Absolutely, I'm with you all the way here. After all a photon is a photon. I will check out Ali Baba.
New Grower First auto after 22 year break!
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Absolutely, I'm with you all the way here. After all a photon is a photon. I will check out Ali Baba.
The thing with Ali is you skip a level to buy direct from manufacturer. But there is not much manufacturing but more of an assembly. The manufacturer only makes the board quicker with machines. Other stuff are sourced/ bought. There are some technical growers who solder the diodes to board by themselves so its not rocket science.
So we are basically paying those chaps on Ali to gather what we want and ship it to us at a much lower profit margin. Due to very high competition in China, they are used to lower margins to stimulate higher quantity sales. Great for us. Not so great for 'rebranders' but there are still lotsa less knowledgeable growers out there for them to target. So...to each his own.
More accurately, for our discussion, a photon is a photon from same diode/ specs on same board powered by same driver with or without same heatsink.
Happy growing bro!
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OK that's great.
What I'll probably do is get to know Ali Baba well and work out costs with shipment and so forth and then factor in how much work I want to do. Thing is that I really like the spectrum the ChiLED have come up with, but I do like the idea of building exactly what I want. Will see how it goes.
With regards to a photon is a photon. Let me clarify what I meant, if a piece of badly designed junk ready made LED unit is putting out say a 660nm red light, and a high quality well designed good components ready made LED unit is putting out the same 660nm red light, THEN the *quality* of that spectrum is identical in the crap LED and the quality LED. The actual photons are the same...HOWEVER...
It is natural to expect that the high quality build LED unit will be designed in such a way as to make the LEDs themselves last longer by better heat control, and certainly we would expect to get MORE of these 660nm photon for the same amount of Wattage that we spend.
IOW, the photons are the same, but we get more photons out of the same amount of $$ we put into electricity.
I only grow for personal use and as something I like to do, therefore spectrum is a very big deal to me as well as control over that spectrum.
This is what really pisses me off, I bought a ViparSpectra PAR700W with separate dimmable controls draws 320W on full power. This is not like their earlier reflector models, it is a really well designed and built unit, it has good heat dissipation and cost me $320 AUD. Now to get what I want delivered to Australia, from ChilLED with all the taxes is going to cost me three times that much. Now for certain the ChiLED is going to be more efficient I have no doubt it will put out more light per watt. However IF the spectrum were the same (which it isn't) then it just means that I'm saving maybe $200 bucks a year on electricity (at a guess) but it would take three years to pay for itself, say.
Vipar use a very cold white 7500K and a warm white 3000K but they also use a LOT of blue, way too much blue. (maybe it's really good for bok choi!) If Viparspectra only used 3000K Whites, and replaced half their Blue LEDs with Red, then it would be the same price but it would have the spectrum I want and dare I say it just about a perfect spectrum. Of course it still would not be efficient enough for big growers, not designed for big growers.
Because ViparSpectra are very responsive I'm currently trying to convince them to follow up on my above idea.
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That look very good man, you're no auto rookie anymore
I would just keep snipping away, grab a handful whenever rather than going for schedule. There's a bit of intuition to cropping and defol, soon you won't even notice what you're doing, until asking yourself why am I standing here with a handful of leaves haha
I think she will easily add another 50-60 cm in height, keep her going like this and there's a nice harvest coming up. Looks like another 5 weeks or so
OK I think she's just about done with any stretch, about 24 inches high. Just have to wait and see if she fills out a bit. Here's a close up bud.
EvilScotsman
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Tell you what mate you better bend over cos I wanna 
that ass!
She's a beast !
that ass! She's a beast !
EvilScotsman
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Mine always look smaller in the pics lol.
Cant go wrong with seedstockers like. They're all massive. Got a dozen or so of their strains I'm rifling through just now trying to figure out what's next.
Cant go wrong with seedstockers like. They're all massive. Got a dozen or so of their strains I'm rifling through just now trying to figure out what's next.
I have just been practising my Rockwool germination technique on a couple of free photoperiods, a dinafem original amnesia and a blackskull jack herer. My White Widow is about 3 cm after 5 weeks an I think it's only the daily visit from a local sympathetic fly that is keeping her alive. Both the seeds sprouted in two days, so I have prepared a cloth pot and I'll also use the smaller pot with the soon to be euthanised white widow. I'll treat them both as an experimental grow. I might try to mainline them both if they grow.
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