ReefBongwell
Well-Known Member
[video=youtube;_e5raflzTGA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e5raflzTGA[/video]
Nice post! And so should I be growing in air pots? Rather than smart pots?!Nah I love the way the airpots transplant it's easy as pie and the 1.5's I use are almost twice as tall as they are wide i don't like smartpot type bags for what I do i'm not using them again after this... IMO the airpots produce happier plants I really think the microbes underneath are happier... you pretty much can NOT overwater an airpot enough to cause root rot unless you use a thick soil mix that's not aerated well enough (my mix is very airy lotsa perlite). I can still overwater my plants in smartpots/bags. Now yes I should be a better grower and dial it in so that the watering's perfect, but I find that even when I get the water right on the smartpots they're still not the same level of happy as the airpots are. Anyway, I'm happy with what I got as far as pots, not planning on switching There are more convenient and less messy plants than airpots, but I don't think there are better.
I still haven't done a side by side on 600 vs the 240s... but will have them side by side starting soon and next grow should have an hps vs leds from same plant cuttings. But so far, I like the 240s better. You can spread them out to get better coverage (i guess you could do the same sort of things with multiple 250w hps - i can't imagine having that many ballasts running in my type of grow ), and I think the plants are just a lot less stressed from the environment but that's also because i've generally not had a properly vented hps And then of course there's the electric bill advantage My bills while being here have been very reasonable especially considering i'm cooling a 2 story house and the a/c works more than the average household because it's cooling the grow room too (although not for long!!!!) It's gonna be a landmark type thing for me to have a grow room that is environmentally controlled separately from the rest of my house I've run a vented hood before but never a room with it's own climate control But anyway, I'm gonna do side by sides to check yields and what not but the results I got in terms of yield and quality the first harvest this year in supersoil and all LEDs I was more than happy with. My yields were higher than under hps ever. Course I didn't do super soil + hps previously it could be that'll blow the leds away I don't know if I want to pay the electric to run and environmentally control multiple 600w or 1K lights, or have the potential attention that might draw to you by someone looking for those kinds of things. Big wattage lights and power bills are hallmarks of commercial operations not the attention i'm trying to draw... and would require electrical upgrade to do so which i can't do where i'm at. Really i'm not sure how well the 600w in there is going to work with all the other stuff that will be running but I can run an extension to another room on another circuit if that's an issue.
Oh PS I can't remember if I said but thanks Owl! Enjoying the fruits of your labor right now it spawned this speel. Feelin good
I'm going for a 4/6 plant grow for the next one...A qp per plant and I will air cool everything, so maybe I'll just get another 400w HPS to go with the one I have, and then use my two 150s as side lighting??Yeah void basically same as the cab I got now but bigger
Sincerely seems like you're doing pretty good with CFLs think there's 2 or 3 good questions to ask yourself before going hps vs led
1) are you planning on scaling up to a big commercial grow? if so, you're probably gonna go hps eventually anyway
2) how good is your environmental control going to be? if you can run a properly vented hood, may want to consider HPS. If you don't have any way to vent your HPS outside, don't go HPS, go LED. definitely less heat for unvented.