LED grow lights

all good points, guys. thanks, i'm learning.

i realize these are new and we don't know much about them yet, so its a gamble. but i don't have an existing system... if it ain't broke don't fix it, stix. they make sense for me cuz of low power, low heat, and i'm using a cabinet, so they let me keep the lights close and keep the plants small. i've heard the red/blue spectrum is the best for flowering only.

soon i'll start a journal to let you know how it all goes, so far so good

and you can replace individual leds on a panel, cheap, if your good with a soldering pen.

lovenbuds
 
The grow with leds products definitely perform as well or better then hids. The XB Cool 400 is like a 400W HID. The ufo sounds good, but so did the plantbars, hopefully we will hear some reports on it. The other new one that sounds good is the procyon 100 at homegrowlights
 
The procyon is rated at 50,000 hours - thats 11 years of 12/12. That is a pretty common rating for LEDs, but what happens is they slowly dim and the rating is usually to half brightness. It wouldn't help to replace a single LED since all the LEDs will be the same half brightness after running for 11 years
 
sfhaze- thanks for posting about your experience here. I think many of us are interested in growing with led's. Any updates you can provide are helpful. Thanks again for what you've been able to tell us about your experience so far!!
 
What about adding LED to enhance your HID garden.. Maybe use the leds for the outside lower shoots?? I was thinking about doing this and was looking for info on LEDS when I stumbled across this... I was thinking either leds or cfl's..
 
Hmm............


The Luxeon star led isn't really like any other led. First off, they aren't rated in mcd any more because they produce way more light than any 3 or 5mm LED. They're now rated in lumens (lm) or flux, the same as light bulbs are rated in. If you look closely at the spec sheet for either the 1 watt or the 5 watt versions, it even states that the Luxeons are classed as a class 2 lasers. Even the spyder or superflux leds can't compare. Basically, depending on the color they are between 10 to 20 times brighter.

I think perhaps I might just look into this, especially when you can build them to suit your needs. Eg dim brighten colors.

Heres that site
 
Aren't those more for LCD tv's or something simular? They even run with the same red, blue, green (RBG) pattern TV's use. Still expensive but a litle better. At least you can get the tri cluster for $15.00 each. The green bulb will be useless as plants don't utilize the green spectrum. It's why a green bulb can be used during the dark cycle without interruption in the flowering cycle.
 
I'm going to do a bit of digging later when I get home. Having green would be nice, especially if you could dim the rest out. Would be nice to have a little sneak with some green light to check on your plants.
 
hi, i was also looking into leds for energy saving and thy do seem expensive but on ebat they have a vendor that sells these lights and they arent all that bad well at least not for me lol but im a newb and i dont have enough exp to judge on these kind of things. check this out
 
I have a friend who's a great gardner and experimenter who just tried to run 3 different grows with LED's. the first two he had problems with the LED's working right and had to enlist the manufacturer of the LED set up to get it set right. The 3rd everything ran right but the LED's preformed like crap. They seemed to veg plants alright...but sucked at flowering. I've heard others report basically the same thing. I personally have no experience with LED's and am only reporting what I've been told. I'm also not knocking the LED's. I'm suggesting everyone do some research and actually ask someone who has trialed them about their results before investing good money into these new lights. I myself have to account for every penny spent and can't afford to buy something that may or may not work. HID's are proven to work with great results.
 
The most mature plants are now on the 8th week of 12/12. They are very consistent in height and are all about 20 inches tall. Several of the plants have large great looking flowers. One Blueberry is a bit to tall at 25 inches but is off to the side a bit and otherwise looks great.

  • Blueberry - robust seedlings, fast to start flowering but maybe a little tall
  • Ice - wimpy seedlings(maybe I have a bad batch) but very fast to start flowering, just the right height and great looking.
  • El Nino - robust seedlings, medium to start flowering, some look very nice
  • Mazar - robust seedlings, slow to start flowering, still need more time to judge
A little behind is some cheese and brainstorm but it looks like most indoor rated strains should work.

A posting by Moose says the temperature delta from day to night effects the height so I may try running the heating pads at night only so that the temperature is constant or slightly higher at night.

The LEDs are working fine, they really seem like a valid choice for cabinet use. The power savings add up in places like California that increase the rate the more you use, rates start out at 10cents/KWHr but move up to 39cents/KWHr if you use a lot of power. Anyone paying $200/month or more for electricity can pay back the costs of the lights pretty quickly.
 
The results are in on the first complete run of 16 plants. The total dried yield was only 0.7oz. Many of the plants suffered from too much experimentation and other difficulties. Doing 3x the yield seems easily doable once it's all tweeked in, hopefully more.

Mazar started slow but ended up doing very good and the quality is just excellent. It stays short which really helps with this setup. One of the cheese's was a dwarf and it had the highest yield, the other was a bit tall like blueberry.

I've been shorting the time seedlings run at 24/0. Once the growth leaves the protoleaf behind (about 3 days after sprouting) they are moved to 12/12. Also, the heating pads are run only at night. The shorter plants do best with this setup and these tweeks seem to be helping.
 
I haven't tried Lowryder since the quality has been reported to be a bit ho-hum. There is lowryder2 and a bunch of new autoflowering varieties on the way. They may be a good solution but the quality - potency and taste of say the mazar is as good as anything I've tried and they grown less then 18 inches tall.
 

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