DIY led test open

I would like to share with you my personal test since in these years I have learned a lot from this forum it seems right to me to try to give something to this community. Obviously I'm a fan of DIY led configurations.

The test was carried out with two genetics to get feedback with more variables and the results are quite interesting

Strain 1 (sativa dominant)
4x4 (1.2m x 1.2m) 20 clone pots 7 l soil


800 watt
16 cxb 3590 db
Par range 300-1450
yield 776 g

600 watt
12 cxb 3590db
Par range 300-850
yield 735 g


640 watt Fotop 2 board
1600 lm301b +660 red
Par range 300-1150
yield 637 g

Strain 2(indica dominant)
4x4 (1.2 m x 1.2 m ) 20 clone pots 7 l soil

800 watt
16 cxb 3590 db
Par range 300-1450
yield 728 g


640 watt Fotop 2 Board
1600 lm301b +660 red
Par range 300-1150
yield 635 g


I wait for your results to understand something more..............

Solid results, congrats.
Weve tried some different versions of the fotop and like them alot. Did 700g average on 1x1.2m trays. But a lot less wattage, about 350 per tray. But we use about 2000 diodes per tray and keep the boards close

Yeah, I like to keep small diodes within 20 to 30cm, unless the plants show distress...
Sure, I don't start off there but, I don't take ages adjusting the light lower either.

Now with our mild winter here, 1 kW of LM561C only needs about 500W in dehumidifying, 120W in fans, and the A/C never even goes on. I'm at the end of flower, so I'm not even trying to get temps up either.

With incandesents, you need that A/C pumping all the time.

So it looks like the 600w cxb performed better than the 800w on a gpw basis.
I wonder if you supplemented co2 at all or if you rely on air exchange?

Going from memory , a few years back,

In one half of my 8x4 flower tent with same strains on both sides but staggered.

I had 700-740w of citizen 1825 90cri cobs and resulted in 924 gram.

Other side 560w of Quantum board v1 (2 x 260w kits) 868 gram.

Roughly I aim to get 8oz per 2x2 of space, though strain dependant.

Kenpark said:

I would like to share with you my personal test since in these years I have learned a lot from this forum it seems right to me to try to give something to this community. Obviously I'm a fan of DIY led configurations.

The test was carried out with two genetics to get feedback with more variables and the results are quite interesting

Strain 1 (sativa dominant)
4x4 (1.2m x 1.2m) 20 clone pots 7 l soil


800 watt
16 cxb 3590 db
Par range 300-1450
yield 776 g

600 watt
12 cxb 3590db
Par range 300-850
yield 735 g


640 watt Fotop 2 board
1600 lm301b +660 red
Par range 300-1150
yield 637 g

Strain 2(indica dominant)
4x4 (1.2 m x 1.2 m ) 20 clone pots 7 l soil

800 watt
16 cxb 3590 db
Par range 300-1450
yield 728 g


640 watt Fotop 2 Board
1600 lm301b +660 red
Par range 300-1150
yield 635 g


I wait for your results to understand something more..............

Click to expand...

More than wattage this makes me think about spread. 16 cobs in a 4x4 yields more than 12, and more than 2 boards that only cover less than 3/8ths of the cannopy (2x 3x1' boards over 16 square feet).

We ran some tests, without completly controlled results, and found that our best trays where either better covered by boards (2/3ds of cannopy covered by boards) or with an extra redleaning 2700k 90 cri spectrum.
In fact 240w of well distributed strips, 2700k, out did 480w of high hanging boards.

coreywebster said:

So it looks like the 600w cxb performed better than the 800w on a gpw basis.
I wonder if you supplemented co2 at all or if you rely on air exchange?

Going from memory , a few years back,

In one half of my 8x4 flower tent with same strains on both sides but staggered.

I had 700-740w of citizen 1825 90cri cobs and resulted in 924 gram.

Other side 560w of Quantum board v1 (2 x 260w kits) 868 gram.

Roughly I aim to get 8oz per 2x2 of space, though strain dependant.

Click to expand...

no co2 ....

Rocket Soul said:

Solid results, congrats.
Weve tried some different versions of the fotop and like them alot. Did 700g average on 1x1.2m trays. But a lot less wattage, about 350 per tray. But we use about 2000 diodes per tray and keep the boards close

Click to expand...

so you have about 3 board for tray that in total consume about 350 watts then 2 gpw ????

Kenpark said:

so you have about 3 board for tray that in total consume about 350 watts then 2 gpw ????

Click to expand...

Several different configs. 5 fotop boards over 2x 1.2 trays at max 150w per board without heatsinks. 3 boards over 2x1.2 at 250w per board. Or 240w in 12 vesta strips
We had 4.2kg from 6x1.2 trays using about 300-350 w per tray. About 2g/w but more on some trays as this is an average. Also mentionable: 11 week strain and loaaads of co2 as this was an openspace winter grow heated by gas heaters.

Rocket Soul said:

Several different configs. 5 fotop boards over 2x 1.2 trays at max 150w per board without heatsinks. 3 boards over 2x1.2 at 250w per board. Or 240w in 12 vesta strips
We had 4.2kg from 6x1.2 trays using about 300-350 w per tray. About 2g/w but more on some trays as this is an average. Also mentionable: 11 week strain and loaaads of co2 as this was an openspace winter grow heated by gas heaters.

Click to expand...

par range ?

800+ even over the cannopy on most, the 2700k was a bit less i think.

from what I could see with the quantum meter between 700 and 850 the best results are obtained between consumption and quality production. plants under 1200 to 1500 are very stressed, seem to grow below hps and the shape of the top is similar......

do you grow in sog or scrog ?

Rocket Soul said:

More than wattage this makes me think about spread. 16 cobs in a 4x4 yields more than 12, and more than 2 boards that only cover less than 3/8ths of the cannopy (2x 3x1' boards over 16 square feet).

We ran some tests, without completly controlled results, and found that our best trays where either better covered by boards (2/3ds of cannopy covered by boards) or with an extra redleaning 2700k 90 cri spectrum.
In fact 240w of well distributed strips, 2700k, out did 480w of high hanging boards.

Click to expand...

Sorry, thats thats supposed to read completly uncontrolled. Too late to edit.

Kp: no sog, it was too messy with so many plants and the risk of PM. We use a couple of nets but not really scorged. 6 plants per 1x 1.1m tray for a 1.20m wide cannopy in an aisle. 7 liter pots, coco, and defoliation and pruning on day one of flower. This way we can shape the plant and get the buds where we want them.

Rocket Soul said:

Sorry, thats thats supposed to read completly uncontrolled. Too late to edit.

Kp: no sog, it was too messy with so many plants and the risk of PM. We use a couple of nets but not really scorged. 6 plants per 1x 1.1m tray for a 1.20m wide cannopy in an aisle. 7 liter pots, coco, and defoliation and pruning on day one of flower. This way we can shape the plant and get the buds where we want them.

Click to expand...

wow 100 g in 7 liter pots ...
how many times do you flood the plants?

They get hand watered until they drink the same, aprox 4-5th week of flower. Then every second day with auto watering, about 10-15% run of.

More than a system its knowing your strain and controlling how it grows. Almost everything gets pruned on day 1 of flower. We leave a few places where the plant can grow. That way all the budsites are brand new growth. We do this mostly to make it easier to trim them, we self trim everything.

Have you tried this pruning system on many strains?
On the pruning technique I read many conflicting things I tried to do it and do a test on two strains with clones and one responded very well the other had a drop in production ... pruning done after two weeks of flower maybe it was too much late....

Kenpark said:

Have you tried this pruning system on many strains?
On the pruning technique I read many conflicting things I tried to do it and do a test on two strains with clones and one responded very well the other had a drop in production ... pruning done after two weeks of flower maybe it was too much late....

Click to expand...

No, we only done it this way on this cut. It stretches for about 3 weeks and finishes in 11 so plenty of time to bulk up weight.
The important thing is to know why you are doing it. Where do you want your buds and how deep do you want your cannopy? Look at your plant ready for flower and ask yourself where do i want the buds? What kinda bush do i want and what current terminal growth will give me that? Anything else gets cut, sucker branches, fans etc. Then we flower on low light for the first bit, to not get too much stretch which uses up plant reserves. When buds are formed stretch almost over we up the light and have 8 weeks to build nugmeat.
You can kinda see on some sucker branches (either new or missed) how well we done: if the sucker branch bud is normal sized and not small and larfy, ok. If its a huge bud coming from a small branch then maybe we left too little space to grow buds on, and could have yielded more acceptable bud if we had more sites. This was the case for the last crop, too small and over pruned. This finetuning is actually beyond my skills, i only consult with this grow

Its not really technique for yielding more, its for having bigger and easily trimable buds. The results we had were mainly due to it being a slightly random bumper crop (even hps did 1g/w) and loads of CO2 thx to gas heating.

coreywebster said:

So it looks like the 600w cxb performed better than the 800w on a gpw basis.
I wonder if you supplemented co2 at all or if you rely on air exchange?

Going from memory , a few years back,

In one half of my 8x4 flower tent with same strains on both sides but staggered.

I had 700-740w of citizen 1825 90cri cobs and resulted in 924 gram.

Other side 560w of Quantum board v1 (2 x 260w kits) 868 gram.

Roughly I aim to get 8oz per 2x2 of space, though strain dependant.

Click to expand...

so you had 740 watts of citizen in 4x4 ....
hydro or soil?
sog or scrog?

Rocket Soul said:

No, we only done it this way on this cut. It stretches for about 3 weeks and finishes in 11 so plenty of time to bulk up weight.
The important thing is to know why you are doing it. Where do you want your buds and how deep do you want your cannopy? Look at your plant ready for flower and ask yourself where do i want the buds? What kinda bush do i want and what current terminal growth will give me that? Anything else gets cut, sucker branches, fans etc. Then we flower on low light for the first bit, to not get too much stretch which uses up plant reserves. When buds are formed stretch almost over we up the light and have 8 weeks to build nugmeat.
You can kinda see on some sucker branches (either new or missed) how well we done: if the sucker branch bud is normal sized and not small and larfy, ok. If its a huge bud coming from a small branch then maybe we left too little space to grow buds on, and could have yielded more acceptable bud if we had more sites. This was the case for the last crop, too small and over pruned. This finetuning is actually beyond my skills, i only consult with this grow

Its not really technique for yielding more, its for having bigger and easily trimable buds. The results we had were mainly due to it being a slightly random bumper crop (even hps did 1g/w) and loads of CO2 thx to gas heating.

Click to expand...

I wanted to put them on gas heaters too, but I'm still not sure how to install them. there are manual ones without an outlet pipe but they do a lot of light .... then there are the automatic ones with the chimney .... how did you do it?

Kenpark said:

so you had 740 watts of citizen in 4x4 ....
hydro or soil?
sog or scrog?

Click to expand...

Yeah my flower tent was 4x8 and I switched out from hps in two stages.
The COBs were the first half switched over. So 4x4 area.
4 plants in 5gal cloth pots hand watered in coco.
Topped for 4-6 mains and super cropped.

I remember that one the easiest because it was my first crop with LED.

Not long after I tried a mini scrog, tricky to do when your perpetual and have separate veg and flower tents with little room to move.
So I did a 1.5x2ft screen, pulled 9.5oz dry off that and that was after losing about half oz to bud rot.
Now im in multiple smaller tents so im going to try to scrog 2x4 and 3x3 spaces once ive done playing with a few other things.
Hopefully I can extrapolate those figures.

If you use the chimney ones they will pull co2 out of the room. We had several solutions, lungroom and just a heater in the corner, facing away, behind a deposit. Watch out though the heaters eat o2 a lot. We had a few situations were they would turn off and not start due to no fresh air