Lighting To Upgrade or To Supplement? (LED Spectrum/Footprint Questions)

[Marshydro]

Having started out this year, I only know one light: My HLG 260W V1 @ 3000K. She was advertised as seed-to-flower, and to a newbie like me that sounded perfect. There's nothing wrong with the light, but now that I know more about spectrum & light in general, I am concerned that lighting will be a bottleneck for the quality of bud I can produce. A few pain points:

1. Lack of blues
2. Lack of reds
3. Poor footprint fit for my space. HLG sells an XL heatsink configuration that I should've opted into, as it would let me more effectively distribute the light in my 2x4 footprint. As it stands, mine is more suited for a square 3x3 space. Serviceable in current config; but not ideal. (To be fair, I could get their XL heatsink and put my panels on it for $70)

For reference, here's the spectrum info on the unit I'm currently using.
View attachment 1226454

So this started out as me thinking about grabbing supplemental lights for veg & flower. Seems like something I can find for $150-$250 or so depending on how elaborate I want to get. But, in considering the above, I'm wondering if I shouldn't just grab a more well rounded light and consider it a system upgrade.

The Mars Hydro SP3000 looks ideal. It's nearly double my budget for supplemental lighting, but it ticks the boxes for all 3 pain points on my current solution. I've read plenty of rave reviews about the light itself, but I'm more curious to hear what some of you more seasoned LED users think. Has anyone recently made a similar upgrade, and if so how did it pan out for you? Do you think the improved spectrum + footprint coverage is worth a premature upgrade?

Thanks advance for any insights or suggestions!

SP3000 is suitable for your 2'x4' growing area from seed to harvest, not a good choice as the supplement light. Personally, no need to upgrade it, you should add one red-spec supplemental strips for now. When you have the new growing area plan, take the SP3000

 

[daznic]

Coming in a little late, I'm interested in what you ended up doing @olegren?

I've OCD'ed on this problem and come up with the following.....

I have 3 x 3,500k strips pushing out up to 150w.(running at 120w atm)

I'm about to add 2 x 5000k strips during veg cycle, these will provide up to 100w.

I'm also adding 2 strips with 660mn and 730mn diodes pushing out up to 50w.

The plan is the 3,500k strips are there from seed to harvest and the additional strips for each part of cycle all running off 2 drivers, strips wired in series.

For my 2 x 2 space it might seem like overkill with up to 250w available but running at comfortable 700ma across all led strips I can easily get 40w/sf without pushing the strips too hard, installed dimmers provide spectrum and wattage flexibility.

After that I'm thinking of adding a couple of UV diodes.

 

[olegren]

@daznic - I love the idea of incorporating strips. If I were to go down this road any time soon, I think that's probably what I would do. (Unless I needed a new light altogether; at which point I still think I'd go with the SP3000)
To answer your question, though: I still haven't done anything. The consensus from feedback I got here reinforced for me that lighting is not really my main area for improvement yet. (I'm still figuring out a technique and favored medium tbqh)

Anyway, it sounds to me like you have a pretty killer setup. What kind of diodes? Are you taking any lux readings? I'm curious if you've run into any burn issues. No matter what I do, I seem to burn mine if I go much over 400ppfd in flower; which is the low end of vendor recommendation. It's really strange.

 

[WildBill]

@daznic -No matter what I do, I seem to burn mine if I go much over 400ppfd in flower; which is the low end of vendor recommendation. It's really strange.

Yeah, that does seem odd!

edit......Do you have a journal to look at your grow conditions?

 

[olegren]

Yeah, that does seem odd!

edit......Do you have a journal to look at your grow conditions?

@WildBill To be fair: It might not be light burn. Working in the infirmary, the consensus was I hit nutrient lockout. I'm just not sure what to make of my post-flush numbers and some of the other symptoms that have persisted post-flush. I suspected light burn as a factor because the whole thing jumped off right around the time I raised my lux ~10K over the course of about a week; which coincided with issues I saw in a previous grow where I wasn't over-nuting like this run.

In this run, maxed ppfd was around 600. Average temps were 83-84 and RH was 45-50% consistently. Running 20/4. Full grow diary is in my sig -- But I haven't been updating but about once every 1.5 weeks lately and haven't yet done an update with the latest trainwreck. :smoking:

All that to say: Light burn is definitely a speculation on my part. From what I have seen & read, nute burn can look like about anything. I had observed some yellow edges in the worst of it; but I had been watching close for taco leaf and other signs of burn before that -- and never saw a thing. Plants were praying, even. I've also noticed that growth beneath those top leaves looks lush and green; but that could be because of the flush, too since all that stuff is newer growth.

This is one reason I'm trying to get to an organic grow. Nutes throw so many variables in there.

Anyway, here's a picture of them today. That infirmary thread has several progressive updates where you can see it get worse. I should've taken a few snaps of the yellow edges that really made me suspect the lights were a factor!

 

[Death The Cultivator]

That doesn't look like light burn. Did you do a slurry of the soil?

 

[WildBill]

I doubt it's your lights. Like you said, organics are more simple. Especially in my mind! LOL!
That's the only thing I've ever done in my life since gardening with my Grandma as a little kid. Some of my most earliest memories are with her in her food and flower gardens.

 

[olegren]

That doesn't look like light burn. Did you do a slurry of the soil?

I probably spoke out of turn. I wish I had taken pics of the yellowing edges. They were really on prominent on one in particular, and in conjunction with the gradiation I was seeing, it made me think that the discoloration was relative to their light exposure - Which got me looking at my data and realizing that everything took a turn when I changed two key variables: The feed and the light. Both were gradual, but that made it impossible to know. So I am sure I'm just linking two unrelated things.

Anyway, to your point: No, I didn't take a proper slurry test. I was checking runoff; but not exactly the way that I'm seeing people prescribe a proper slurry test. I was basically watering to runoff, pouring the runoff in a cup, and taking PPM readings. This may be why I saw such strange results post-flush -- and why the flush numbers were confusing too. And, to be fair, I had yellowing tips for most of veg and onward; so something was clearly out of whack in the chemistry. I compounded on that by making some other watering/feeding fluctuation mistakes trying to calibrate.

I'll do a slurry test today and see what that tells me. Hopefully it will clear up confusion I saw in my last runoff tests! I'm limited in what I can do for these girls at this point, but I'm going to get them across the finish line and learn everything I can in the process.

I doubt it's your lights. Like you said, organics are more simple. Especially in my mind! LOL!
That's the only thing I've ever done in my life since gardening with my Grandma as a little kid. Some of my most earliest memories are with her in her food and flower gardens.

Absolutely same here! Gardened a lot as a kid. Missed it more than I knew. Got started with this and wanted to go organic; but got sidetracked trying bottled nutes. They can clearly work, but I am learning it's not for me.

I am stalking your grows as I try to prep my first proper organic run.

 

[daznic]

@daznic - I love the idea of incorporating strips. If I were to go down this road any time soon, I think that's probably what I would do. (Unless I needed a new light altogether; at which point I still think I'd go with the SP3000)
To answer your question, though: I still haven't done anything. The consensus from feedback I got here reinforced for me that lighting is not really my main area for improvement yet. (I'm still figuring out a technique and favored medium tbqh)

Anyway, it sounds to me like you have a pretty killer setup. What kind of diodes? Are you taking any lux readings? I'm curious if you've run into any burn issues. No matter what I do, I seem to burn mine if I go much over 400ppfd in flower; which is the low end of vendor recommendation. It's really strange.

Hey Olegren,

I use a Lux app on my phone, doubt it's particularly accurate but at least it provides a bench mark. I then use apogee light calculator app to get PPF and umoles...etc

Calculating lux into PPFD and umoles...etc I take with a grain of salt as I understand the converting lux to these is a bit clunky without more info.....I try not to get to hung up about the stats and let the girls tell me what they like.

With my LEDS running at about 80% (approx. 120w) it's averaging about 26,000 lux, 32,000 in the middle and 22-23,000 on the edges at 10 inches from lights. Once the additional strips are installed I expect I can have lot more lux on tap while not pushing the strips so hard.



This week I noticed the start of light burn (pistils toasting) when the canopy was down to 6 inches from lights and have adjusted so canopy is back to 12 inches.

While I'm an indoor newbie, to me your girls look like it's not light burn but a nute issue.

I use half strength nutes all round, except for calmag, this is working out good.

For veg I start using seasol (seaweed fertiliser) at start week 3 and canna classic during flower and flush on the last week and that's it.

If I do install UV doides my led supplier is great, they can customise to just about any config. These UV diodes run at 3 volts each so I thinking of 4 strips with 3 diodes each with 280, 365, 380nm running at about 25w in total during late flower.

Anyway here's a couple of photos of my Blueberry just on 8 weeks old (2 weeks into flower).

 

[WildBill]

daznic
Which LUX app?