Do you know of any small plug and play LED lights that could be used for vertical lighting at the corners of the tents instead of flourescents?
It has to be full spectrum white light, not blurple or targeted growth spectrum. blurple / growth spectrum lighting plays havoc with landraces.
I’m tired of replacing sunlight spectrum flouro tubes and paying $15 recycling fee to be a good citizen.
anybody have any good ideas?
@mr.sparkle I know you have a lot of experience with LED lighting. @Baudelaire I was looking at the solstrips and solsticks, but I don’t really understand the drivers, mounting for the strips, or how to hang them as vertical lighting.
vertical lighting lets me start seedlings and root clones in the same tent as much larger plants when the primary light is raised up too high for the smaller plants. Reduces light competition in a crowded tent, improves light penetration into the lower canopy.
In general vertical lighting reduces internode stretching, and improves the health of the lower branches on mother plants, giving you healthier clones and more branches to take cuts from.
It makes a big difference when you are growing stretchy landrace sativas indoors.
I was talking to B about this for my tent a few months ago, as corner/top lights like at a 45 degree downward in each top corner to even out the hot center on my HLG 550. I can’t afford it yet, but my plan was to go with four X2 strips each paired on a driver so I could turn off one side for tall or sensitive plants or newly flipped plants etc. Here’s what he told me:
“I’d recommend the Mean Well HLG-150H-24 or XLG-150H-24 for 4 X2 strips wired in parallel. A or B style if you want dimming. You’ll get about 175-185w running it full power. Each X2 has a max rated output of about 58w. You could push it a little harder with an HLG-185H-24, but you’d need to keep under a total of 220 watts total draw.”
As to mounting, you can supply your own heatsink from locally and thermal tape or buy the Solstix that are pre-mounted and pay the shipping on heat sinks. For mounting, my plan was to use a small hinge at the bottom attached to a pole mount of some sort and then have an adjustable cord with a drawstring cordlock at the top so tilt could be adjusted easily.
For thermal material heat sinking locally I can get scrap aluminum T-rail (3” wide, 80/20 two-sided T-track they use for framing solar panel installs) from my friend who works in solar, that’s great stuff and what they make a lot of the commercial lighting out of.
These are also neat, I bought them to use on the walls of my tent but have ended up putting them inside the lower canopies of my plants in mid to late flower instead once the tent fills up. They are a little expensive but pretty unique and quite high quality, waterproof and high CRI, and the neat thing is that they’re lensed so that they don’t burn buds or leaves, I put them right against a bud or leaf if that’s where they land with no bleaching. Fun for intracanopy and low wattage for the bang, my lowers get heavier and super frosty. LEDTeknik is an interesting guy to read about lighting. I have a set of two white strings running on an HLG-25 driver
i had solstrips once… and reasons why i went my own route after.
@zephyr it kinda depends on how much light your looking for to put in your corners as if its just to add a little there are some “cheapish” amazon options, even some consumer light manufactures have “veg strips” that would also work
as a refrence for the Cheap lower power options that would just be slight supplemental and not saying they are quality even assuming they are using samsung lm301 chips like they say.
