Growing certainly isn't worth killing yourself over.
Hey Fert, I do have a journal, it's the perp link in my sig, we are coming up on our 3rd harvest. I do run cobs, I have a fixture running 4x50w 3500k and 2 660nm Osrams for up to 250w, and another fixture running 2x100w 3000k for up to 210w, but I don't run them all out. I do use co2.Yeah I am kind of in the opposite boat, I have to shut it down in the summer because the heat becomes too intense. I haven't ever really tried to sacrifice quality for quantity though, because then I just end up smoking more to get the same relief.
Okay, now this has my attention. Do you have a journal I can read through? Those lights look a bit fancier than your run of the mill MH/HPS setup. Are they COBs?
A little lighting conundrum...
So my last cycle with Alaskan Thunderfuck, I had to put my T5 in my tent at the same time so I was getting 515 watts. (Ok I'm breaking 400 watts, but it's my thread!) But the reason why I did so was because my plants stretched off on me, and I knew I wouldn't be able to get light penetration to the lower growth so I hung the T5 on the side to light the lower branches. I still got about 258 grams of smokeable bud, so I figure that at pretty much exactly .5 GPW.
I wonder if I got them to not stretch out so much, say keep them at 2 ft max, if my CMH alone would have been able to accomplish the same yield. I was pretty impressed it did so well even so high up, but I could noticably tell it got much dimmer it got in the tent without the T5 too.
I still can't really add any more watts so I have been deliberating about running the T5 and CMH side by side. I usually use the T5 in a separate veg tent, attempting to cycle but never really got the hang of it. Seems like it might be better used in conjunction with the CMH, but I also think that the CMH would have done well too if I had trained the plants better.
.)
You think if I had cut the lower bud sites off the ones up too would have grown bigger buds? In the past I feel like I have always taken off too many flowering sites without the ones left compensating, so I didn't want to do any pruning.I'd reckon so, assuming that it's a relatively productive strain (IDK). Your effective canopy thickness was the distance from the top of the tallest plant to the lowest bud in the grow space. Had you kept the undergrowth pruned and trained the upper mass to be on a flat plane, you could have kept that single 315-watt light closer to the majority of your buds, methinks - and possibly even managed to harvest more than you ended up getting. (If all other conditions were 100%, of course - as usual, if light-energy wasn't your limiting factor, then... not so much
I wonder how much plant size comes into it though. If plant X is half the size of plant Y, but plant X has twice the light energy, with equal water/nutrients, does plant X yield the same amount as plant Y?
Umm feel free to not respond if the conversation has become that tiresome for you.
Those seem like strong little lights for sure. I haven't been interested in them, but whenever someone mentions the costs of building them it kind of turns me away. I've heard people say you need $400-$500 to put one together.
No problem, didn't wanna be a hassle. I see what you mean now, thanks. It seems the only way to really get answers, practically, would be to do side-by-side grows to test each variable. Otherwise it's a long road of learning cycle-by-cycle.
Sounds a little more affordable. They need some kind of driver as well don't they? I know the chips are on board, so is it just a matter of wiring leads from one power source in daisy-chain to each light? I know there are a ton of guides to do it, but I haven't really got an "in a nutshell" summation of it in my mind still. The heatsinks seem pretty straight forward, I have experience with those working on desktop computers so I know where I can get some fans and thermal paste to make sure they work well.
That sounds pretty interesting. Did you just remove the LEDs from the Mars and replace them with the COB?
Ah okay see I didn't know you could have individual drivers, I've mostly seen them driven by one. I've seen some people put them on pretty cool looking light racks that fill up a 4x4 space, so they're pretty much just little strips of alluminum with the COBs on them and the driver in the center, but I'm guessing those are the more complicated/costly builds?
