i took your advice smilintime and overnight i saw improvement, i put in the 85w cfl in last night, a relative straight forward task to do and this morning, the sick plant look more vibrant green and one if the sprouts whose shell hadn't come off yet opened up so i think your idea worked, i will allow them to vegetate under this light for 3 or so weeks then i will put the LED panels back on and force them to flower, please let me know when i should start LST'ing, as for how to get even more cfl in there, i dunno im going to have to come up with something in the next week, please share your thoughts on the light placement and temps, should i move the light closer or further away? as for me covering the box up with a towel, it has never interfered with overall temps, i dont cover the exhaust and as for the intake, there are vents in front of the case that draw air from the ground, thats something the towel cant cover just the light. here are the new pics!
That looks better! Glad to see it made a difference! With that light your plants will stay nice an low and wont be stretching at all. They also seem to be of the Indica variety, so they would be shorter plants in any case, which is good for a PC grow. I get the black towl thing now, haha, okay, thats cool then. The more I look at your grow, the more I'm impressed by your design. Looks good! Keep it up
I still dont know if I would use the towel to cover it, your humidity looked low (for ideal conditions, its fine for just growing) there are plenty of cheap ways to up your humidty including something like this http://www.gardenscure.com/420/planting-indoors/112602-diy-humidifer-chiller-small-grows.html but with the exhaust tube'd so you can feed it into your grow box. That might be to much humidity for your set up if left running for very long, you might have to monitor it meticulously until you get the hang of it.
Clarification from LED gurus: If it's 60 lumens per watt, that would give you 3000 lumens from each panel. VS. 120,000 lumens for a 1000W HPS bulb. How do the numbers play out. I know LED light is more effective at horticulture, but by how much. Are 6000 lumens of LED power really equivalent to 120K lumens of HPS? Thanks =]
well to kinda answer your question: a 1000watt hps bulb may produce 120,000 lumens but its all unfocused. i read somewhere that 85% of a hps light output is unused by the plant, so if thats true then for a 1000watt hps producing 120,000 only 18,000 lumens get used by the plant and at that how many lumens in the right light wave spectrum gets utilized by the plant?????, it just seems all a big waste of electricity and $$$$ to me. with my LED panels i know that they are producing 6000 lumens in the correct light spectrum to get the most outta my plants. i think 6000 lumens of focused light in the right spectrum is better than 120k lumens in useless light spectrum, but that's just me
Now, HTG sells these for circa $140 a piece. 2 of them, would cost 280. A 1000W HPS is roughly the same price. and although it has a little more power than the LED's, costs a shitload in energy costs (like 50-80 bucks a month) Would you think that you'd get the same results from the two LED panels as you would from a 1000W HPS?
I'm not bashing LED's, this is just my take . I don't have any experience with LED's, but what do you think it is about em' that would prevent them from yielding similar results to HID? OK this baffles me, but I don't understand why LED's are so expensive when the bulbs and components that make them up are so cheap and easy to find. It's baffling. Advertising always focuses on LED's energy saving features, long lifespan, no heat buildup, so on and so forth, I'd like to hear about some actual research showing the yield quality comprable to HID's before I consider investing $1K bucks into this.
very true bruce6000, LED components are very cheap, but have you ever tried to build one? it takes many hours even days to solder all the LED's onto a panel, then you need a housing and a decent powersupply, then if you did everything correctly you probably have something comparable to the ones they sell on the market.....if all goes well with my grow i will attempt to buy all the components individually and build myself a 3 or 400 watt LED panel but seeing as im only dealing with sprouts that may be a longs times away!
Now I know why they're so expensive . Keep us posted on the quality of the smokes if you don't mind, boricuapuffer. It will be interesting to hear about it. Peace!
but of course bruce, i just started smoking a few years ago and im in love with pot, it has helped me out so much with anxiety and post traumatic stress (came back from iraq) that i cant function as a normal member of society without it but it can be a very expensive medicine.....soooo thats why im growing, as i get better i will eventually try to do bigger grows with more potent strains and hopefully give my other guys coming back home something to help them out with cause once your back, your never the same!
http://forum.grasscity.com/blogs/liplayer101/464-help-me-my-200w-led-250wfloro-setup.html This is my old blog with the rescued plants. Ill have some harvest pics for you soon. The plants are almost done im in the flushing stage.
i would seriously put the leds back in there, and the cfl. have both. you can easily cool it in a computer case with proper amount of fans. run like 2 more 120mm fans and double the lumens. if you had like 14k lumens in there it would be perfect and those plants would be growing really really fast. in veg state, depending on the genetics unless its finicky the plant can handle about 90-100 degrees. its just important you keep the roots cool and keep it hydrated. red spectrum actually increases the speed of growth with plants, and blue spectrum makes them kind of grow outwards and develop lots of leaf and close internodes. mixing the 2 is key cause thats what natural sun is and thats what gets both the fast growth and the bushiness. you can easily grow the plants to 16 inches in there in 2 weeks with this amount of light and tons of organic nitrogen and a hell of a lot of micronutes..
Wow I just found this thread, been in the outdoor section. I was thinking of doing the exact same thing, but got a deal on a small 150 HPS. Also, have a very low power bill. The design that you have here boricuapuffer is excellent. You obviously did your homework. I am subscribed and anxiously awaiting your results. I will include a link to a thread on another forum that will help you build your own additional LED's. I will be building my own if youget some good buds. http://forums.cannabisculture.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1432562#Post1432562
damn geneticengineer, i m impressed with your advice but i dont wanna risk burning my LED panels with the CFL, you see, the CFL is very wide and even if i can fit the LED panels in the case im sure the the CFL can burn the LED's themselves, if my case was at least 3 inches wider, this could have been accomplished easily but these panels cost me wayyyyyy too much money to put in harms way like that! but thanks for the advice, you seem to know your stuff, any other advice would be greatly appreciated
glad to hear the herb is helping man. PTSD is a real problem, just glad that you found a way to cope. cases like yours are a good argument for medical mj.
got some more pics for you guys and a shot of the roots......which werent there 2 days ago, once again thanks smilintime for your advice on putting in a CFL, i have seen more progress in the last two days then when i started this grow operation.. enjoy!
i have a question though, am i gonna have to cut off the rumply looking leaves or should i give them time to recover and is the color of the leaves ok?