Today I finished the wire management behind the driver cab. I use some self adhesive ziptie mounts to keep the wires close to the door. Then, i wired up the drivers’ dimmer wires to my Bluefish controller. I also installed a latch to keep the driver cab closed.
I sowed a clover cover crop and added a layer of straw mulch. I then watered it in with a coconut water tea. I setup my timers and LED controllerto run at a max of 70% with a simulated sunrise/sunset with the far reds on for 15 minutes before and after sunrise.
Due to the frame being inside the material, I was thinking the other day you might have had the side’s bulging out a bit with the weight of the soil, but the sides look perfectly flat. Great job👍
Well, I was looking at spectral changes with the elevation of the sun and noticed both sunrise and sunset had a high level of far red light. So I decided to do both the morning and the evening with far red. Just twiddling the knobs…
Exactly what wavelength are you calling “deep red” never heard it called deep red. These are the articles I was reading, far red is 720-740nm. What article were you reading?
Er…I’d have to go run a search, was about 3/4 years ago that I read about it while doing research on what led parts to buy. The deep red is 660nm but maybe it was just called red? I recall something along the lines of the morning light not being the same red as the evening in wavelengths. Might’ve been from a Growmau5 too…thrills of being stoner and forgetting shit.
Interesting… in the first paper I linked, it treated sunrise and sunset (sun elevation < 20°) the same. The 660nm, corresponds to the “photo red” diodes that make up the rest of the Emerson board. If you can dig up that article, I would love to read it.
Most the articles about using far red for growing cannabis only use it for the evening.
I’ve been trying to dial in my environment for the last few day.
To recap, my initial tests were will all lights at 100% intensity, resulting in a total of 50 W per square foot. The fan speed was set to 5, the fan setpoint was 77F, and the AC in the lung room was set to 75F. After an hour or two, the temperature at the probe was up to 90F, I did not take a soil temperature reading. So I bumped the fan speed to 10 and it dropped the probe sensor to 88F. So, I installed a circulation fan and lowered the fan’s temperature probe to about 1/2 way between the soil and the light.
Once I got the dimmer wires connected to the controller, I was able to run the lights with a simulated sunrise/sunset. Running with a max intensity of 70% the max soil temperature was 86-88F (depending on which thermometer I use) after 9 hours. It then quickly cooled off as the lights began ramping down in the evening. The mother room was running at the same time, so I went ahead and set them so that the mother room runs during the day and the main room remains on at night. I’ve also lowered the AC in the lung room to 72F. So far it seems to be keeping up, in theory the 5,000 BTU unit should cool 1200 watts. I may also set my max fan speed to 6, but when I set it to 10 it was too loud.
I have been doing some mathematical modeling of the lights, as a way of helping me dial in my environment. The first thing I did was calculate the kilowatt hours (kWh) that are used in a day for both veg and flower settings. For veg, I came up with about 12 kWh with an average of 662 Watts. For flowering, I came up with about 8 kWh with the same average of 662 Watts. Both run a max wattage of 876 over 24 square feet, or 36.5 W/ft2 for half of the day cycle.
From there I was looking at DLI charts and noticed that at the beginning of the growing season in the spring, DLI was very similar to the end of the growing season in the fall. Based on that, I came up with some settings using an 18 hour day that uses a similar kWh as flowering. I settled on settings that gave me about 7.6 kWh with a max of 556 Watts and an average of 425 Watts.
I noticed one of the lights didn’t turn off at the right time, I double checked my timer and it should have worked. I was logging in at the exact moment it should have switched, so it may have just been a delay. I will see if this was a one-time issue. I also had my Bluefish set to the wrong time zone, so instead of having just the far red on, I had all the supplemental lighting on around 50%. That’s been fixed and I will be double checking everything during the next cycle using the early veg settings. No need to blast the clover cover crop with a ton of light before it has even sprouted.
My observations of using Deep and Far red LEDs for the full 12 hour light cycle is that my plants stretch less and flower much sooner after the switch to 12/12. At least with the limited number of strains i have grown recently,
Ah yeah my understanding was you wanted DLI to be roughly the same in veg and flower, meaning flower gets more watts since it’s on for less hours.
Sounds like you’re getting it squared away solidly tho. Definitely interested in how the sun-rise/set do on flowering…
I know switching from veg to 11on/13off will cause flowers to form in ~2 weeks instead of ~3 weeks. Least across 3 different strains I’ve tried it on so far.
I have no idea where the idea that you need more light during flower comes from? DLI decreases with the hours of the day, as the season goes on DLI decreases. Maybe I’ll need an early flower setting that keeps the DLI closer to flower during the stretch.
So, turns out everything at max during a 12 hour cycle is close enough in kWh to the 70% settings during an 18 hour cycle. So I will try that during stretch.
hmm… well… my thought is if it’s getting 100w of light in veg for 18 hours and i switch to 12hrs, they are now getting that same 100w of light for 1/3 less time. So instead of the plant seeing 18kwh for that 18 hour time, they’re now only seeing 12kwh. So overall DLI has gone down, which is what most any chart would say when looking at the sun and earth, the DLI is always going down from a max somewhere in veg/transition.
But the thought is, if you kept that DLI the same in flower, 18kwh, by increasing the wattage of the lights to 150w for the 12 hours that they’re on, you’ll get a better return and a bigger plant then if you kept the wattage the same and therefore lowered the DLI like would happen in nature. Now finding what that plants preferred DLI is, is another story. Regardless I’m not running at max wattage for the last couple weeks. They might only see max wattage for the first ~5-6 weeks of flower depending on flower length. I start low in veg and slowly increase every couple days or week until max and then slowly ramp it back down to maybe ~70% of my lights capacity before harvest.
Hi @HolyAngel, I run to many watts in general but I also ramp the power up as the plant goes into flower. Do you have some info or theories for why you slowly ramp it back down at the end of flower? Or are you doing it on a gut feel by how the plants are responding?
PS: When i say I run to many watts, it is because i have my lights right up the top of the tent as I let the plants stretch for a large portion of the tents height. So rather than drop the lights i just crank them up. Going into flower I crank them further. I only back them off though if the plants stretch to close to the lights. My theory is that if i have the lights set up the top of the tent and increase the power so the intensity is at the max for the plant at the top of the canopy then I am going to get better penetration down into the canopy and the light will maintain its strength further away from the light. A classic example is the sun, its power is so high and it is so far away that holding a light meter at 6 foot above the ground and holding it at ground level produces the exact same reading. It doesn’t fade like when you put your meter 6 feet away from your indoor light.
I lower intensity towards the end of flower as I’ve found the plants just don’t need ~30-40w/sqft to finish ripening. 20-25w does perfectly fine and I can usually manage heat and/or humidity easier that way to prevent foxtails. I also tend to keep my plants a bit shorter or at least managed in such a way that I can still get the proper light to the lowers so I’m not getting any airy buds. It just depends. I’m still figuring things out as I go with lots of reading and testing along the way, but so far it’s worked pretty well.
I got some brown paper at lowes to make my pattern for the no-till beds. It turns out it is was a lot thicker than the grocery bags, so I decided to use it with my paper pot maker and see how it goes. I was able to fit 36 in a standard 10x20" tray. I filled them with coco and dunked 40 or so Juanita la Lagrimosa x Lowryder2 seeds in water. The plan is to make F2s, 12 plants in each bed culling any early males or off types.
Looking great ReikoX! Really fantastic setup you’ve built for yourself there! Just got a chance to catch up (temporary light duty at work affords me ~5-10 hrs a day to do diddly squat). Im excited to see if you see any real difference with the far reds.
Can’t tell you how many times I did that remodeling houses! Also had a lot of shitty sheetrock hangers that liked to leave 2-3 inch gaps at the bottom cause “you’re just gonna cover it with baseboard anyway”
