My Very First Grow(Mars Ii 400W Led)

This will be my thread for the beginning of my grow. Unfortunately, I still haven't received my light in the post yet and since I jumped the gun on germination, I have to start with CFLs. But as soon as I get my light installed, I'll include pics of that as well. It's only going to be probably 2 more days till I get my light and then all will be back to normal. I'm going to outline the details of what I'm using in this grow and then the first pictures of my seedlings. 
 
Strain: Autoflower Northern Lights from Vision seeds. Got them from Herbie. 
           In addition, I'm also going to be growing a basil plant inside the tent as well since grow lights do            so well with cannabis, they must do well with this sort of plant as well. 
 
Media:  I'm using Coco Coir with perlite(85/15 mix because I didn't buy enough perlite) in 2 2-gallon                   pots and coco coir by itself in a 1-gallon pot. The basil is in a 1-gallon pot with regular potting               soil bought at Wal Mart. 
 
Nutrients: Just using Dyna-Gro Foliage Pro and Bloom and following the guidelines set forth by various                 tutor sites. Half-strength at first to see how things go and then maybe up it a little. I'll be                         watering whenever the girls start to get dry, have no idea how long a watering should last,                     but with ambient humidity being so high here it shouldn't be more than twice a week. And I'm                 just going to control my pH with vinegar as needed, but I'll probably have to add to the water                 every time because pH of water here is 7.   
 
Lighting: Once it arrives I'll be using a Mars II 400W LED from topledgrowlight.com with the standard                    spectrum. For now I have 6 23-26W CFLs lighting up the girls. I did this because while the                    seeds were sprouting, today I noticed that every time I would go into the room to check on                    them, they were getting taller and  I could already see they were leaning towards the                            sunlight coming in through the windows, so I decided to give them this light till the real light                    arrives. 
 
Anything I may have left out concerning details of the journal, please let me know because I want to help people make informed decisions about buying these sorts of lights. Power consumption seems right on for my situation, as well as keeping temps down, so I decided to splurge for this panel. We'll see how everything goes over the next 65 days or so. Enjoy!
 
First pic is of the tent, with the attached home made a/c for when ambient temp reaches 86-88 degrees during the day and early evening. 
 
The next three are of the autos, and the last one is of the basil. I'll update once I get my LED hooked up and working to perfection. 

 

Small update. I finally freed my girl from the second pic from her seed husk. It was hours and she hadn't opened like the others and I managed to get that damn husk all the way off and she should be opening anytime now. It hasn't been too hot today so temp inside the tent with the home made a/c going has been between 82-84 degrees, so I'm glad about that. I'll post a pic later cause I couldn't find the cable for my phone. More to come later, but with just 146W of CFLs they've grown more than an inch in 6 hours. 
 
And based on the tracking of my package, my light should be here tomorrow in the afternoon. 
 
Based on a screwup of mine, I started vegging at 11am and I was planning on having my off period be from 2pm-8pm so what I'm going to do today is run the rest of today lights on until tomorrow at 2pm where the timer will shut the lights off and my fan will run another half hour after that to get the rest of the heat out of the tent. 

 

Finally made it to lights out. Had my lights on since yesterday at about 11am and now going to see how lights out treats me over here. Been having some very mild days lately, but today was the first day back to normal where ambient temps get up to around 86 degrees and the highest it got inside the tent was 88 for a few minutes approaching 1pm. But I kicked in a little of the wall mounted a/c in the room to bring things right down. I realized that while my home made a/c will work for nighttime, it can't handle the time around 12-1pm by itself so I'm probably going to run that a/c about an hour or two a day to stabilize the temperature. And at least I finally know how long the igloo cooler lasts, it's about 6 hours, that's with two of the gallon bottles completely melted and the last one more than halfway melted. At least I know it'll maintain ambient temperature, more or less, but I'm still nervous over how similar the heat will be with the LED, which BTW still hasn't arrived, but should be here tomorrow. These are going to be the last pics I post with my CFLs taking up the slack while my LED gets here. These pics are only 4 days from seed. The girl who had her seed husk sticking(first picture) still hasn't opened all the way, but I'm hoping she'll snap out of it soon. They're all, except the basil, a little over 2 inches tall. While the basil hasn't gotten taller, it's leaves did get a little bigger this morning. Next update coming as soon as I get the LED hung up and working. 

 

Interesting, and I was kinda thinking the same thing, but I figured I would do it there so I wouldn't have to go through the hassle of transplanting later on. If I could have a nice field with fertile, hearty, moist, life-giving soil, you could just make a little hole in the ground and pour water on it and have it sprout. But oh well, live and learn. For next time I'll do the transplant, since it is very easy, I just wanted to be extra careful. 
 
Unfortunately I do have an update, and it's not good news. The first girl to sprout apparently couldn't get over having the seed husk stuck to her for so long and she kinda doubled over this morning. I watered all three anyway and I'm going to see how she responds, but I'm kinda thinking I'm going to have to sacrifice here and just germinate another girl to take here place. I've got my fingers crossed though. The other three(including basil) are fine even though my second isn't standing quite straight up. But tonight they'll have a new sun to give them wonderful light. 
 
Quick question. Is it necessarily a bad thing if when I watered them, a lot of water ended up in the trays? While this made testing the pH a breeze, I'm a little concerned that the coco coir won't absorb that water for days. 
 
I'll post pics as soon as I get my new light up. 

 

Yeah, that's exactly what this is. Since there aren't that many journals with LEDs from topledgrowlight.com, I wanted to be amongst those who have bought the lights and given a play by play of how our grows go with these lights. I actually just got mine this afternoon and am waiting for my dark period to be over so I can hang it up. 

 

I'll try and get this thread moved then. I just figured since I am an absolute beginner, I would post here, that's cool though dude, we're all here in community just trying to perpetuate the genetics         
 
And no, I'm not selling anything. I bought this light from one of GC partners because of all the positive reviews here and on YouTube. Let the members of the forum make informed decisions regarding the use of LEDs, that's all I want. Just wanna help!

 

Update, but only to let everyone know that I already submitted a message to the mods to get this thread moved to its appropriate place and because I got my light and it's installed. 
 
Good news is that it doesn't seem to be increasing temperature inside my tent as much as I had feared. When it was lights back on the temp inside was a nice and even 84 degrees. I hooked up the yo-yo hangers, in the dark BTW, and plugged that monster in. As soon as my timer hit 8pm, it was a little startling to see it light up again. It's way different at night, and this brings me to the conclusion that I'm going to have to get a curtain for the window because it looks like there's a damn UFO in that room from the street. I have the light just a little over 12 inches above the pots and the bottom is absolutely bathed in light. After 20 or so minutes, the temperature only went up 2 degrees and probably will go up a couple more to 88, but once night really settles in, temps should go back down to about 82-84 degrees and stay that way for more than 10 hours. 

Bad news is I think I lost one of the girls. She bent too much at the stem, I tried propping her back up, but I think it's too late for her. I think the fact that the husk was too heavy and her leaves never really opened up after that were the killers in this case. The following pics are where I am right now. 
 
Last one is how the floor looks with the light shining through the mesh screens over the passive intakes. Crazy, even more purple outside. 

 

 
 

Well, then I better get to it. Lucky that I have toothpicks here at home. I guess that and a little twist tie or something. I'm gonna do it now because she's still green.
 
Done and done, let's see how she spends the night, I have her propped up between 2 toothpicks, but the stem's very thin in the middle. I splashed a little of the runoff water on her roots, so lets see how this goes. 

 

Yeah, that and the weight of the husk on her head for 2 days after sprouting. But the light should be great for them all. I know it takes me 15 minutes to recover after being exposed to the light, and that's with the light on in the room and sunglasses on. I can't wait for daylight cause then I can leave the tent a little more open and control temp a little better. I'm pulling for her though, she was the first to sprout!

 

Small update for you all. Unfortunately, the first girl to sprout with the problems never recovered. I watered here a little with a pipette, propped her up with toothpicks but this morning she was much drier than before and her stem was almost completely black. So I'm going to germinate another seed to take her place. On a positive note, my other two Northern Lights seedlings are doing great. They're almost 3 inches tall and one has already sprouted her second set of leaves. And for some strange reason despite only planting ONE basil seed in the potting soil, I have 3 seedlings in the pot. But I believe one of them is a weed that I'm going to have to evict from the pot. Probably something that survived in the soil after being microwaved to sterilize it. Other than that, no real problems. Temperature control is good with the a/c blowing into the tent(84-86 degrees pretty much all the time) although my ice only lasts 4-5 hours tops and I always have to change bottles out right before going to bed at night. I guess I finally realized that 146W of CFLs versus 400W of LEDs heats up this tent only slightly less and I probably would have had a worse time controlling temperature if I had gone with 6 42W CFLs and 4 23W. As long as the tent never touches 90 degrees I'll be glad. 
 
Quick question. Today is the 9th day from seed, when do I start feeding my plants nutrients???