what method do you do now and are you puilling better from them now?
Anyone doing over 3lb / 4x4 using LED's?
- Thread starter kdt15
- Start date
1000W SE gavita would be how many LED?
assuming that you're saying 750W LED (which i thought was a little much with 640 being the highest recommended amount of light)= 1000W DE Gavita
what kind of name is this type of grow? its neither scrog nor sog right?
do people wet trim commonly? thought it was more popular to do dry trim instead
can you shed light on how you made those LED's? looks sick!
Humple
Well-Known Member
It's an approximation. In general, when switching to LED, most folks seem to shoot for about 60% of their previous HPS wattage. At 750w, you'd be a little over that (for good measure). This also assumes that the LED fixture in question is appropriately configured for maximum uniformity.
what do you consider sufficient and not 'too much' light for a 4x4?
i only brought up 4x4 since people either use 4x4 tables or tents most commonly and the current simple LED solution of HLG covers a 4x4 footprint ideally.
greater yield with same power in a 5x5, is this due to penetration? got lost at the wall losses, cna you explain
got clarification, the 2.5 still needed about a week to cure, the 2.8 was full dry
coreywebster
Well-Known Member
Lots of people wet trim. More traditional to dry trim. Cleaner and easier wet IMO. Although im sure many would disagree.
growingforfun
Well-Known Member
I'm doing single plant scrog most times. I pretty much grow for personal at this point so I did what I could to make everything streamlined. This run I expect around 1.5 lb but I could be under or overshooting my guess from my 5x5 tent, I've gotten up to 830 dry from a single indoor plant. Pretty decent for a single plant grow. Being a scrog all the buds are extremely uniform so trimming is a quick job, every bud is about 2 thumbs wide an about 4 inches tall and theres almost 2 weeks to go.what method do you do now and are you puilling better from them now?
It's all very easy and low stress to only take care of a single plant in a small-ish tent like this.
In the past I was a medium scale medical grower doing 7200 kw grows, around 10kw counting the a/c's an fans.
More plants tends to have always given more more bud, while fewer plants gave me higher quality.
Oh an per lb, counting all my nutrients, dirt, power etc its costing me around $200
Edit to add, I probably spend less than a hour a week maintaining the plant.
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Humple
Well-Known Member
I would shoot for 600 watts of LED in a 4x4.
The greater yield under equivalent power is due to the fact that you're actually getting more light for your watts with LED. If you get the right LED, it will be considerably more efficient than HPS, which means less of your wattage is waste-heat.
Wall losses occurs when light hits the wall instead of the plants. Yes, in a tent that wall will be reflective, but you're still losing some photons that could be hitting the canopy. A DE (or 750w of LED) in a 4x4 will have to be hung higher to prevent burning and stress, which means more of that light is lost to the walls. Appropriately sized fixtures can be hung in a sweet spot that gives you maximum light to the plants, and minimum to the walls.
Humple
Well-Known Member
I'm with you. Wet trimming is waaaaay less hassle, and I don't notice the quality difference that a lot of the dry trimmers talk about.Lots of people wet trim. More traditional to dry trim. Cleaner and easier wet IMO. Although im sure many would disagree.
CobKits
Well-Known Member
why? its easy to match the photon of a 1000W of DE with 7-800W of good LED. No reason it cant be done. nice garden BTW
just take whatever wattage the gavita is running at and multiply by 0.7 to 0.8 to account for the difference in efficiency (and keep in mind that a lot of people run their gavitas at up to 1150W)
its 100% a space, strain, and grower skill issue. there is nothing you can do with an HPS that you cant do with 70-80% of the wattage with LED. If you believe otherwise, youve got several years of threads to catch up on
Humple
Well-Known Member
So you figure 70% is closer than 60%? Seems a lot of peeps 'round these parts have that success at around 60%. But then again, perhaps that just means they could have done better with HPS!
CobKits
Well-Known Member
DE HPS throws 1.7 umol to the plants. 60% less wattage would necessitate 2.83 umol/J at system level
not aware of any commercial fixtures doing that
now an SE at 1.3 umol/J, easy to match with 60% of the wattage, you only need 2.16 umol/J, which lots of top end fixtures can deliver these days
Humple
Well-Known Member
Excellent clarification, as always.
MrStickyScissors
Well-Known Member
Yea like 4 inch cubes
Prawn Connery
Well-Known Member
Vertical HPS. It's a 4'x4'x6' box on 6" legs. Two 600w bulbs hang inline down the middle of the box. There is a floor fan at the bottom blowing straight up over the bulbs, air-cooling them, and an extractor fan above pulling the air out (which you can see in the photo). A cylindrical trellis is wrapped around the bulbs and fans, and the plants are grown around the outside - up to eight at a time.
The plants are grown in 2-gallon pots of coco that are auto fed by drippers on timers. The waste nutrient drains out the bottom and out into a vege garden outside - that's why the box is on legs, so the plumbing hoses (nutrient inlet, waste outlet) can enter and exit underneath. There's a hole in the bottom of the box, which also lets in fresh air and keeps light leaks to a minimum.
You'll notice the plants are not typically top-heavy - they grow bushy on all sides because they have complete side-lighting. You get much more yield for the same height, and no wasted light, as the bulbs are completely surrounded by plants.
It's a great way to grow tall sativas, as you can see below. But I also like to grow a bit of variety, so I didn't always maximise my space., and always had various height plants in there.
I've never really liked horizontal HPS set-ups, as most of the light is reflected off the hoods, which probably only have 80% efficiency, and heat is trapped underneath. With vertical growing, no light is reflected and all the heat is ducted away. It's also a good use of a small footprint, as you are obviously growing vertically.
There are two reasons why the big room I designed has horizontal HPS lamps. Firstly, my mate was skeptical of LEDs and wanted to use HPS. "Fair enough" I said. He then wanted to grow vertically, like me. But I said that eventually he would come around to LED and that it would be easier to covert if we set the grow up initially as a horizontal grow.
Horizontal grows are a little less work than vertical, as you need to do a lot of plant maintenance to ensure they grow around the light and fill in all the gaps.
Here are some other old grows that were different to the previous one I posted. They weren't alway 3.5lb - depending on strain (I always multi-cropped) - but the best I had was close to 4lb (60oz) in that 4x4, growing a bunch of haze plants similar to the one below.
Prawn Connery
Well-Known Member
They're just QB324 panels with heat sinks connected by 50x25mm L frame. The L-frame is turned upside down to reflect a bit of ambient light back in, but also to act as a blind spot when working on the plants (so you don't get blinded walking past!) and finally the frames can be rested on the floor without damaging the LEDs if need be. The QB324 panels are side-by because I originally designed this system to be one plant per 3x3 to minimise plant numbers (for legal reasons), and I wanted good penetration in the middle and wasn't so concerned with the light around the edges - which is supplemented by overlapping light from the next station anyway.
Each QB324 panel (there are two per frame) can be driven at up to 250W, but I have them dialled down to 200W each (400W per frame/station) on a HLG-480 driver. So, 400W LED replaces 600W HPS, but I can dial the LED up to 500W if we don't get the results we want. However, I suspect 400W will be enough, and any more may result in bleaching.
