500W Blackstar Grow

Hello all, I am back for another grow. It has been a while since my last grow and thought the growing community could benefit from another LED grow and review.
-Lighting: 500W Blackstar LED Panel 2011 model.
-Soil: Fox Farms Ocean Forest with perilite
-Potting: 4 5 gallon buckets
-Strain: 4 plants of a cross between Master and Mango Kush (My friend did the breeding)
-Grow Room: 3x3.5' closet
-Odor Control: ONA
-Air: 1 Honeywell cheapo
-Nutes: Fox farms veg, right now I'm using another set of bloom nutes I had, but I still need to get fox farms to stay with the theme.
I vegged under 3 105W cfls from my last grow plus a few little cfls for side lighting and 1 68W. Due to some unforeseen and unfortunate events, I had to flower the girls for a little under 2 weeks under the CFLS. After this period, I placed them under the blackstar and trimmed the worthless branches. I am currently running a 10 on 12 off schedule to keep temps, energy usage and time expended reasonable. I'll post pictures as soon as I can, but I hope to make a good review of this light.

Sounds like a cool setup. Always interested in new LED technology so I'll pull up a chair to see your results. I was curious why u chose to cut your day short 2 hours though? That's more food your ladies could be producing to feed the buds at night. Temps still a problem with the LED panel in?

I think it depends which panel you got, my UFO creates enough heat to bring a small dresser up to 34 degrees steady along with another LED. But the temp won`t go higher I dont think, and that is without any air entering the dresser,. I can run the dresser at about 25degrees without the fan with only the Advanced xtreme 3W LED 100W running. I was a bit disappointed with the heat, but in some ways though the light itself is not hot, you could have the plants touching it almost! The newer model run cooler. The difference between the UFO and the Advance in terms of heat is quite noticeable... like I say though this is when I run it with no air going in and out of the dresser and it`s a pretty small dresser!

If you cut it short two hours you force the plant to go through days quicker. It counts nights only, so a day can get as far down to 6 hours on and 12 hours off without causing too much problems. The only issue is that you do lose some yield, but thanks to the incredible intensity of the panel, that shouldn't be an issue. I'm hoping to get two blackstars and run them at less than 10. The temps are ok, its just a matter of ventilation issues, I'm trying not to mess with the structure of the closet because I rent. Also, my roommates keep setting the temperature on the thermostat to 78.
The entire panel is cool to the touch, and the fans dissipate the heat well, its just when the heat has nowhere to go after that and its still 304W of drawn power.

In the first pics the plants are fairly healthy because they hadn't had any stretch, that kind of ended... Well anywho all of the plants have been topped to have 3 tops. Two of them spent 1 week more than the other two in veg, but they're all fairly large at this point.
Enjoy!

looking good so far keep us updated

Updating now, I'm roughly 3 weeks from harvest and the girls are looking great, plus I have a new female super sativa plant. I'm excited to see how well it grows. 1 of the plants though is rather bleached in places and kinda got messed up. One of the pics is a branch that got severely bleached, cut off and placed in a "vase." I'm hoping for good yield and the smell of them is amazing. I also just gave them each a full gallon of water and full flower nutes after a 1/2 gallon 1/2 strength nutes a few days ago to get them accustomed to the new CNS17 bloom nutes. I intend to give them one last big dose of nutes and then I'm going to give only water and molasses for the rest of the time. Here are some pics!

looking, good - will they fatten up much more? since you only have a few weeks till harvest?

Hows the blackstar coping with 4 plants? could it manage more do you think?

Subd

The plants are taking longer than expected, but they are starting to fatten up quite nicely. I'm switching their schedule to 8-14 to remain on a 22 hour schedule to force it to finish a little earlier. I've been lazy and haven't placed the light high enough so the spread isn't very good, but where the light is hitting, the plants bulk up. I've got 5 plants in there and are looking damn fine for the small space they have. The next plants I do will not veg for nearly the same time. The plants smell so minty its incredible. In addition to the light change, I am drying the roots out right now to force the plant to use its nutes and after that I intend to start flushing with water and molasses.

When you go to flush with the intention of removing nutrients form the soil be sure to first move the plants to an area where the pots can drain freely because you'll want to put about twice as much water through as the pot can hold in order to actually flush out nutrients. If you only water until there is slight run-off the result is that you make the nutrients already in the soil more available to the plant. Also, flushing with molasses will increase the soil activity by feeding the organisms in the soil and further promote uptake of nutrients by the plant.

Don't you want to first force the plant to eat what's in the pot?

It depends whether your goal is to simply water and use the nutrients in the soil or to flush the soil. Flushing is meant to remove the nutrients available in the soil, forcing the plant to use the nutrients it has already taken in and giving a smoother taste.

I consider a slow build up as you give the plant a day or two with full access to nutes and water then drown the shit out of em.

So what happened?

The plants realized they had been grown for a purpose like lambs to the slaughter and in a selfish act of rage smoked themselves up until there was nothing left but ash. Fucking plant rage. Lost 3 crops to that shit.

I had to. Just browsing and happened to see an unfinished ending. . .