First LED run

[wingwing]

Hello everyone,

My space is mostly sorted now just the extraction fan and ducting to put in and a bit of wiring. I'm hoping this diary I can ask me some questions and get me some answers.... even if it's 3 different answers from 3 different people   

It's been a while since I grew indoors and I've never grown under led. I've tried not to get too caught up in the deep dive and get this thing sorted before putting plants in but some clones became available so at the minute the grow doors are open and a fan is circulating air. I have a dehumidifier that is keeping the RH acceptable. Temp not an issue yet. I still have a lot of finishing up to do but they're in veg so I got a bit of time.

Herewith the details!

Space:

1m x 1.7m x 2.2m high

Extraction:

6" with speed controller

Passive intakes - 3 x 6"

Temp:

oil heater hooked up to a TH16

Light:

 550w bar light with the 561 diodes (75cm X 115cm ). It has a sonoff timer and a power supply that can be dimmed with a screwdriver. Currently on full whack and 130cm from the plant tops as I just put the clones in there and I didn't want to freak them out. 

Strains: 

Blueberry Hashplant / Bruce Banner / Mandarin Mints / Pineapple Express / Super Cheese / Gorilla Glue

 I was only going to do two strains, a head and a body stone, but got a bit carried away and got 6 different strains in the end. Planned to grow 4 plants  but got an extra two in case I cocked something up. It's been known to happen. I also didn't match the growing properties because I didn't know the details for each strain but I did recognise a few names and know I've got some tall ones in there so this could get interesting.

They're still in 1L pots, was going to pot into 20L final containers today / tomorrow

IPM so far:

Yesterday: Neem spray (1ml / litre)

Tomorrow: Margaret Roberts Worm (1 leaf a caterpillar had munched on. No sign of the caterpillar.

Friday: Coppersoap if I can remember to buy it

Nutes:

Biogrow / Biobloom / Root Juice 

Microbes:

Biocult Mycorrhizae at transplant

Soil:

FF, the green bag

Water: 

So far rain water with ph up. Going forward either rain water or tap water left for a day and ph down.

 

OK I think that's all except I should probably put a pic up. Let me do that now...

My first questions:

1 - Does everybody put into the final container or do you pot up again? I was going to go to 4L containers and then into the 20L grow bags but now I'm thinking I ight put them straight into final container so the can get over transplant, then top them.

2 - Is 20L too big? I have 15L soil in each container at the moment resting.

3 - I had planned 4 plants. Is 6 doable in this space if all the clones survive my heavy hands?

Thanks everyone, looking forward to this.

wing

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 4, 2022 by wingwing

[ORGANinc.]

Definitley doable in the space, pot them up to 20l straight and veg the space, once you filled the space some what you can flip

[wingwing]

Thanks man will do that then. I'm worried I'm low on light for the full length of the space but I guess we will see!

[ORGANinc.]

2 hours ago, wingwing said:

Thanks man will do that then. I'm worried I'm low on light for the full length of the space but I guess we will see!

Not even slightly, got ample!

[Prom]

16 hours ago, wingwing said:

Water: 

So far rain water with ph up. Going forward either rain water or tap water left for a day and ph down.

Which doffus told you to use Up or Down on your organic feeding? You turn it into chemical feeding with a single drop of those chemicals. Use biological Up/ Down, like Lemon juice/vinegar and liquid lime stone. But once more, if you run organic in soil, you can skip the pH hassle, not needed at all.  As long as you use rain water, you are good. Moment you use tap water, you run chemical again.

Edited July 5, 2022 by Prom

[ORGANinc.]

17 minutes ago, ORGANinc. said:

Not even slightly, got ample!

I wont delete this but, I welcome arguments  

Lol. Ok maybe your need more. They say minimum 480w per m/2, which I found to be quite a lot(but who am I., dont hit heavy numbers). However, i'm not actively feeding my plants.  

Food for thought. 

Edited July 5, 2022 by ORGANinc.

[wingwing]

Thanks so light's good for the space i'm happy about that. 

[ORGANinc.]

15 hours ago, wingwing said:

Thanks so light's good for the space i'm happy about that. 

How's the progress on the room coming along?

[Naughty.Psychonaut]

20 hours ago, ORGANinc. said:

I wont delete this but, I welcome arguments  

Lol. Ok maybe your need more. They say minimum 480w per m/2, which I found to be quite a lot(but who am I., dont hit heavy numbers). However, i'm not actively feeding my plants.  

Food for thought. 

I always thought it's 300w per m/2, this is what the LED gardener gives as ideal range, with 500 micromol/second on the leaf surface during veg up to 1500 micromol/second on the leaf surface during flower. 

as we all know wattage says very little, if I have 500w of blurple light I get way less micromols/second on the leaf than a 300w light with some nice samsung diodes with a much better PAR readout than the blurpy. 

but yeah man, I agree with ORGANinc, 550w samsung lm561c diodes in that space of yours is ample!  

my bar light in the 1m x 1m flower tent is 310watt, actual output 300watt, got the same lm561 diodes as him, less light to space ratio overall and I am doing juuust fine

[wingwing]

6 hours ago, ORGANinc. said:

How's the progress on the room coming along?

all good thanks, got the extraction fan arriving tomorrow so I can close the doors. doing some electrics today but other than that it's good to go. I'm looking forward to closing the doors the room is unusable with the doors open and such strong lights. I'll update soon as I have it fixed up better!

[wingwing]

6 hours ago, Naughty.Psychonaut said:

I always thought it's 300w per m/2, this is what the LED gardener gives as ideal range, with 500 micromol/second on the leaf surface during veg up to 1500 micromol/second on the leaf surface during flower. 

as we all know wattage says very little, if I have 500w of blurple light I get way less micromols/second on the leaf than a 300w light with some nice samsung diodes with a much better PAR readout than the blurpy. 

but yeah man, I agree with ORGANinc, 550w samsung lm561c diodes in that space of yours is ample!  

my bar light in the 1m x 1m flower tent is 310watt, actual output 300watt, got the same lm561 diodes as him, less light to space ratio overall and I am doing juuust fine

awesome. thanks for the input. I don't know what half those things are or rather, I've read of them but I haven't put the time in yet. Will do that when I get a chance. Last time I grew indoors it was a 1000w hps, a single fan, no extraction just the door open, regular feed not cannabis specific, and the walls were painted black. Grew some very fine weed in those conditions. Not sexy weed but got me very caned!

I wonder how much difference in potency a perfect grow makes. Terps, flavinoids etc I understand, growing conditions are essential but potency?

Edited July 6, 2022 by wingwing

[Prom]

22 hours ago, wingwing said:

I wonder how much difference in potency a perfect grow makes. Terps, flavinoids etc I understand, growing conditions are essential but potency?

Potency, like Terps, are genetics. You make it as cozy for the plant as she likes it most, she will reward you. 

You can be a grow guru and still not be able to turn shit into gold... the breeders give you potency level indications.  GSC is in general given as 18% THC content... we even reached on one batch 18.6%. So there is also a little space upwards. Also to mention, the average potency test result in SA is 12%... what brings most people back to reality rather fast. Growing weed is one thing.. growing really potent weed needs perfection in every way. 

My preferred weed.. Gelato.. gets set by the Breeder at 26%.. I haven't reached that even close. 19isch I get, but 26 i am very far out.. but I creep slowly up in potency too.. learning the strain takes time. 

Next factor of potency is how you dry, cure and store it. Wrong way and you reduce potency. 

So to make it short, if you keep all parameters from Germination, Veg, Flower, Harvest, Dry procedure, Curing procedure and Storage in the green areas.. you will get rewarded with the potency the plants genetics have to offer.

Anything else.. Veg to dry, flower to wet, Temps out of range (18-25 i see as sweet spot range), dry climate off, cure humidity to low or to high, ... any pest hindering the plants development, any feeding lockout or deficiency, light strength, leaf sugar content.. every factor will reduce a bit potency from the max to reach. You want max potency weed, you have to be perfect yourself. 

Edited July 7, 2022 by Prom
2 addons

[wingwing]

Thanks Prom, my knowledge is still heavily influenced by a book I bought around '95 or so: Mel Franks Growers Insiders Guide. I seem to remember him saying a perfect grow will get you maybe 10% stronger smoke than if you did an average grow so I've always gone off of that. The book is still relevant however, it's incredible how little is dedicated to curing. A few sentences really and the advice is literally: leave curing to tobacco farmers

[wingwing]

Dropped the light till the ppfd showed around 650 on the PPFD Meter app I know, it's an app but it's all I've got. 

It's now a metre above the tops of the plants. 

[Bos]

Be carefull of cellphone apps measuring par/ ppfd or mmol/sec, they will not be accurate as they were never designed for that....period.

But they might give you a ballpark figure rangewise when compared to natural "sunlight". 

Most of our outdoor averages around 12-16%, but last year we had one Seedsman Lemoncello Haze pheno that kicked butt at 22%.... put me flat on my ass...Genetics play a big role in potetial terpenoid levels, but you as the grower has to "enable" the potential.

[Naughty.Psychonaut]

On 7/6/2022 at 1:23 PM, wingwing said:

I wonder how much difference in potency a perfect grow makes. Terps, flavinoids etc I understand, growing conditions are essential but potency?

Well, you don't want the most potent weed that taste like

You got good advice there, Prom will provide you with truth, the man got all the cheat codes for this game  

with this discussion we can look at the whole indoor VS outdoor thing. 

Outdoors = You got the clouds sometimes blocking the sun, you got birds flying through the air and potentially your plants, you got higher presense of all living things, you got all kinds of dust and shit covering your plant, some days you got strong winds other days no wind.... a bunch of minor things all contributing to a generally inconsistenct growing environment. 

Indoors = No clouds, no birds, less insect life, less dust, wind stays the same all season through, grower gets to easily manipulate environment to suit the plants needs. 

This directly translates to the difference in overall quality. 

the reason I put the "overall" there it doesn't mean increase in potency. 

sometimes you can make a fuckup and end up with something more potent, tastes or looks like shit, but has higher resin production than a plant grown in favourable conditions. 

to understand this, you need to know why a cannabis plant produces resin in the first place. 

they do it as a form of protection, this is why you can see the correlation between stronger lights = better resin production and vice versa, weak lights = weak resin production. 

let's look at torture test, when breeding and you finally got your new strain you wana stabilise, you gona start selfing that plant to lock in desired traits and everytime you get offspring you wana find the strongest, most prolific, pest and disease resistent plant amongst the new generation so you can carry those traits through, how do you find these traits? you grow the batch in unfavourable conditions. strong winds, never IPM and leave in a high RH area to check if it catches anything unwanted, too much light intensity and then too little light, all that shit you can do to stress the plant without killing it. through this kinda experiment you'll find a plant can produce more resin when stressed just the right way, but obviously not always and more ofthen than not you fuck up the plant in many other ways. so it's like I said, you don't want the most potent that taste like shit. 

you want everything environmentally to be perfect so you can get the full expression of the plants potential. you want the plant to express its terpenes to its fullest, this will make your weed way more enjoyable than just focussing on the potency.

 

[Naughty.Psychonaut]

a good way to explain why good terpenes are just as important as good resin production is the "entourage effect"

when you smoke weed you're doing thousands of things, you're experiencing smells and those smells cause chemical reactions in your brain. 

when you out smelling perfume or flowers with the lady, there will be certain smells that excite you certain smells that make you wana throw up, certain smells that make you think of your gran, certain smells that make you think of a time when you where a child... all these are highs that we experience from the terpene profiles that perfumes have and when we smell it, it stimulates your senses. 

everything has a terpene profile, "terpenes" are fancy lingo for "smells"

when you get a weed that stimulates your sense of smell, taste, visual and all that fancy stuff, then you get higher off it than the dude next to you who doesn't get stimulated off those same things. 

and it's never just one thing. it's like a million things. to find the right one for you is the fun of it all. 

[Prom]

21 hours ago, wingwing said:

Dropped the light till the ppfd showed around 650 on the PPFD Meter app I know, it's an app but it's all I've got. 

It's now a metre above the tops of the plants. 

You got no hanging instructions with the light?

[wingwing]

Apologies! The boy got sick so all life outside of him came to a bit of a standstill. He's better now, out of the hospital and life is back to normal... or whatever it is we call normal these days. Been a bit hectic and I'm unfortunately very slow when it comes to making stuff but I did manage to get some things done and the girls are still alive so... not ideal but not a total loss 

Missed some IPM with all the goings on.

Also struggled a bit with light height: I dropped it to 100cm and burnt the tops then realized my house cleaner had moved the dehumidifier under the air intakes of the space so I think the damage was also from the dry air running over the tops of the plants. Lights at 115cm and I'm still getting some tiny leaf curls on the new growth. This is worrying. The light is at almost full height already!

I was going to flip them to 12:12 this evening. 

I put the sticky traps in because gnats suddenly appeared in my outside garden pots. Found a few on the traps a few days later. 

Also what appears to be mite bites on some of the Glue leaves and that's the plant I was most interested in growing so that's annoying. 

They, and the rest of the garden pots outside, got a dose of efekto insect control last night. 2ml/L. Looks like mite damage on the glue leaves but I couldn't for the life of me find any mites.  Will spray neudosan next I think: I see 10ml/L is the recommendation on this forum so that's what I'll go for, 20 minutes before lights out so I don't stack a mist on top of lights out, then fan up to half speed until RH gets to mid 60's. 

 

 

[wingwing]

On 7/8/2022 at 12:41 PM, Prom said:

You got no hanging instructions with the light?

No. I sent leonled a mail but no response. very disappointing.

Howzit, 

I've got one of your 550W 561C lights, the 75 x 115 version. I just wanted to ask a couple of questions because I couldn't find anything on the site.

 - How do you get the 500W out of the 48V/10A power supply? Is it overclocked? 

 - Do you have any ppfd maps for this light? I have it in a 100 x 170cm space, over a meter above some clones and am going to start lowering it to find the right distance but ppfd info would be super helpful. I see it can be dimmed to 50% so need to decide if that'll work for veg too.

 

 

[wingwing]

3 minutes ago, wingwing said:

Apologies! The boy got sick so all life outside of him came to a bit of a standstill. He's better now, out of the hospital and life is back to normal... or whatever it is we call normal these days. Been a bit hectic and I'm unfortunately very slow when it comes to making stuff but I did manage to get some things done and the girls are still alive so... not ideal but not a total loss 

Missed some IPM with all the goings on.

Also struggled a bit with light height: I dropped it to 100cm and burnt the tops then realized my house cleaner had moved the dehumidifier under the air intakes of the space so I think the damage was also from the dry air running over the tops of the plants. Lights at 115cm and I'm still getting some tiny leaf curls on the new growth. This is worrying. The light is at almost full height already!

I was going to flip them to 12:12 this evening. 

I put the sticky traps in because gnats suddenly appeared in my outside garden pots. Found a few on the traps a few days later. 

Also what appears to be mite bites on some of the Glue leaves and that's the plant I was most interested in growing so that's annoying. 

They, and the rest of the garden pots outside, got a dose of efekto insect control last night. 2ml/L. Looks like mite damage on the glue leaves but I couldn't for the life of me find any mites.  Will spray neudosan next I think: I see 10ml/L is the recommendation on this forum so that's what I'll go for, 20 minutes before lights out so I don't stack a mist on top of lights out, then fan up to half speed until RH gets to mid 60's. 

 

 

Meant to say, the pots are in that config because I was going to ditch the bruce banner (far left) so the dice 5 seemed a better config. Of course the mighty bruce bounced back from the leaf burn so I left him in there.

[wingwing]

Finished up a box for the clones. The fans are pwm so I attached a controller and turned them down to half speed or less. When I'm happy with the config of the room I can vent directly into the grow space and from there to outside via the extractor. No heat mats or humidity sensors, the ambient temp in the room doesn't go much below 18C so hoping those won't be necessary. 

 

[MrE]

4 hours ago, wingwing said:

Finished up a box for the clones. The fans are pwm so I attached a controller and turned them down to half speed or less. When I'm happy with the config of the room I can vent directly into the grow space and from there to outside via the extractor. No heat mats or humidity sensors, the ambient temp in the room doesn't go much below 18C so hoping those won't be necessary. 

 

I friggin love it!!

[wingwing]

thanks man, was built to keep some bonsai mums so I guess we'll just see how that turns out. More learning curves.

[wingwing]

man, getting your environment sorted requires more work and money than I had anticipated. I've now put environment ahead of growing for this cycle... still learning on the grow but these plants have been stressed by a number of things: some understandable mistakes, some stupid mistakes and some inexplicable decisions have been made! One of my favourite things to do is break out the Mighty for a little lift and then do the days grow work so that probably explains a lot. 

My concern now is that I'm pretty sure I've got a case of light stress. Initially the plants reacted really poorly to the light being lowered. I had another go in late veg, dropping them 50-100mm each day. Got the light down to 600mm but that was before a few colas stared to mess up the uniformity of the canopy. I've lifted the light to 650 from the top cola's but eish, I'm not sure if I should lift it more or not.