Happy Holidays, fellow 420 posters! Love you all! You're some of the classiest, kindest people to be found anywhere on forums, and not a day goes by that I don't appreciate it.
Well then....that being said Gray...and your success w/ Destroyer i'l go ahead and give it a go after these Mazar's run thru a couple of rounds! I think i'l go ahead, as well,and order them right now to avoid stock shortages. They also come in different quantities of Fem seeds ,so that gets me stoked. D.P. has been around and has obviously hooked up w/ the right dudes to get this new strain out to us.
I will no doubt find myself going back to your old journals by the time i actually get to grow it.
With growing it in Doc's. gear the flowering will prolly go for a good 11/13 weeks or so ,but it'l be worth it with yield,im sure! We all know the quality will be there
Have a great day and thanks . Goin for a stella!
I'm looking forward to watching you grow a Destroyer in your distinctive monster-style.
Very happy for you GT! Its great to see the jungle take a turn for the better, I know of the demoralizing effects having your garden sub par for any duration can have...and just in time for the holidays too
only took about 7 PAGES to get re caught up lol
Plants look great, nice and green def getting the HB shine back!
Congrats on the Destroyer harvest too incase I didn't say back when you chopped...good ol short term memory
Happy holidays and happy new year!!!
Yeah, I'm startled at how demoralizing it is! Sheesh. *mutter* Now I know how big of a hole a guy can blow in his perpetual with just a couple hiccups. Bah.
Taking notes
I´m thinking on upgrading from HID to LED.
On the oher side, Gray, I followed your previous journal some time ago and I gotta say its a shame what happened to your garden, your plants were some of the most beautiful specimens I´ve seen. Those Jamaican Dream you owned were Fkn A! I tried to grow it once but she went hermie so I culled it, that was before I went High Brix though. Anyway, its great that you figured the problem out, we are all learning with you.
I'll keep hangin around the thread and I look forward to see more of your kickass HB plants.
Greetz!
Thank you so much, Engorage! I'll be back on track soon. Nexus and Blue Blood both look very promising so far.
Merry Christmas Gray.....
Merry Christmas to you, Dennise!
I spent a few Christmases in the South Carolina Piedmont, a lot like your neighborhood - I can smell the mountain dampness as I type.
For a Northerner, it smells so sweet and enveloping. All the best to you and yours!
Happy Holidays Greytail. This comment about spread was exactly what I was thinking. I'm looking into using the tax return for upgrading from CFLs to LED and this company makes the most sense to me. My grow space is a tiny, tiny closet with only 2'x14" usable space. I'm growing two Autos (THC Bomb and Buddha Magnum) and I'm trying to figure out the best approach. I was considering either one small unit with cfl supplementation for the lower areas and sides or two small units, one over each plant and cfl supplementation if necessary. Two units in such a tight space seems like a bit of overkill.
The sunrise, sunset feature is attractive to me as well. I can't see how the plants wouldn't appreciate it. I'm sure the worms in the pots would appreciate it as well. I just don't know if it would make enough difference in such a small space to justify the added expense of the controller. Any thoughts on that? Do you believe your plants have responded appreciably better to the gradual spectrum changes afforded by the controller? Can the lights be run without the controller?
I'm still making my way through your journal. I found you just as it was time to ramp up Christmas Cookie baking, so I haven't had the time to do much reading or research. My apologies if I'm asking you to be redundant.
Time to make bread balls for Babolki. Enjoy the celebration.
Good to see you here, Sweetsue!
I've spent a lot of time considering a veg cabinet 20"x48", so I've had to think about heat and penetration and clearance, etc. It's kinda complicated, isn't it?
CFLs give the best clearance because you run them a couple inches from the canopy, but they give off a lot of heat when you have enough of them to flower decently, and they're not very efficient - high power use. LEDs would seem to be the obvious solution, but they need at least a foot of clearance and more like 2 feet to allow all the individual LEDs to blend and spread. In a full height space that's not much of an issue, though - I want a double-decker veg cab, so height is an issue. HPS is a possibility, but again, a lot of heat.
So ... LEDs. This Intelligent-Gro panel of mine shocked me when I swapped out my 600W hps. It's MUCH cooler. Not a little bit, a LOT. The laws of physics don't really allow for big differences. In a closed system, if you pump in 600 watts, you're gonna produce 600 watts of "heat" - doesn't matter how. But there must be some sort of absorption effect, the light "heat" being absorbed by the plants more than the heat "heat". In my 4x4 room, vented with a feeble 50cfm duct, I went from an 8 degree temp rise to a 2 degree rise. These panels produce more light and less heat, maybe because of the 10 band spectrum, better tuned to the plants' actually needs.
Your space is just over 2 sqft, so you need to be running roughly 100 watts of LED. 90 watts would be enough, but 180 would be better, with a much better spread. You could mount 'em high and let the plants grow up to them.
As far as the sunrise/sunset thing, I did some brief searching on the subject and didn't find anything definitive. It's clearly not something obviously better - subtle if anything. But ... the other half of the question - do they suffer from less light at sunrise/sunset - is a different matter. It's mostly a matter of how much light the plants receive in total, during the day. 10 hours of 600 watts is roughly equal to 12 hours of 500 watts. That's the way the plant tissues calculate it - how much total light they got. So, in my case, I was using a 600W hps 12/12 with great results. I replaced it with a 540W LED, which produces more usable light per watt, so more light intensity for the plants. The sunrise/sunset saves me juice, running nearer to 450W spread out over the day, it probably is better for the plants, allowing gradual hormone buildup and waning, instead of sudden, and I still end up with more total daylight than I had with hps. Win, win, win.
What I see in my plants under the Intelligent-Gro is obviously denser trich production, and no noticeable slowdown in the growth metrics - rate, size, etc. So, I see no
negative in the sunrise/sunset program. If you compared two panels exactly the same power though, one with the dimming and one without, the non-dimming would always outproduce the other because the plants would be getting more total daylight.
I just believe that programmability is the future of LED tech, and Intelligent-Gro was the first to introduce it. It's not just the fun sunrise/sunset idea. With individual control over each of three bands, red, blue, full, there's all sorts of fun things we can try. For instance, as in your case if you get two 90s, you can dim the entire panels to save power and crank it back up when you think you need more. With a 50,000 hour lifespan, I'm all set for the future.
Oh, and yes, you can run the panel without the controller. Many of the initial product testers don't use the controller. It just runs at full power like any other panel. But ... I don't see much advantage in buying the panel without being able to use the programmability.
Some of the youngsters I have now were started that way. It's nice to be able to hold them in cups while I wait to see if the planted ones take.
I can just imagine them chilling out under the mulch, doing their thing when suddenly they are blasted by lights coming on and have to run for cover. I'm just starting a no-till, so the worms are there to stay. They deserve consideration too.