White Widow First Grow

[philthegeek]

Potted up the 6 cuttings from my known, non-hermie, female plant today. In the spacebox veging. 2 were showing a goodly amount of roots out of their jiffy pots so well pleased.

Will harvest the current grow a week after the seeds look nice and brown i think. Then harvest the 3 males i am maintaining once i have a seed supply.

I'll let the hermie clones i have flowering in the main tent keep going until the tent is needed for a proper grow of 4 of the female cuttings from my one that never went hermi.

If i have more than 4 of these establish think i will use those the spacebox to vege em bushy and and short. Then try the feminised seed thing on them to get seed from the plant i have that is least likely to go hermie.

Few changes am planning for second grow.

Will use larger pots and less of them. Vege for longer. Let the plants get a bit taller before i start to LST and go for horizontal growth.

Have been considering going hydro, but decided like the "buffering" inherent in a soil mix grow.

For lights, i have a 600W HPS in a 1.2 x 1.2m tent at the moment. By the time i start second grow I will have sorted some DIY 50W COB LEDs. That's an experiment with some cheap Chinese chips from eBay mounted on heat sinks.

Have a mate who can do the electrical hookup (these are "driverless" chips) such that if they will be safe and properly earthed. I'll mount them up so they are behind thin acrylic to keep fingers away from connections. Have seen some setups online that seem to me to be really quite dangerous.

That would draw 300W out of the wall for 6 x 50 units and i suspect give me better light distribution. Will do some PAR comparisons as i have access to a proper light meter for that. At the moment looks like i can build a 50W unit (if my cunning plan works) for about AU$30 each.

Anyway, have time to do some bench testing on lights. One other possibility is to keep the HPS and mount up two 50W LEDs either side. Ok, bumps up power use to 800W out of the wall....but the light intensity could be pretty good.

Will be coming into hot time of year for second grow so think will have to schedule for lights on at night.

Anyhow, fun tinkering woT !!!

 

[Flavormaker]

Just caught up w journal. I'm on similar time line. Was worried about hermaphrodite on day 22 flower.

 

[Flavormaker]

 

[philthegeek]

So....my grow 15 weeks from germination and 7.5 weeks in flower. Seeds shaping up nicely. Some going brown with stripes / spots. reckon i will harvest my main 5 plants in a week or so when more seeds ready. Will push on with some clones and see how they go. When they finish will plant some seeds from my hermies in a couple of months and see if they are all female??

Been playing with lights. Bought some gear off eBay to do some test pieces with. Have workshop available with lots of off cuts of things, good bandsaw and a wunderful bid sheet metal bender. Anyway........

All 50W, "driverless" chips from China off eBay. Wired up to 240V. Built in so output through 98% transmission acrylic as i really dont want to electrocute myself or burn the shed down.

Made up a 1 chip unit and tried it as a passive heat sink. Within 10 mins the heat sink was at 104 degrees C. Turned off before something melted.

Put a 12v computer fan on it, and then it maxed out at 36 degrees C.

Found some 240V cooling fans so both these test units use those now. No need for separate 12V supply.

1 chip unit runs @ about 42 degrees C, 3 chip unit @ 35 degrees C. There is no discernible flickering.

light output a bit disappointing when measured.

I did some tests on other LED units. Best one was a "600W" 2 chip COB LED off the shelf for about AU$180. Draws 110W out of the wall according to specs. Second best a "600W" with about the same 110W draw but multiple "epistar" chips spread out on a panel. That was about AU$90 off eBay.

All light readings PAR (umoles) @ 30cm below the center of the unit.

"600W" COB 835
"600W' epistar 293
My 1 chip "50W " 124
My 3 chip "150W" 285

So, its on par with the commercial off the shelf "epistar' type.

Cost for parts to build the 3 chip unit? Hard to say as had things like acrylic in the workshop. But, i reckon about AU$60.

Will have to do some further tests. Would like to check the actual power draw and that may take a few days. Maybe they sent me the lower power chips they had advertised?? If that turns out to be the case i will try and get actual 50W from another supplier and rebuild.

Could be some value in a couple of 3 chip units, one either side of my 600W HPS?? All kinds of possibilities.

 

[philthegeek]

Did some test for current draw this morning. Tech down the hall had the right meter to measure amps in real time.

So, a=on a watts = Amps x Volts basis.

1 x 50W COB 1 chip Unit Draws 81W
Ambient PAR for test 008 Stable temp 40.8 Degrees C

@ 30cm distance getting 274 umoles PAR.


1 x 150W COB 3 chip Unit Draws 212W
Ambient PAR for test 008 Stable temp 33.8 Degrees C

@ 30cm distance getting 134 umoles PAR.

Mk3 may be done tomorrow.

Thinner acrylic but dont think that will make much difference to light transmission.
2x 80mm 240V cooling fans for redundancy. I think that is needed for safety as if you rely on the passive heat-sink the temp will get very high very fast.

6 x 50 W COB LED's mounted in two groups.

Much more neatly put together.

Expecting a draw of a little under 450W. If i can get that to work with its temp stable at something under 50 degrees C then i think i'll make that my "standard" LED unit and then look at footprint vs intensity and work out how many units to cover an area and at what $.

 

[philthegeek]

So, lots of nice looking stripy seeds. Happy with that and harvesting today and tomorrow.

Laborious collecting the seed but will have plenty to do another grow with. Am getting some "regular" seed (hand pollinated early on from a male), but most will be pollinated from hermaphrodite pollen. Which hopefully means females only for my next grow from seed.

"Spacebox" will be left on vege lighting settings and used for clones / cuttings for the next little while.

Main tent has some older clones in small pots that are about 4 weeks into flowering now. Will just let em go until i have clones or seedlings available to put in big pots in the main tent.

Much re-arrangement of lights and watering to happen methunketh. Will do a new journal next time.

Am still playing with building COB lights from the cheap Chinese components, but think will pop over to the grow lights forum for that.

Seeyahs elsewhere peeps!

 

[Amadeus Forzin]

Hope all is well in your world.

Thanks for sharing this grow with us.

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