First time ever growing. Plant is a white widow clone. Currently using 365 635nm high output leds (3000mcd). Power draw is 188mA at 117 volts for 22 watts of power and a whopping $11.56 per year in electricity at $.06/kWh. Red lights will be doubled soon and our blue lights still haven't arrived! We are attempting to recreate nasa's setup with 92% red and 8% blue. Current setup has cost $80 in electronic parts (leds, boards, etc). Guessing that enough lights for a full 3'-5' sized plant would run almost $200 total, no bulk rates, and building it yourself. Will keep ya posted tho. The top light carries AC to the board, turns it into dc, and powers the lights. The bottom board is connected to 2 wall adapter 12V DC power supplies (1 iomega and 1 linksys layin around) that combined actually put out 32 volts. This board is much less likely to shock you so its not covered. So far the easiest way is rectified AC, more voltage, the DC board was a pain at the lower voltage. Heres a picture of day 1: And a couple of day 13:
Wow - very interested in this grow... You won't get much of a harvest, but the fact that you can grow anything at all with 12W is pretty impressive. In veg the plant will want mainly blue spectrum light. I'm concerned that all your bulbs are only one colour (within a panel), meaning the plant is only getting two different frequencies of light. A broader range of colours would help I think...
its doing damn well for how little ur spent on it, and we needed an L.E.D attempt one of these days... i think its doing pretty good for a very limited spectrum. when did u add the second set of red L.E.Ds? + rep for that man!
1st panel of 180 red leds went up on day 1. Second panel of 165 red leds went up on day 8. Days 8-13 saw about 3.5 inches of growth. Our blue lights are in the mail...This is basically my own creation of what i saw on http://www.ledgrowlights.com. They are charging $299 for a starter kit whereas i made my own for around $100. If i got down and dirty and bought bulk i figure i could make 10 systems 4 TIMES MORE powerful than this (about 1400 leds a piece) for about $120 a piece. The plants do use all spectrum but im going off a NASA website that says in their research a mixture of 92% red and 8% blue will grow most plants harmoniously, especially a weed
w000000000000000t. +REP Hail to you bold and daring experimenter! I'll be watching your posts allright. Tech questions : Do you know the current and voltage per LED? bottom board : powered up with 2x12 V DC right? So you turn this in to 32V DC without additional transformers? This does not add up to me. Bad math? So you running lets says 15 LEDs in series on 32V DC?!?!? You put a bunch of those series in parallel? top board ; rectified AC. ? This confuses me. LEDs are rectifiers, right? Or did you put a big fat skotty in between? AC is 110V for you? Don't tell me you got 40 or 50 LEDs in a single serie? (that would not be wise) Grow question : Did you grow all of this plant under the LEDs? Or are just trying to flower it?
Ok so it ended up kinda weird. On the top panel i brought in AC, turned it into 117V DC. Now the LEDs are rated at a forward voltage drop of 1.9v typical up to 2.6v. The first set of leds in series is about 80 leds with the voltage popping out at about 4 volts, with a resistor drawing 20mA of current. The other sets are around 40 leds a piece with the voltage popping out at over 50V and using a single parallel resistor array on each to draw enough current. Ok, now my 2 "12V" power supplies, one came with like a iomega drive and the other one was a switch or router or something, both put out 15.9 volts for some reason. So when i connect them in series, it bumps it to about 32 volts and i was able to do 12 sets of 15 leds in series. Im not really trained in this so im not quite sure how it works exactly. Oh yeah, the plant is a white widow clone from a medical club. It was 4" tall upon planting and is currently 9.5"
This part makes sense to me. I see from the other part about Volts, Amps and all, that this tech stuff is really not your thing. That's cool. No problem. I will still be watching your grow! Besides, where did you get those LEDs so cheap? Here in the dark Netherworld...uhhhm...lands, light comes at a price : >1 Euro each for a single 3000mcd powerLED @ 100 pieces. I own a 3-15V DC 0-25A (375W) kickass powersupply. Taking an average of 2V, 20mA power LED = 0.04W = 25 LEDs/W. Means I have enough power for more then 9K LEDs, but I cannot afford it for 9K Euros.
Places like digikey have fairly low average prices for red. http://www.besthongkong.com has some amazing blue light prices. Like 13 cents a piece range for similar ratings to the $4 ones you can get from radioshack. http://www.hebeiltd.com.cn/?p=led.diode has like 5cent reds and 8cent blues but it is in china and there is a minimum $25 shipping fee so for small amounts its basically the same price and there is much faster deliver with an american company.
I'm gonna have to keep my eye on this thread +rep Bobert for makin this thread You should setup another expirament. Get two clones and have one with an HID plus LEDS and one with just an HID
Thanks, first time growing so im not sure how it works. The clone has had 24/7 led lights since we got it, I think we have to flower it soon. Those will be the only lights on it for this whole thing so we'll see how it works.
how good would these work? http://www.enluxled.com/r30-floodlight.php how many would you need per plant?
Those are quite expensive but they are also very very bright. Their site tells you the square footage it covers
been looking into this for a while - as the ideal setup for me is LOW POWER & led panels sound great, esp as u can tune the panel to emit % more in whatever spectrum - & they run supercool Some u can buy are multi / dual colour - & the superbright leds are awesome. I have a 32led superbright torch - get 30hrs on 4AAA's (not for growing - just a torch!) - the light output is fantastic. imagine a 10,000 led superbright panel! Not found anywhere yet that supplies cheap ready to use panels (big ones) - so the only affordable option atm is self build. * ed. Cheers for the hong kong supplier links btw I'm pestering some ebay powersellers atm trying to get the price down on some 136 led superbright spotlamps! Interesting experiment.