My new plants are HATING my new t8 leds!!!!

So i have bought from barrina before and im not knocking their products,they make great lghts at a very affordavle price,that being said,i bought these t8,2 foot leds.they are 24watt full spectrum.every time i put my plants under these lights they droop and just look incredibly unhappy,put them back under my 6500k white light barrinas and within 2 hours they are perked right back up!i did tgis 3 times so its this full spectrum light 100%.
The only thing i can think of is they dont likre the red spectrum!they acted the same way when i put them under my floraflex 700 watt led at 50%.its a full spectrum light.
Alk the hyoe of leds and im tginking i made a huge mistake here.im prsying tgat they are just a kittle too young to handle the full spectrum,im exchanging the t8's,but i cant return the floraflex which was not cheap.here is a pic of them under the 6500k,i dont have a oic of them undr the fulk spectrum,should have taken one. any led pros want to chime in here?
Thank you

Oh,and they are on the bathroom sink cause im building a new grow room in tge next 4-5 days

I'm FAR from an expert...more like an LED hack. I'll start by saying that I grew for 25 years+ under HID.

Bottom line...while I own too many of them...I'm just not impressed with "LED". I've never seen so many "Cal-Mag" deficient plants in my life...nor have I ever grown such paltry looking things...until I switched to LED. I dunno what it is but IMO...there's something there (or missing).

Fortunately, I still have far too many ballasts/hoods in the shed...and I'm thinking...if I grow indoors at all (outdoor rules on yields)...I'm gonna switch back. I know that's off the mark for your grow...but I wanted to mention it cus I think a lot of folks are chasing light-driven problems these days but don't realize it. I only see a few grows where things look really dialed in. That's different than the old days. But I digress...

good luck with your grow!

Gsplover11 said:

So i have bought from barrina before and im not knocking their products,they make great lghts at a very affordavle price,that being said,i bought these t8,2 foot leds.they are 24watt full spectrum.every time i put my plants under these lights they droop and just look incredibly unhappy,put them back under my 6500k white light barrinas and within 2 hours they are perked right back up!i did tgis 3 times so its this full spectrum light 100%.
The only thing i can think of is they dont likre the red spectrum!they acted the same way when i put them under my floraflex 700 watt led at 50%.its a full spectrum light.
Alk the hyoe of leds and im tginking i made a huge mistake here.im prsying tgat they are just a kittle too young to handle the full spectrum,im exchanging the t8's,but i cant return the floraflex which was not cheap.here is a pic of them under the 6500k,i dont have a oic of them undr the fulk spectrum,should have taken one. any led pros want to chime in here?
Thank you

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I don't have any experience on this matter. Im curious, did you try raising the lights? Or were the lights not close enough? Could it have something to do with light distance from plants?

It has nothing to do with light distance

That would be more of a burn issue,and i dont think its intensity either as the t8s are only like 44 watts

Very peculiar. I actually just bought some of those exact lights. Im setting them up on Tuesday. I will let you know if I have the same issue. I hope I don't have the same issue. Lol. Otherwise Im sending them back immediately.

When I swapped to led from t5s the plants looked like wilty and crap, I used 96w to replicate the 96w of t5s but that was way too much.

To get equall t5 output from led I only needed 33w or 43w of power, led has more output and less heat for the environment.

If you keep your temps up and dim it by 60/70% to star with i think you'll see a difference.

I've got a lot of complaints about led compared to hid with its silky spectrum lol.

Jfc it's been age's since I measured the output but it was either 33w or 44w and I think it was 33w?

Star Dog said:

When I swapped to led from t5s the plants looked like wilty and crap, I used 96w to replicate the 96w of t5s but that was way too much.

To get equall t5 output from led I only needed 33w or 43w of power, led has more output and less heat for the environment.

If you keep your temps up and dim it by 60/70% to star with i think you'll see a difference.

I've got a lot of complexity about led compared to hid with its silky spectrum lol.

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Do you think when the plants get okder they will do well under the full spectrum?

Gsplover11 said:

Do you think when the plants get okder they will do well under the full spectrum?

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Yes I think they'll be fine with gradually increasing the intensity.

I hope so...

Time will tell

Gsplover11 said:

So i have bought from barrina before and im not knocking their products,they make great lghts at a very affordavle price,that being said,i bought these t8,2 foot leds.they are 24watt full spectrum.every time i put my plants under these lights they droop and just look incredibly unhappy,put them back under my 6500k white light barrinas and within 2 hours they are perked right back up!i did tgis 3 times so its this full spectrum light 100%.
The only thing i can think of is they dont likre the red spectrum!they acted the same way when i put them under my floraflex 700 watt led at 50%.its a full spectrum light.
Alk the hyoe of leds and im tginking i made a huge mistake here.im prsying tgat they are just a kittle too young to handle the full spectrum,im exchanging the t8's,but i cant return the floraflex which was not cheap.here is a pic of them under the 6500k,i dont have a oic of them undr the fulk spectrum,should have taken one. any led pros want to chime in here?
Thank you

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Just trying to clarify, you have 48W of T8 led total, and how many watt total is your white light T8s?

I don't have any answers sorry, but I'm watching to learn and see what happens. My feeling is fluorescents create nice even diffused light similar to a cloudy spring day which young plants must freaking love. I don't have much fluorescent practice except a long time ago and I noticed the plants did better under a blue grow light fluorescent bulb compared to a typical shop light fluorescent which I'm sure is very old news.

Gsplover11 said:

So i have bought from barrina before and im not knocking their products,they make great lghts at a very affordavle price,that being said,i bought these t8,2 foot leds.they are 24watt full spectrum.every time i put my plants under these lights they droop and just look incredibly unhappy,put them back under my 6500k white light barrinas and within 2 hours they are perked right back up!i did tgis 3 times so its this full spectrum light 100%.
The only thing i can think of is they dont likre the red spectrum!they acted the same way when i put them under my floraflex 700 watt led at 50%.its a full spectrum light.
Alk the hyoe of leds and im tginking i made a huge mistake here.im prsying tgat they are just a kittle too young to handle the full spectrum,im exchanging the t8's,but i cant return the floraflex which was not cheap.here is a pic of them under the 6500k,i dont have a oic of them undr the fulk spectrum,should have taken one. any led pros want to chime in here?
Thank you

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You might want to ask the sunni or curious2garden to move this thread to the LED section.

I don't know that the spectrum of a T8 looks like - can you post a picture of the spectrum.

The spectrum of a 6500k light is shown here:



Is blue heavy which is used for plants in the vegetative stage. Blue photons inhibit cell expansion so plants grown under a lot of blue light will tend to be short and compact. That's desirable in many situations but there's a "blue photon penalty" when it comes to yield. Typically, growers will use lights with a blue heavy spectrum in veg and then switch to a light that has a high percentage of red in the spectrum in flower.

Red photons do not inhibit cell expansion, the promote cell expansion and they're significantly more electrically efficient than diode that generate blue photons. That's where legacy growers used HPS lamps which have a high percentage of red.

The reason to ask for the spectrum of your light is that, per Bugbeee, grow lights should have at least 4% blue in their spectrum so as to avoid malformed plants. That number looks an awful lot like the percentage of blue that the Mars has in one of their new "greenhouse" lights.





It would be surprising is the T8's don't have some blue in them. The 4% number can't be a trade secret so I'd have to ask - what else changed when you went from the T8 to the 6500k light?

Re. HPS to LED - the spectra are different, one difference being that LED's don't heat the plant and the grow space the way HPS does. I've seen research done that compares HPS to LED and there's no mention of any difference in nutrients so I suspect that it was an environmental issue (different temperature = different VPD = different transpiration rates = different nutrient uptake) that causes nutrient issues.

White LEDs are phosphor coated blues so usually plenty of blue. I don’t think the wilting is directly related to any white spectrum. Been raising plants with mostly white “full spectrum” LEDs for over 10 years here, never experienced that wilt from lights.

I think its the red spectrum

Gsplover11 said:

It has nothing to do with light distance

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Did you increase air temperature?
Because you need to run them generally higher air temp under LED, especially so in veg.

im not sure what or why it is but i've been using combos of led and a couple of old floros in a veg tent and its worked much better, after they had initially not liked the same led by itself.

i tried the same thing in my flower tents, a cmh and/or hps inbetween 2 leds, sat either side. You can really see the plants prefer it, a dimmer is essential with big leds, i have to keep them on quite low. 50 - 100w usually even in flower, or they just start to look sick, adding extra calmag seems to help.

Gsplover11 said:

I think its the red spectrum

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It would be a good thing to know. FWIW, their spectra are a bit unusual to me.