I really want to see how this grow turns out....I have read about the led's and am tempted to buy some of them just to keep the heat down...
Awesome job, man!!! I've been interested in LED's for a while, but have never seen a grow with them!!! I don't wanna sink the money if it doesn't work out well, ya know...but here's my proof Just curious....what's the life expectancy on these? Can I expect 'em to last a few years, or are they like HID where you gotta change them annually?
Excellent stuff - I'm not a techy sort, but my other half was rambling about setting up banks of LEDs a year or so ago. I have to say I was a tad dubious. I'll be interested to see how the flowering goes. I'm debating whether or not to book mark this page to show him when he gets back from working away. The only drawback is I'll be choking on "I told you so" till I'm 90! Just imagine a whole grow cupboard lined with em..... okay, so you'll be soldering for the rest of your natural life, but hey...
This is totally awesome what you are doing. I've been looking into LED's for a long time now. I am going to make a design that doesn't consist of "panels" but instead it will be made as an expandable sphere so it will evenly distribute light across the whole plant.... I'm also thinking of using LED's from this manufacture http://www.luxeonstar.com These LED's are just so incredibly bright, and the wavelengths are close enough to the desired wavelengths where they will work just fine. I'm going to purchase about 300 watts worth of LED's. One of my other great ideas is to hang some LED's into the middle of the plant so as to not give off light only to the outside of the plant. As we all know, light loses half of its intensity but every inch that it travel. LED's dont put out very much light at all, so they are only effective in short distances. So when you using only a few panels of low powered LED's only a few parts of the plant get the light and the rest of the plant will start to stretch for the light, especially as time goes on and the plant keeps getting bigger. Even if you use 20 watts of high powered LED's and compare it to 20 watts of low powered LED's, the high powered LED's will have a lot more penetrative light because of it's initial intensity and not being as spread out as with the low powered. If you think on the scale of different light sources, There is Sunlight that has so much intensity that it can be millions of miles away and that intensity doesn't lose that much from the top of the plant to the bottom of the plant. HID's like High Pressure Sodium have enough intensity where you can hang you light 8 - 20 inches above the top of your plant and the light will be effective close to the bottom of the plant. Compact Flourencents Must be kept within 1 - 4 inches to the top of your plant for the canopy to recieve enough light, but unfortunately the light is not intense enough to penetrate through the canopy and to the buds below. For this you either need to switch to HID's during flowering or surround your plant with CF's so you can get some decent buds. LED's are even worse for intensity. But the great thing about LED's is that they are small and only creates very little heat so you can easily and safely dangle a few into the middle of your plant. If you are using the high powered LED's like the ones in the link about, you can easily attach a small copper heatsink onto the backside of the LED. Now I am not saying at all that compact flouros can't give you a decent yeild, because they can. But you have to use a lot to be able to get big solid buds. But they now got those 125 watts CF's which are supposed to be great. My only problem is that I am not an electrical engineer, so I am going to need some help to figure out how I am going to wire everything up. One of the other things I am thinking of doing is using a computer power supply to power my LED's because it easy to pick out how big of a supply you need to power those things, and with multiple power leads that come out of the power supply it makes it easy to connect multiple arrays. for different functions. Another great thing that you can do to save even more electricity is you can dim your LED's (which is the bad way of saving electricity) or if you're smart and know how to make it happen you can setup a little dial nob that can change a blink rate so it can be set from zero - full. And when you turn the nob a little back from full it will start a very high blink rate that you're eyes wont see, but it will cut down on the amount of electricity used and the plants will recieve pretty much the same amount of light. You can easily save %25 more power and still be fully effective. LED's dont need an intitial burst of electricity to start like how other light sources do and LED's also have a less than 100 nanosecond turn on time which can make for some serious blink rates. Well, Sorry for going on this rant, but the info is great and very usefull to all who wanna try led's to grow. I'll hopefully be setting up my LED's in a few weeks.
personally i'm getting to think that led strips would be better suited to modding the output of a veg bulb to 'flower friendly' frequencies - like I mean adding light in a particular spectrum to whatever the stage of growth prefers. That way u would only need ur (say) 2x200w envirolite vegging cfl's, then mebe switch on ur leds at flowering stage & add (red is it?) whatever light a vigorous flowering stage requires, without sacrificing the power of ur main lights & having to spend weedmoney / change bulbs?????????? Was thinking the same as DF above - (must be on same chong!) like instead of building hooj panels to fill an entire wall with (technically inefficient) leds, hang multidirectional strips of 200 or so (emitting a particular spectrum of light) to augment growth in otherwise shaded areas - particularly when flowering Can u tell I'm wre|'kt<T? *ed - sry DF, maeant to quote u - IR electrical / hvac engineer = pro as fk - we can work this out m8 *can I just add, just to tantalise, today I bought a 33'x9'x9' refrigerated trailer with a/c & 7.5kw diesel genny built in
One of my even crazier ideas to do is get one of those stupid expandable sphere toy things and put my LED's on the inner points and just expand it as the plant grows. Or even better make one of your own to perfectly suite for wiring and shit.
rofl1 ebay the fkers. pmd. Use them to push plants apart & boldly go where no light has gone b4f Inventing shit is cool as fk.
id sure like to see an update. id buy a ready made system if i could see someones complete grow with one.
I might be stuck having to build one because my digital ballast creates a lot of electrical noise which might interfere with my computer system that I'm building. If i sell my light and hood online I could get enough money to build a led setup.
i dn if these are much help but w/e... ive been looking for cheap led strips so that u dont have to do so much soldering and came up with these: http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?product=BARS ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 12 8k mcd red leds in strip 15.95(runs on 12v) 12 6.5k mcd blue in strip 19.95(runs on 12v) http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?product=OTHER ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 36 red 7k mcd leds on pcb(runs on 12v) $10 sorry but i dn the kelvin of any of these, heres a pic for best kelvin for plant growth: i hope this helped u guys cause it took away my high
If everything is properly grounded and the ballast is engineered properly you should not a interference problem.
http://www.besthongkong.com/product_info.php?products_id=278 They are pretty cheap. 10 of those would be anough for 3 plants? steeve