graying.geek
Well-Known Member
I'm loving these things more every day, but they've proven dangerous in the hands of Noobs. BuddyColas had warned me that I'd better raise these up when I got the wiring corrected, but while I doubled the height, it wasn't enough, and the tripled output light-burned the middle 1/3 of my scrog -- yellow leaves and toasted pistils -- after just 1 light cycle. They appear to be recovering with some new pistil growth, but I'm sure I affected my yield and potency. Oh well, the other 2/3 look pretty good. Lesson learned. Grow #3 will be better.These strips are awesome!
Not surprisingly with the drivers dialed up to 100%, heat has become an issue. I've moved the drivers outside the grow space and shifted the light cycle to take advantage of our cooler evenings, but my room temp still holds pretty steady at 29'C, a bit above optimal temp for bloom, but within reasonable limits. Going forward I plan to forego indoor grows during the summer months and take advantage of free sunlight, lighting up the grow room again in October.
Thanx, Serva. There hasn't been as much comment on my earlier post re: this topic as I'd expected, so maybe it's already been discussed ad nauseam and generally accepted by all indoor growers, but if not, anyone who grows an indoor sog or scrog under DIY LED strip lights might want to pay attention to this.serva: said:And also your light/grow looking good! It's nice to see someone else also did some exponential (what I did)/logarithmic spacing! I just followed my intuition, and it seems to work out great!
Making your light frame big enough to cover 90% of the canopy and shrink the spacing between strips as you move from the middle to the outer edge can yield consistent coverage across the entire canopy. When I had my all of my strips spaced at 1" apart and the total frame width of 15", my Android lux app gave me ~65k lumens in the middle, and 25K-30K at the edges of my scrog. No wonder I burned my girls when the lights were correctly wired. After applying the log spacing to nearly the full width of the scrog, I was getting 50k lumens across the entire canopy. BTW, the fact that you CAN futz around with spacing and coverage is a real advantage with these strips. Try that with a canned LED, irrespective of the perceived quality of the light.
As you assumed, you don't have to dust off your calculus and trig skills to calculate the integrals under the inverse square law. WAGging it will give good results. Just start from the middle and decrease the space between the strips by 30% of the previous space in both directions, making sure the width you start with will yield nearly full coverage of the expected canopy size. That'll get someone close enough.
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