Thanks for the follow through, much appreciated. I'm not sure I would call my color spec issue as much of a "problem", as I would lack of knowledge. Over the past couple of years I've been slowly transitioning from photoperiod to autoflower plants, and from HID to LED lighting. After more than a dozen grows a pattern emerged ... ALL of my auto grows stretched beautifully under HID, but none of the grows I did under LED would stretch. I had complete start-to-finish LED grows where the plant never exceeded 10" in final finished height. The plants have been very healthy and bud density has been excellent, perhaps even better than HID grows. But sometimes the lack of stretch has hurt yields, and the dense / compact growth has adversely affected bag appeal. I outlined this in my intro when I joined AFN, link at the bottom of this post.
So during this learning curve, I began to speculate that light intensity was preventing stretch. My HID grows were single-plant in a 2X2 tent under 250W HID, while my LED grows were 325W (at wall). So increased power, coupled with improved efficiency of LED, pointed me to the idea of light intensity as the cause. So I did another thread on Light Intensity, link also at bottom of my posts, with the intention of gathering other growers' experience with stretch under LED. I wanted to chase light intensity from actual power of the LED, as well as distance from the plant canopy. Idea being, light strength drops by the square of the distance (or something like that which I really don't know enough to explain) which is a simpler and more affordable way of varying light intensity than buying COB's of every strength available. As input slowly and somewhat unreliably trickled in from other growers, I became convinced that it was not light intensity that was preventing stretch, but more likely color spectrum.
Fast forward to the past few weeks, and xxxxx has experienced a great deal of stretch with his grows under your COB's.
If memory serves, he is running your 3000K or 3500K COB's. A
nd a few other growers have reported healthy stretch under their full spectrum lights.
Still, my only point of reference is from my "olden" days of HID grows, where everyone rated their systems in degrees Kelvin, with daylight 5500 - 6000K metal halide bulbs for effective veg cycles, and 2900K high pressure sodium bulbs for effective bloom cycles. Both ratings encouraged healthy stretch in my plants. But with the advent of LED, everyone went to nanometers in rating their color spectrums. Yours is the first LED I have encountered that included degrees Kelvin ratings for your products. Kudos to you for that. So now I'm rambling somewhat because I don't understand everything I know about lighting. I've invested a fair amount of money in a couple of LED lighting systems that aren't giving me the full results I'd hoped for. So I'm looking for next steps that seem to point to different lighting, and your COB's seem to fill the ticket for what I do next.
So (a) what spectrums / degrees Kelvin lighting do you recommend that would closely simulate the stretch results I am used to under HID?
And (b) how many COB's of what strength would you recommend for a 5 sq. ft. (2'3" X 2'3") tent, to simulate the positive results I saw from my LED system lights? I have no issues with heat today using the 325W actual LED system lights. And I don't want to sacrifice bud density by under-powering my grow canopy. But I do want to take the next step in improving my grow methods. Your thoughts & input welcomed.
