HPS will suck the rooms very dry.
dont upgrade AC, go to LED lights!!! Prettier flowers, easier to cool, humidity goes WAY up.
Is the Ro attached directly to the humidifiers?
Every time the filter kicks on and off the first few gallons of RO water can be more contaminated than the resulting flow after the filter begins to function correctly.
What is the PPM of the filtered water? if your PPMS are not below 20 then im sure your filter is not functioning correctly.
Best way to keep scale down is to run RO into a holding tank and then pump to humidifiers so you dont have the constant on/off cycles on the RO filter.
we run 300+ gallons through our humidifiers every day with no scale as long as the filter is working properly.
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Another thing to keep in mind is that from a photosynthesis standpoint, plants donāt care about watts, they car about number of photons. Longer wavelength photons carry less energy, and conversely you get more of them per watt of luminous efficiency.
Now, not all photons are used as efficiently, with 425nm blue and 660nm red being about the same. However, 425nm blue photons require nearly twice the energy. These are the two most common single wavelength diodes. By comparison, photon efficiency is approximately 20% greater for 680nm red (which is why we use them for our lights, which basically requires getting 660 diodes that are binned out of spec because theyāre difficult to manufacture). At the same time, yellow and green are about 50% as efficient as 660nm red photons and require more energy.
The last factor is actually the luminous efficiency of the diode (which is what everyone talks about the most). Basically watts of light per watt of energy. A high efficiency 425nm diode can be almost 80%, where a high efficiency 660nm would be maybe 55% efficient. Thats one of the reason so many mid-range blurple lights are so blue heavy. The issue again is that if youāre a light manufacturer, you sell on watts output or par, which is flawed. What is actually important is photon use efficiency * luminous efficiency / watts per photon at the given wavelength.
All that said, you would probably choose to have lights that are all 680nm red using the above formula, which clearly doesnāt make sense. There are hormonal considerations and issues with saturation (if you only charge one half of the chlorophyll A&B pathways, you limit the light that can be used). Just figured Iād throw in my 2c about the missing piece of the efficiency calculation
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google phytochromes , Im not sure that light movers or pivoting is the best.
watts are for humans and photons are for plants, but as long as we are comparing apples to apples ie all growlights at the moment are using very similar diode combos and producing very similar spectrums for the most part then ppfd/watts is still usefull for us to make a quick comparison on how āgoodā or ābadā certain lights are.
when light manufacturers start making true āfull spectrumā led lights then using ppfd/watt to compare them to older āstandardā spectrum led lights will be useless, it will always favour the āstandardā spectrum light even though the āfull spectrumā light may well out perform it.
so yes i totally agree that you can have say 2 different lights with 2 different efficiencys and 2 different spectrums and the light with the lower efficiency may outperform the light with the higher efficiency because of a more photo active spectrum and not oversaturating certain wavelengths ect.
and not to nit pick but i guess you meant 450nm and 660nm when you mentioned them being the most common monos?, there are very very few 425nm monos and i have never seen one used on a growlight.
you do still see 450nm monos being used on modern led grow lights (they shouldnt be), but not like the bad old blurple days.
also no sizeable led light manufacturer could survive on the supply of ābinned out of specā 660nm monos to be used as 680nm monos in their growlights they simpiliy wouldnt be enough for any meaning full sized production run. most 660nm monos that are produced bin under 660nm very few bin over. they are using 660nm monos binned for efficiency, they dont care about colour accuracy they could be anywhere between 630nm - 670nm, they dont care.
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Yes, my mistake with the 450/425 diodes.
As far as binning 680nm, weāre doing a run right now of 3300 fixtures that are all being made that way. We have a 3rd party inspector on site in Shenzhen to make sure we donāt get cheated but itās taken them a while to bank enough of them. You are probably right that if we were an OEM weād have a lot of trouble stocking them.
Iām not sure I exactly buy that listed par output is particularly useful to evaluate the efficiency of a fixture. As you said, 5000k LM301bs and their ilk are extremely common and while their luminous efficiency is fairly good, over 50% of their output is between 475 and 600nm, which should be derated 50% or so. So essentially lights which just use those diodes would be considered to have a max efficiency of 75% in my book, even if they were 100% efficient on a watt per watt level.
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sounds like you have your finger on the pulse sid, sounds like i could learn a lot from you.
amazing that you and your manufacturer are acctually going to the trouble of binning the 660nm like you are, hats off to you, respect.
any more details on the lights you are having made?, what did you want to accoplish with them over what was available of the shelf?, whats your motivation?.
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Thing 1 was price and QA - going through middlemen sucks and what we were asking for was very specific. 2nd thing was spectra selection, as I mentioned we did a lot of calculation and trial/error to get an efficient spectrum that still pushes high 20/low30% THC numbers in a ~50 day flower time. We also needed more output than most fixtures (2600 umol/s to hit 1800/m2). The last thing was far red. We have an insane amount of far red in our lights to take advantage of Emerson enhancement. Because 730nm diodes are quite expensive, Iāve yet to see another manufacturer double down on adding anywhere near as much as we did.
On our next run if weāre satisfied Iām going to respec the diodes to run smaller frames to increase our luminous efficiency but the cost was too high for us (apparently we could justify $4M on a relatively unproven light design but $6M was pushing it). I would also like to water cool the lights but that is obviously a major redesign (Iām guessing this will add about $100/fixture in cost as well)
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It is not hard to balance BTUās. Itās actually super fucking easy. Read your docu and donāt cheap out on your environmental gear.
sounds interesting, care to share a spectrograph?.
what ratio red to far red have you gone with?, the highest i have seen in a grow light is approx 4:1.
i think i have personally seen negative effects of to high a ratio of red to far red (approx 3:1/2:1 ratio) ie too fast a ripening at the cost of weight. but i could have maybe used a touch more 400nm - 440nm to try and ballance this more.
what if anything are you using to ballance your larger amounts of far red?.
i doubt you will see much benifit from the emerson effect at the high photon levels you are pushing, its effects fall off quite quickly the higher the intensity. might be a percent or two but i suppose every little helps.
have you put your far red on a seperate channel for EOD?.
if you dont mind me asking what diodes have you used?. what does your board efficiency look like?.
as a side note to anyone who is interested i like what these guys are doing, https://growlightsaustralia.com/
their 420 board has a nice āfullerā spectrum. if i didnt diy my own lights id run these over probs anything else i have seen.
Our board design is very simple because it worked out pretty easily to have one power supply per color channel (two for the red).
Our far red ratio is about 1:1 on a wattage basis. Weāve not seen any issues with bulking and the faster ripening was one of the reasons we pushed the ratio that high. Fwiw weāre growing in DWC so the plants tend to have excessive yield anyways, shortening flower time is our primary concern.
Attached is a spectra chart
yer thats a lot of far red! 1:1 is very similar to mid day sunlight.
thats a lot of 450nm, are your 3 channels going to adjustable?.
Yep, that looks about right. Weāve got independent channels on blue, red, far red and white that are adjustable via 1-10vdc control. The blue is only that high because we had a last minute change to a bridgelux diode that was higher efficiency/output than the Samsung equivalent so itāll probably get dialed back.
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Are you using ro water for the humidifier? If not give that a shot!
Iām hopefully gonna be able to run without the humidifier this next run. I had the room at 60-70% as soon as they got transplanted into 3 gal smart pots to the point where i had to start running the dehum. I am using ro water now though, so if Iād need to Iād use that.
Iām switching back to plastic pots and hoping that 16 x 2 gal per 3x3 ft tray should be a good enough scrog so that skipping the 4 inch pots will allow for adequate humidity.
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Such beautiful spectrum control and no UV. if you like FR, you should see the resin when you add UV. Something about UV combined with Emerson effect gives amazing results.
I push my Deep and Far reds at different intensity and ratios alot throughout the grow, and I get some really cool results, and cannabinoids. The plants will floresce the ultra violet into the 410+ range, and well as trigger cryptochrome at the same time.
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Quickest cheapest way to get rocking if your location allows you to do a window AC
These styles can be had in the $600-800 range
24,500 BTU Room Air Conditioner with 10.3 EER, 7.7 Pts/Hr Dehumidification, 1,560 sq. ft. Cooling Area, Auto Restart, Remote Control and 230/208 Volts
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That looks like the older styled LG. The newer LG dual inverter (mini split tech in a window unit) sports ceer 14.5 and Walmart has the 22000 for under $600 rn.
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