Some changes are in the works.
First here are the plants
The pc case, all the seeds except one dark devil are in coco, and most just popped their shells today, so lets call this day 0, also the other plant has recovered and is looking really healthy. It is happy with the proper pH feed water.
The mini bucket plant i plucked a few damaged leaves from but currently i am just letting it run and its still partially recovering from that pH mishap. Im gonna make a new mini bucket when the time comes and i have another container, as there are a few things i want to change. The first is the lighting after doing some calculation im wasting probably a good 20-25% at least in just resistor load, so i need too either reduce the input voltage or i may swap out the lighting for a dismantled screw in led bulb.
As for current and future changes.
The bucket i pulled out all that side strip lighting due to the efficiency of it. As like the mini bucket i figured i was wasting at least 25% in just resistor load inherent in those strips. What i did though was add 4 of the dismantled 8w Philips bulbs i had on hand to the sides, two 2700k and two 5000k. Whats different about them though is i am running 2 of the cobs in parallel per ballast. This drops each cob’s current in half and also increasing the efficiency in the process. Reason i did this was one i had a busted ballast for one of the lights so this allowed me to utilize the cob of that light. But second and the main point was i wanted to run a lesser amount of light for the sides as i just wanted supplemental lighting not lighting at the same level as the lid. Worked out to be an extra 13w of power use which is a 30% efficiency increase over stock. Bonus is it now runs at 49w total, is brighter, and about 12.5% more efficient power wise.
As for the PC case im probably going do a light update on it. Currently i have 4 vero18’s running at 350mA each off some meanwell drivers “apc-35-700”, but the issue is those ballasts in this setup i figure i am running under 80% efficiency wasting a good 13w of energy in ballast loss. So even though they are very nice chips and to back up my assertations on screw in led bulbs that i have discuss on other forums. I will probably try and run three dismantled 14w led screw ins bulbs which will be mounted to cpu heatsinks. So around 45w total instead of my current 65-67w, light output should be a little less, but im making up for it in efficiency, and if i feel i need more light i’ll add another light.