distance and no efficacy. Between two generations of the same 100 W board from the same company, the one number this site ranks on has disappeared, and a different useful number has appeared in its place.

We have no way to know whether the new board is more or less efficient than the old one, and we are not going to assume it inherited 2.75 µmol/J. It is a different product with a different specification.

Running cost

Who should buy it

• Anyone lighting a humid space — a propagation bench, a hydroponic tote, a misted setup. The published IP65 rating is the best ingress disclosure on this site, and the alternatives mostly publish nothing.
• Anyone who wants to place a board by arithmetic rather than trust a coverage claim. A PPFD at a stated foot lets you work out what any other height delivers.
• Not anyone comparing efficiency. Without a published PPF there is no efficacy figure, and a buyer who wants to know photons per watt should choose a board that publishes one.
• Not anyone buying for the app without budgeting for the GrowHub, which is a separate purchase.

The verdict

A capable 100 W board with an unusually honest intensity figure, an unusually informative lifespan claim, and an ingress rating almost nobody else publishes — wrapped around a specification that omits the one number this site uses to rank fixtures.

If you are choosing between boards on efficiency, buy one that publishes a PPF. If you are choosing on placement, humidity tolerance or honest lifespan disclosure, this is a better-documented fixture than most of its competitors, and the missing efficacy figure is the price of admission.