L
littlebopeep
Guest
(without spending a fortune on heat management?)
Since I moved to southern Europe several years ago I've had to stop growing indoors for most of the year. Dealing with heat issues just made the whole thing problematic and it was hardly ever worth the effort. Plus, with such glorious sunshine I was happy enough to join my new countrymen and grow outdoors. But lets face it, whilst the marijuana plant LOVES the sunshine, outdoor weed just aint got the same quality as best grade interior skunk. LEDs have changed all this, and I'm a new convert.
At the beginning of the year I ran a showdown of a small LED versus a 250 watt HPS, and the LED did great … but I was left with the question as to whether a 600 watt draw LED would be able to produce at the levels demanded by any serious grower. Now I'd love to do a showdown at this level, but it being summer and my outdoor temps are touching 36ºC and it just aint worth the plant life to try and get a 600 HPS running at the moment. I've just got the big LED though and I cant wait until autumn to put her into action, so here's my grow journal of 25 autoflowers in a hydro system.
I'm going to be doing this grow looking at how well this LED lighting system works from a number of different angles:
Grams Per Watt
Firstly of course I will be testing for gpw (grams per watt). Bear in mind that this grow will using a auto strain and as experience tells us that “as a rule” autos will produce slightly less per square meter than traditional photoperiod varieties, allow a little tolerance for this .. I'm an “auto fiend” and as this is one of my own varieties that I've been working on for the last couple of years I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway …..my mother always said I was a stubborn little bugger!
Optimum light and power consumption
Also I will be looking at the efficiency of this light: the huge thing I really love about my new light is the settings options – it has four switches that mean that at each stage of growth I can change
the amount of leds that are available &
the light spectrum which I choose to use
The combination of these two effects is that I should be able to grow a cannabis plant from seed to harvest using just one, large sized (600 watt draw) lighting unit. And not only that, but as the plant moves from seedling to strong vegetative growth, from flower set to buds blooming, I can control how much power is offered to the plant (10%, 20%, 40%, 80%, 100%) and also what end of the spectrum the plant receives most of its light from.
Heat and Interior Growing
As a by product of this test (and others) I'll be looking into the question of heat control in the indoor grow room. I know some of you UK growers are just glad to see a bit summer sunshine no matter what, but lets face it, pretty much the world over heat management is a big factor in any indoor grow using HPS lighting.
This grow is situated in a semi arid area where summer temps touch (and exceed) 40 degrees. Now one of the biggest pluses of growing with LEDS is the lack of heat they produce. I know cannabis growers who are struggling as we speak with HID systems even though they are using 2.5K airconditioning systems with half the amount of light that I am using. Thanks to this trial, the "safe-guard seedlings" in coco-perlite, and a seed run I'm doing, I am running over 2.5k actual draw of LED lighting in a 7 square meter area. I'm using a 125mm rvk extractor and a 900 watt portable air con unit. Lets see how the system copes with the summer heat as we move into August!
So rather than prattle away for a couple of thousand of words ... I'm going to bang straight into this trial and let anyone who reads this report make their own minds up explaining the different features as and when I use them.
Get ready for lots of “pink” pics and eventually lots and lots of “bud porn”! (fingers crossed)
Days 1-7
average outside temps 25-35ºC
average temps inside room 23-25ºC
average RH 45-65 %
OK I popped 100 seeds, germinated on tissue paper, and then put into rockwool. Lost a few to the kitten (why?) and am left with 94 seedlings. Now I'm going to be putting the light over a hydro table, but as my seeds have not been feminised, I can't put them straight into the trays. Not quite able to cough up the 200 quid for a X-stream aeroponic propagator right at the moment, I've decided to have a go at building my own “bubblers”(dwc). As usual with this kind of do-it-yourself job, it all depends on sourcing the right materials. I've had problems with a d-i-y- bubbler in the past so I have 45 seedlings in bubblers to go on to the hydro-tray (ideally I need 25 females from these to fill it nicely). The other seedlings I've put straight into coco-perlite under an adjustable LED as a fall back. All going well these will provide some comparison to the strength of the light ... All going badly, I'll still have some seedlings left to grow on. I realise the second group aren't a strict control group, but it should still provide some level of comparison (for myself at least).
Heres a pic of the 100 seedlings (day 4) sat in 2 cm "grodan" propagation blocks
And here's a pic day 7 of some of the 45 unsexed seedlings sat in their bubblers ready to go:
Until I see the roots pushing out of the net pots I will be watering from above a few mils of 5.8 ph'd water twice a day until we fill the pots and fire up the bubblers.
See you next week ...
Happy tokin
Since I moved to southern Europe several years ago I've had to stop growing indoors for most of the year. Dealing with heat issues just made the whole thing problematic and it was hardly ever worth the effort. Plus, with such glorious sunshine I was happy enough to join my new countrymen and grow outdoors. But lets face it, whilst the marijuana plant LOVES the sunshine, outdoor weed just aint got the same quality as best grade interior skunk. LEDs have changed all this, and I'm a new convert.
At the beginning of the year I ran a showdown of a small LED versus a 250 watt HPS, and the LED did great … but I was left with the question as to whether a 600 watt draw LED would be able to produce at the levels demanded by any serious grower. Now I'd love to do a showdown at this level, but it being summer and my outdoor temps are touching 36ºC and it just aint worth the plant life to try and get a 600 HPS running at the moment. I've just got the big LED though and I cant wait until autumn to put her into action, so here's my grow journal of 25 autoflowers in a hydro system.
I'm going to be doing this grow looking at how well this LED lighting system works from a number of different angles:
Grams Per Watt
Firstly of course I will be testing for gpw (grams per watt). Bear in mind that this grow will using a auto strain and as experience tells us that “as a rule” autos will produce slightly less per square meter than traditional photoperiod varieties, allow a little tolerance for this .. I'm an “auto fiend” and as this is one of my own varieties that I've been working on for the last couple of years I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway …..my mother always said I was a stubborn little bugger!
Optimum light and power consumption
Also I will be looking at the efficiency of this light: the huge thing I really love about my new light is the settings options – it has four switches that mean that at each stage of growth I can change
the amount of leds that are available &
the light spectrum which I choose to use
The combination of these two effects is that I should be able to grow a cannabis plant from seed to harvest using just one, large sized (600 watt draw) lighting unit. And not only that, but as the plant moves from seedling to strong vegetative growth, from flower set to buds blooming, I can control how much power is offered to the plant (10%, 20%, 40%, 80%, 100%) and also what end of the spectrum the plant receives most of its light from.
Heat and Interior Growing
As a by product of this test (and others) I'll be looking into the question of heat control in the indoor grow room. I know some of you UK growers are just glad to see a bit summer sunshine no matter what, but lets face it, pretty much the world over heat management is a big factor in any indoor grow using HPS lighting.
This grow is situated in a semi arid area where summer temps touch (and exceed) 40 degrees. Now one of the biggest pluses of growing with LEDS is the lack of heat they produce. I know cannabis growers who are struggling as we speak with HID systems even though they are using 2.5K airconditioning systems with half the amount of light that I am using. Thanks to this trial, the "safe-guard seedlings" in coco-perlite, and a seed run I'm doing, I am running over 2.5k actual draw of LED lighting in a 7 square meter area. I'm using a 125mm rvk extractor and a 900 watt portable air con unit. Lets see how the system copes with the summer heat as we move into August!
So rather than prattle away for a couple of thousand of words ... I'm going to bang straight into this trial and let anyone who reads this report make their own minds up explaining the different features as and when I use them.
Get ready for lots of “pink” pics and eventually lots and lots of “bud porn”! (fingers crossed)
Days 1-7
average outside temps 25-35ºC
average temps inside room 23-25ºC
average RH 45-65 %
OK I popped 100 seeds, germinated on tissue paper, and then put into rockwool. Lost a few to the kitten (why?) and am left with 94 seedlings. Now I'm going to be putting the light over a hydro table, but as my seeds have not been feminised, I can't put them straight into the trays. Not quite able to cough up the 200 quid for a X-stream aeroponic propagator right at the moment, I've decided to have a go at building my own “bubblers”(dwc). As usual with this kind of do-it-yourself job, it all depends on sourcing the right materials. I've had problems with a d-i-y- bubbler in the past so I have 45 seedlings in bubblers to go on to the hydro-tray (ideally I need 25 females from these to fill it nicely). The other seedlings I've put straight into coco-perlite under an adjustable LED as a fall back. All going well these will provide some comparison to the strength of the light ... All going badly, I'll still have some seedlings left to grow on. I realise the second group aren't a strict control group, but it should still provide some level of comparison (for myself at least).
Heres a pic of the 100 seedlings (day 4) sat in 2 cm "grodan" propagation blocks
And here's a pic day 7 of some of the 45 unsexed seedlings sat in their bubblers ready to go:
Until I see the roots pushing out of the net pots I will be watering from above a few mils of 5.8 ph'd water twice a day until we fill the pots and fire up the bubblers.
See you next week ...
Happy tokin
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So I can't be of much help with heat, yet I do have to blow 1-2 mini-fans on my lights directly (LED/CFLs), to deflect the direct heat and keep the air moving. If it were a still heat in that box, they would stunt or die, the key for me was to work at 80-85 F in the summer, I had no realistic choice, so the airflow was key, keep it moving.
