YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO:
Well my day got amazing and intense with what I found on my doorstep today and I am both humbled and extremely grateful!
Thank you so much @MarsHydro for your generosity with this FC-6500 LED bar light.
I still am in disbelief that my number came up in the give-a-way even though I just spent the last 2 hours re-doing my 4x4 tent installing this BEAST!
All the work will be worth it; and much of this I was going to do eventually but now had my “rubber arm” twisted with this new light.
The 4x4 before the changes for reference while it was still sporting the 2x Mars Hydro TSL-2000 fixtures; which are now my back-up spares.
The FIRST CHANGE was to insulate the floor by putting in anti-fatigue matting on the tents floor as insulation.
This was then all covered with the “drip tray” that is built for the tent.
I removed the older 6" Vivosun fan which was taking up too much space inside. There’s nothing wrong with it and I will be installing it into the MedCAB tomorrow as nothing is running in there right now.
Additionally the small black fan I had aimed down from the tents roof was removed to see what kind of headroom i can get with this new light. I’ve been wanting to swap this black fan out for a squatter box-type fan which will take up less of a vertical footprint anyway while doing the same job as the round black fan.
Now on-top (outside) the tent replacing the Vivosun 6" inline fan is the AC Infinity 6" inline fan from the MedCAB. It all fits “neatly enough” along side the 6" inline duct booster that pulls excess air from both top venting holes on either side of the tent via a Y junction section of rigid ducting.
As I said, it’s “Neat Enough”.
I needed 4x hanging points for the 2x MH TSL-2000 lights so I’m glad that Mars Hydro supplied 2x metal-cable Y adaptors along side the 2x heavy-duty ratchet hangers so it’s now all a 2 hanging point set-up. Sure the 4x points with 2x lights allowed for moving tall plants to one side with short on the other for different hanging heights in the same tent but that’s not ever going to be the case with this fixture.
This fixture is all about the even PFFD spread and they aren’t fucking around with the design!
I needed to unfold it carefully into the tent as it fits my 4x4 tent with very little wiggle room. This is not a bad thing by far, but it does have me now changing my future upgrade plans from a new 4x4 tent to a 5x5. The extra footprint will give me that luxury while I can still maintain the growing within the 4x4 sweet spot.
This took some finagling as I lifted it up slowly from back to front gradually until the first set of issues presented themselves.
My 2x2 horizontal supports are there to both secure items as well as to prevent negative pressure from caving in the tent’s walls… but they were also in the way of the light.
The solution was to raise them as high as possible so they are pressed right up to the 6" flexible ducting that draws air out through the 6" inline vent booster. I also then had to move the horizontally hung tower fan as high as it could go which turned out to thankfully be above the maximum hanging height of the FC-6500 with the Y-cables attached.
IF I go back to 4-point hanging I can get the fixture higher up; but to be honest that’s too much of a pain so I’m thinking of rigging up extra hook points at equals spaces apart so I can take up the slack of the Y-cable.
This is the bonus of buying 2x extra ceiling support bars to increase my hanging points… the tent only came with 2… there’s now 4 making for a fantastic workable grid.
With the TSL-2000’s I still had great quality of light but the throw spread was very different and i’m really gonna love getting used to this type of set-up.
The best working height from the canopy is suggested at 12", 18" & 24" with diminishing returns for throw distance and throw focus at 36" or beyond. This is why the dimming feature is so critical with LED bar-type fixtures like this.
Testing with a meter shows this rapid fall of rather steady with what the online documentation states so it’s crucial for max DLI that I keep the fixture to canopy distance as even as I can muster.
For now the headroom has been maxed out and by moving around everything I can now move the fixture freely down to the working height and then slowly up as the plants do their thing skywards in conjunction with the dimmer.
Now I need to throw a frozen pizza in the oven and then go back downstairs to water everything and then set the parameters on the AC Infinity Cloudline T6 and twist a dimmer knob.
(And then eat the pizza! )