31 december 2010, GOAL ACHIEVED! LEDS CAN REALLY BEAT HPS! Thanks to the cree XP-E Leds I got 93 grams (3.3 OZ) of perfectly dry Bud from 60 watt of electric power. There is no way this could be done with HPS, it would have been about 50 grams. Total energy consumption, including timer and power supplies, for vegging and flowering is 82,3 KWH, 1.13 grams for each KWH. After all the complaints from you guys, I bought a new scale :-)
19 december 2010, Have a look at this very nice surprise, for the first time, they hardly fitted on the plate :-) Please compare it with Set-up 6, the plate is the same (11 inch) and still only 60 Watt of Led.... I'll let you guys know the dry weight in a couple of days. In the coming week I'll put all details and schematics on the site.
18 december 2010, Ready, exactly on time, in a couple of days I will know the weight. But I still won't be able to tell if the cree's are better than the Rebels. Next Set-up starts the 8th of january.
1 december 2010, 2 weeks to go, buds got bigger but spidermites and perhaps cold roots, have done quite a bit of damage. Lots of yellow leaves and the beginning of spiderwebs. It won't be the best result ever, I'll finish it anyway, sorry.
19 november 2010, just got back and was pleasantly surprised by this, you can see the leaves touched the Leds and got burned a bit, I don't think it is much of a problem. I can see the plants have been under attack by spidermites, besides that it looks great, specially because there is still 3,5 weeks to go.
19 november 2010, this is how close the plants are to the Leds
27 oktober 2010, growth has slowed down and flowers are starting to show, 7 weeks to go. Next update 20 November, sorry about the delay, I'm visiting beautiful California.
16 oktober 2010, For those of you who are new to my experiments; the sidepanels are there because I want to keep the paneltemperature as low as possible, the efficiency of the Leds improves dramatically at lower temperatures. Putting all the Led's together on the toppanel would increase the temperature a lot, toppaneltemperature is now 30 degrees Celsius, 86 F, the sidepanels are 25 degrees C, 77 F, very cool indeed. No additional cooling is required. Another function of the sidepanels is to prevent stretching, please see the earlier Set-ups for that.
16 Oktober 2010, Looking absolutely great, the rate of growth is amazing. Sprayed against the spidermites with Masai.
10 oktober 2010, Added the Farred's, they are running at 175 mA, 50 % of the other Led's. If you are new to my Led adventures; the Farred's are needed for the timing of the flowering period. Without them flowering would take 13 weeks instead of 9 (It will be an interesting test to leave them out again and see if I get more Bud after 13 weeks). And because I will switch to flowering in 2 days time, I turned on the extra Red Leds and reduced the current in the Blue Led's to 120 mA. Extra reflective foil was also added.
10 Oktober 2010, Nice and bushy. In general the bushiness is controlled by the ratio between Red and Blue, more Blue = more bushy.
8 Oktober 2010, After some hesitation the ladies are now growing rapidly and very bushy indeed. I will switch to flowering in a couple of days.
2 Oktober 2010, First picture of the cree panels, building these was truly a lot of work. I left out the reflectors, I'll add reflective panels/mirrors instead. Some Led's are still switched off, they are only for flowering, also the Farred's have not been placed yet.
Theoretically these panels give much more light than the ones build with Luxeon Rebels from the 7th Set-Up, the forward voltage of the Red Led's is 2,1 Volt instead of the 2,9 volt the Rebels have, this makes the cree's 1.38 times more efficient. Also the Rebels give 40 Lumen at 350 mA, the cree's give 56 Lumen at the same current, again making them more efficient by 1.4 times Added together the cree's give 1.38 * 1.4 = 1.93(!) times more light than the Rebels, whoopy!!
But... I still have my doubts about the true output of the cree's, they're good, but I'm still not sure if they will beat the Rebels in real life situations. There is only 1 way to find out :-) So, the clones went in on wednesday, they all seem to have started to grow nicely, let's see if the cree's truly blow the Rebels out of the dirt.
25 september-2010, the brand new panels with 76 cree-XPERDO-L1-R250-00501 and 20 XPEBLU-L1-R250-00Y01 are ready to be tested.
Because I will be using the best Leds available, these new panels are quite expensive; about 500 U$ for just over 60 Watt :-). The new clones go in on 26 september, update with pictures tuesday 27 september.
Thank you for your patience.
