Emmie's 6 Plant, True Living Organic, LED Grow Journal

Nothing much happening in the veg tent today, all of the girls are working on shaving another day off of their wet/dry cycles and I think by next weekend we will be down to two days between waterings. The new lights show up tomorrow and this too should help accelerate the growth, once I get them installed. I would guess that by mid next week I will need to up-pot to the final 3gal containers and we will get to sneak a look at these roots. I want to flip to bloom by mid January but I need at least a week or two in the final containers before I do.
420IS said:
Nice journal... learning loads. some crazy plants you have growing!!
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Glad to have you following along 420IS, and glad that you and I are both learning as we do this! I am proud of my girls, and they seem to be responding quite well to my old fashioned up-potting and wet/dry cycle ideas. Proof is in the pudding as they say. :)
 
Big Sparks said:
Just found this. Being a soil guy myself, I cant wait to go back and see what I've missed. So far so good...I like what I see. Now time to pull up a seat and go back to catch up on all the organic soil info and talk that I love so much! :)
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Glad to have you Big Sparks! You came in just in time... I am about to pull out the dandelion juice!
 
HiddenGrow said:
Nice Journal Emilya
I am pretty sure I have been looking at the exact light your using as a veg light. I was wondering how strong it is and the proof is in the pudding here. I cant wait to see the intensity of the new LEDs you're getting in. The coverage will be great. how big are they?
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Unfortunately the promised delivery date for the new lights for today was missed... I assume they will arrive tomorrow. Yes, I expect the coverage of the two 3000w lights is going to amazing... im really expecting to accidentally burn my plants a bit at first, even moving all the way out to 24". Two of them should completely blanket the tent and provide multisource light so there are very few shadows and good penetration into the canopy. I used a similar technique in flower using two 600w bulbs, one MH and one HPS. These two lights are each going to draw around 300w from the wall for a total of 600w of focused light exactly the spectrum that the plants need. 600w of LED power equates to 1200w of HID, roughly equivalent to what I used to run. I am expecting the LED however to do even better than the HID lights, and that is the purpose of this particular journal, to learn if this is true.
This 1000w light that I am using in veg is wonderful for this stage of growth and I could probably get by with putting 3 of these in my 2x4 for bloom and still get a good harvest, but that would be silly when I have access to these much bigger lights for roughly the same price. The 1000w light in use right now is drawing about 175w from the wall, and the rough estimate to a standard HID light is roughly twice that rating, so this thing should perform about the same as about a 400w HID bulb. All appearances in the veg tent right now seem to support this theory, and I am seeing growth very similar to when I ran a 400w MH bulb in veg, for about half the electricity and a fraction of the heat.
 
I was in the tent this evening getting ready for bedtime by lifting each of my plants to see how close they are to needing water. It looks like the bigger ones are going to be ready tomorrow, the rest probably the day after that. Things are still accelerating, but slowly, as a result of the strong LST training and wack-a-mole trimming of the dominant growth tips, and soon as I start letting things go vertical, they should start using the water a lot more quickly. The new lights will also help and this next watering is going to be very nutrient rich...
I plan on giving them with the water, 1 tbs of liquid fish, 1 tbs calmag, 1 tbs FF Big Bloom and 1 tbs of Emmie's distilled Dandelion fertilizer. This feeding will be like liquid rocket fuel and we should see some immediate strong growth as a result. Remember: Think of nutes as supplements designed to put into hyperdrive an already thriving plant.

So with that, here are some shots around the tent to highlight these thriving plants. Their ages are between 35-45 days old. Please excuse the red light... Emmie is a tired girl tonight and was too lazy to fire up the white light.
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Alright! These lights are a bit bigger physically than the 1000w but not significantly so. There is quite a bit better footprint however as these lights are recommended to be hung at around 20" distance from the plants instead of 12-15... so for the moment only one light would be sufficient for the space these 6 plants cover right now in veg... but what fun would that be? I have one installed at the moment and need to run to the hardware store for another extension cord to get the other one hooked up, so I will get that done after dinner.
The first stop for these lights was at my test bench so that I could accurately measure the power they were using in both veg and bloom settings. Here are the results from my ammeter:
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So, doing a little math, in the veg/full spectrum mode we are drawing 1.57amps x 120volts = 188.4 watts. In bloom/extra red mode she draws 2.29amps x 120volts = 275.8 watts. HID equivalent, by doubling these values and we get 377w and 549w. This is of course with each light, so with two of these, in veg we should have the equivalent of around 750w of HID light and in flower it will be around 1100w. This is the best test that I can think of to compare these LEDs with the two 600w HID lights I am used to running in flower... watt equivalent to watt.
 
I got my extra extension cord and now have both units hooked up and centered in the tent. Man alive, this is a lot of light, and this is just the veg setting! I suspect we are about to see a growth spurt. Several hours of this light so far, and no bad reactions at 18-19 inches away from the tops of the plants. I will check again at 1am, right before lights out.


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by the way... sitting here looking into this tent, in the veg mode, I don't see red light. The camera does, but I see a bit of pink being reflected off of the sides of the tent, but this full spectrum light looks almost white from here.
Here is another shot from the same angle as the last one, with the bloom switch on. In this position, from my vantage point it now looks like red LED bloom lights and the camera simply shows a deeper and stronger red.
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