Hey guys, Just joined and this is my first time growing, I found a seed in some bud I grabbed and decided to invest in a 90W UFO light, ($155), grabbed a box from a local warehouse, lined it with aluminum foil (dull side in). And an old cpu fan for circulation. Got a pot, high-end soil and basic nutes (20-20-20). I started the sprout using 1 CFL (4000k ish), in a small box, then transplanted when the leaves extended past the Dixie cup diameter. During transplant, it was clear that the roots needed more room. I'm using custom r75: o10: b5 ratio LED all 90degrees, by custom request. What I've so far noticed is she's growing very bushy, wide leaves, so probably an Indica. The nodes are very short. It may be because of the lack of blue light ( as compared to the default ratio r70: o10: b10 ) or just may be the strain (no idea what strain this is). I just FIMmed her a moment ago, hoping to get 4 branches to grow out of the node, sto get some extra cola's instead of one big one. This is just a small hobby/experiment. I've heard mixed reviews of LED lights, but the numbers show that they are pretty efficient compared to other light types. The UFO comes with 3 built in fans, but I took 2 of them out because they were noisy as fuck, I couldn't fall asleep and pretty sure my roommates would hear it. Right now it makes the sound a normal desktop computer makes, so it's pretty stealth. It gets a little warm inside the box, but nothing compared to what CFL used to generate. It allows me to hang it ~10in from the plant, to soak it up with all that light. Just wanted to start a thread to share with the community, and in case something goes wrong I can have a short medical history for my girl
Awesome dude, can you take a pic of the outside of the box? I just wanna see how big, and the light leakage etc.. as you saw in my thread I'm thinking of doing this as well. Are you going to use that LED up until harvest? What do you find are the benefits compared to cfls?
so sweet! only if i had one of these a few years ago, would save me a ton of money instead of paying crazy amounts of money to dealers. from my experience i would recommend putting one of those hand fans to keep air circulating and making an exit exhaust with a small smoke buddy on the end, to remove the odour. yeah i would be interested to see that too. keep us updated!!
Some pics of the box as requested. Living with roommates, it was my top priority to make it as stealth as possible, and if it became too heatscore/bait/obvious i wanted it to be easy to tear down and get rid of. My landlord can do random inspections so you can see why im a bit paranoid.. As you can see I got lucky and got 2 boxes of the same dimensions, so I put one inside the other. So when it gets bigger, I can telescope it up and it can get a 2-3 feet taller. These were taken at eye level.
From what i understand, LED is more efficient, but it's a higher initial investment. I am doing this as an experiment, so I thought why not try something cool (LED).. LED works like this.. you get a choice of color LED. NASA did research and theres patents out there for LED grow lights with an optimal ratio of RED: ORANGE: BLUE light.. plants need much more RED than BLUE (something like 9:1) RED is best for flowering, BLUE better for growth of stems/leaves. So since I wanted and extra small/bushy plant, I chose to get even more red per blue. CFL emits white light, and although 26W is advertised as "100W incandescent" that's still just 26W of energy being transferred to the plant. And since it has all spectrums (roygbiv), the plant doesn't use it all. For example since the plant is green, green light is 90% reflected and not used, so the plant likely uses only a fraction of it, somewhere like 20% to 40% is wasted probably. Whereas LED, it emits only RED, OR, and BLUE, all of which the plant absorbs for photosynthesis, and the light is made of 90 x 1W LEDS. At about 85% efficiency, you can bet that your plant gets about 75W of light energy. Correct me if i'm wrong, I haven't done extensive research, thus it's an experiment.
I have one tiny laptop cpu fan on the other side, i didnt take pics of it.. but i basically glued it inside a toilet paper roll, and cut a circle in the box to fit it snug. the fan "sucks" air out of the box, the incoming air is from the air holes up top. I think I may need to upgrade it soon, but i don't want the extra noise. The tiny fan is nice bcus it runs relatively quiet.
I don't want to advertise, so just search 90W UFO LED on Alibaba or Aliexpress.. some allow you custom LED arrangements, and light spread angles (160 vs 90 vs 60).. Takes something like 2 weeks to ship.. until it arrives just use a CFL or 2.
the UFO ones looks the best, although quite expensive, I don't think you would need a 90W for something that small, i would have gone with a 45W, but i suppose LED hardly use any energy so it probs doesn't matter lol looks really good, cant wait to see the bud when its done!
Here are pics after FIMMING last week.. It seems I missed the FIM, so the leaves grew in a circle.. haha
Great thread. I'm thinking about doing this exact same thing. Thinking about buying this, or something similar: 90W 90-LED Red & Blue Light Grow Lamp with Cooling Fans (AC 90~240V) - Free Shipping - DealExtreme How warm does your light get? Does it really need 3 fans? Does it get hot to the touch, like high power CFLs do?
I just started to do this to because my plant got to big for my cabinet In my room so now my plant is growing in a large box in my room with a fan and led lights and my mom has no Idea.
so do u only use led lights? im thinkn about getting some right now off of ebay. let me know ur input please.