BigYellowCob
Well-Known Member
It’s been about 5 years since I’ve started an mj grow. I used to use a 250 HPS in a stealth closet grow on the East coast, but after moving to NorCal I decided to start a legal medical grow at our new home and I’m scrapping HPS and going LED. The new grow space is semi-stealth in my garage, with a wall cabinet for a veg space and an office cabinet purchased from a used office furniture shop as the flower cabinet. I’d like to thank Supra, Positivity, and all of the LED COB pioneers for sharing their knowledge and science on RIU for the rest of us to learn. If not for the great info in this RIU forum I’d probably have bought some crappy Chinese blurple light. Here’s my setup:
Veg Cabinet:
Size: 32”wide x 12” deep x 28” tall
Lighting: 2 Vero 18 v2 5000k driven by a Mean Well APC-35-500. Running at 500 mA, the Vero’s run at about 50% efficiency and produce around 4500 lumens in a great veg spectrum. The driver is not the most efficient at 84%, but it does the job. I’ve wired in a 2 pole 2 throw switch to allow me to run 1 or both COBs in the veg chamber. The Vero 18s are mounted on a couple of old AMD CPU heatsinks that that I had lying around from some old computer builds. They are semi-passively cooled – each COB runs at about 14 watts, and the 120mm fan I have running in the chamber moves enough air to keep them very cool to the touch. There are no fans mounted on the heatsinks. I have a 60mm fan running at 5v to pull enough fresh air through the cabinet and keep it cool. I used some 2” black PVC for an air intake at the bottom of the cabinet.
With this setup, I’ll be running about 10 watts/sq foot for veg
Flower Cabinet:
I picked this cabinet up from a used office furniture store – its dimensions are 36” wide x 18” deep x 36” tall. I painted the interior white, and added a couple of 1 ½” black PVC pipes to allow air to flow into the cabinet while remaining light proofed. To improve the light proofing I used some panda film and foil tape on the doors.
Lighting for flowering:
For flowering I’m running 3 - Vero 29 v2 3000k COBs powered by a Meanwell HLG-120H-C1050B driver. The Vero 29 3000k driver produce a lot of red and deep red spectrum light, but they are a bit lacking in the blue spectrum, so I ordered 6 Cree XTE 3 watt Royal Blue LEDs from RapidLED to enhance the spectrum. The 3 COBs and the blue LEDs are all powered by the Meanwell driver with the COBs and LEDs wired in series. The light is dimmable by a 100k ohm pot mounted in the cabinet in a small project box. The LEDs pull about 134 watts at full power, which works out to about 30 watts per sq ft and runs at about 46% efficiency at 1.05 amps. The driver runs at about 92% efficiency.
I’m considering re-wiring the LED wiring through a switch, so that I can shut off the blue LEDs a couple weeks into flower, but I want to try a couple runs with the blues on through til harvest to see what happens. I may add a switch later on.
The COBs and blue LEDs are mounted on a 28” long by 4.85” heatsink from Heatsink USA.
Ventilation:
To keep the flower cabinet cool, I have a 92mm AC powered fan mounted to the ceiling of the cabinet blowing air out. It runs at low RPMs and is pretty quiet, but still pushes out a decent air flow. To control air flow, the heat sink has 2” x 34” aluminum strips from Lowes resting in the outer channels of the heat sink. The heat sink is held up by 2 long bolts and presses the 2 aluminum strips up against the ceiling of the cabinet creating an air flow ‘tunnel’ on each end of the heat sink. The air is pulled in from each end of the heat sink, and pulls across the top of the sink and outside the cabinet, so the heat from the heat sink doesn’t get mixed with the air circulating in the cabinet. The aluminum strips also create additional mass/surface area to the heat sink to keep the LEDs cooler, and also block most of the light from escaping the cabinet, making it easier to light proof the exhaust fan.
I think this ventilation setup will work great in cooler weather, but when I tested it in my hot garage in the summer, it got hotter than I’d like. I may need to keep the cabinet doors open a little bit during lights on in the summertime to help keeps temps down.
The grow:
One of the big issues I have is temp controls, since the grow areas are in a garage without heat or AC. I’m in the California central valley in Sacramento county, and it gets hotter than hell here in the summer. Normally I plan to grow only in the spring and fall when temps are moderate, but since I'm tired of paying dispensaries for meds, I’m going to put these first plants through a heat torture test. The flower cabinet will likely top 100 degrees F in the afternoon during the summer. The seedlings and clones that I currently have in the veg chamber have tolerated the high heat without too much trouble so far. I know these are not ideal conditions, but I consider this more of a test run, and am curious to see how the plants do in the high temps. People in NorCal grow outdoors in conditions that can exceed 100f in the shade, and their plants do OK, so I think I can pull off a micro grow in similar conditions. The heat may affect the yield and maybe the potency of the buds, but I’ll be happy with a few zips of some smokable meds for now. When this run is complete, I plan to do a more legit grow in the cooler weather of Oct and Nov.
The plants:
When I used to grow in a stealth closet grow in my house back on the East coast, I did a lot of experimenting with reversing plant sex via colloidal silver, and produced a bunch of feminized seeds. One of my favorite smokes back then was Mandala’s Satori, and I produced a baggie full of fem’d seeds of Satori. Since Mandala claims Satori is a heat tolerant plant, I figure I’d grow some of these for my summer grow. Even though the seeds are 5 years old, I’ve kept them in the fridge with some rice to absorb moisture, and I was pleasantly surprised when 5 of the 6 seeds I planted popped up from the soil looking healthy and happy. The 6th seed actually popped too, and pushed out a small tap root, but that’s as far as it got, and then it died.
I also picked up a few clones from local dispensaries, including Sour Diesel, Fire OG, and Blue Dream. I plan to flower the Fire OG cut and a Sour Diesel cut with 1 of the Satori seedlings for the summer grow.
Plant pics from about a week ago:
Satori seedlings on the left - 2 Sour Diesel, 1 Blue Dream and 1 Fire OG cuts on the right. I also took a cutting of the Fire OG to keep as a potential mom if I like the smoke.
Soil & Ferts:
This will be an organic grow, using the same amendments and dry organic fertilizers that I’ve used for the last decade in my organic vegetable gardens. The soil is a mix I threw together using a coir/perlite mix as the base, and added in a bunch of garden compost from my compost bin, along with dry organic ferts and a bit of dolomite lime for Mg, Ca and to balance the ph. I’ve been ‘cooking’ this mix in a large bin outside for about 2 months, and even added a few worms from my garden to the bin to improve the soil with their castings. After each grow I plan to mix in some additional compost and some fertilizers to the soil, and re-use it for the next grow.
Current status:
Here's the current status of the plants. I've got 1 Satori, 1 Sour Diesel, and 1 Fire OG in 3 gal smart pots in the flower chamber. They were potted up a few days ago, and I plan to give them a couple more days veg before flipping to 12/12. Temps have been abnormally cool lately so I've had the light running at 100%, but may dim it a bit when the hot weather returns to control heat. Height is an issue in my cabinet, and since these are all 10-12 week strains that will stretch (2 of them are sativa dominate), I can't veg too long or I'll have problems later on.
This will be a grow journal, but I probably won't update too often until a few weeks into flowering since there's not much to see right now.
Veg Cabinet:
Size: 32”wide x 12” deep x 28” tall
Lighting: 2 Vero 18 v2 5000k driven by a Mean Well APC-35-500. Running at 500 mA, the Vero’s run at about 50% efficiency and produce around 4500 lumens in a great veg spectrum. The driver is not the most efficient at 84%, but it does the job. I’ve wired in a 2 pole 2 throw switch to allow me to run 1 or both COBs in the veg chamber. The Vero 18s are mounted on a couple of old AMD CPU heatsinks that that I had lying around from some old computer builds. They are semi-passively cooled – each COB runs at about 14 watts, and the 120mm fan I have running in the chamber moves enough air to keep them very cool to the touch. There are no fans mounted on the heatsinks. I have a 60mm fan running at 5v to pull enough fresh air through the cabinet and keep it cool. I used some 2” black PVC for an air intake at the bottom of the cabinet.
With this setup, I’ll be running about 10 watts/sq foot for veg
Flower Cabinet:
I picked this cabinet up from a used office furniture store – its dimensions are 36” wide x 18” deep x 36” tall. I painted the interior white, and added a couple of 1 ½” black PVC pipes to allow air to flow into the cabinet while remaining light proofed. To improve the light proofing I used some panda film and foil tape on the doors.
Lighting for flowering:
For flowering I’m running 3 - Vero 29 v2 3000k COBs powered by a Meanwell HLG-120H-C1050B driver. The Vero 29 3000k driver produce a lot of red and deep red spectrum light, but they are a bit lacking in the blue spectrum, so I ordered 6 Cree XTE 3 watt Royal Blue LEDs from RapidLED to enhance the spectrum. The 3 COBs and the blue LEDs are all powered by the Meanwell driver with the COBs and LEDs wired in series. The light is dimmable by a 100k ohm pot mounted in the cabinet in a small project box. The LEDs pull about 134 watts at full power, which works out to about 30 watts per sq ft and runs at about 46% efficiency at 1.05 amps. The driver runs at about 92% efficiency.
I’m considering re-wiring the LED wiring through a switch, so that I can shut off the blue LEDs a couple weeks into flower, but I want to try a couple runs with the blues on through til harvest to see what happens. I may add a switch later on.
The COBs and blue LEDs are mounted on a 28” long by 4.85” heatsink from Heatsink USA.
Ventilation:
To keep the flower cabinet cool, I have a 92mm AC powered fan mounted to the ceiling of the cabinet blowing air out. It runs at low RPMs and is pretty quiet, but still pushes out a decent air flow. To control air flow, the heat sink has 2” x 34” aluminum strips from Lowes resting in the outer channels of the heat sink. The heat sink is held up by 2 long bolts and presses the 2 aluminum strips up against the ceiling of the cabinet creating an air flow ‘tunnel’ on each end of the heat sink. The air is pulled in from each end of the heat sink, and pulls across the top of the sink and outside the cabinet, so the heat from the heat sink doesn’t get mixed with the air circulating in the cabinet. The aluminum strips also create additional mass/surface area to the heat sink to keep the LEDs cooler, and also block most of the light from escaping the cabinet, making it easier to light proof the exhaust fan.
I think this ventilation setup will work great in cooler weather, but when I tested it in my hot garage in the summer, it got hotter than I’d like. I may need to keep the cabinet doors open a little bit during lights on in the summertime to help keeps temps down.
The grow:
One of the big issues I have is temp controls, since the grow areas are in a garage without heat or AC. I’m in the California central valley in Sacramento county, and it gets hotter than hell here in the summer. Normally I plan to grow only in the spring and fall when temps are moderate, but since I'm tired of paying dispensaries for meds, I’m going to put these first plants through a heat torture test. The flower cabinet will likely top 100 degrees F in the afternoon during the summer. The seedlings and clones that I currently have in the veg chamber have tolerated the high heat without too much trouble so far. I know these are not ideal conditions, but I consider this more of a test run, and am curious to see how the plants do in the high temps. People in NorCal grow outdoors in conditions that can exceed 100f in the shade, and their plants do OK, so I think I can pull off a micro grow in similar conditions. The heat may affect the yield and maybe the potency of the buds, but I’ll be happy with a few zips of some smokable meds for now. When this run is complete, I plan to do a more legit grow in the cooler weather of Oct and Nov.
The plants:
When I used to grow in a stealth closet grow in my house back on the East coast, I did a lot of experimenting with reversing plant sex via colloidal silver, and produced a bunch of feminized seeds. One of my favorite smokes back then was Mandala’s Satori, and I produced a baggie full of fem’d seeds of Satori. Since Mandala claims Satori is a heat tolerant plant, I figure I’d grow some of these for my summer grow. Even though the seeds are 5 years old, I’ve kept them in the fridge with some rice to absorb moisture, and I was pleasantly surprised when 5 of the 6 seeds I planted popped up from the soil looking healthy and happy. The 6th seed actually popped too, and pushed out a small tap root, but that’s as far as it got, and then it died.
I also picked up a few clones from local dispensaries, including Sour Diesel, Fire OG, and Blue Dream. I plan to flower the Fire OG cut and a Sour Diesel cut with 1 of the Satori seedlings for the summer grow.
Plant pics from about a week ago:
Satori seedlings on the left - 2 Sour Diesel, 1 Blue Dream and 1 Fire OG cuts on the right. I also took a cutting of the Fire OG to keep as a potential mom if I like the smoke.
Soil & Ferts:
This will be an organic grow, using the same amendments and dry organic fertilizers that I’ve used for the last decade in my organic vegetable gardens. The soil is a mix I threw together using a coir/perlite mix as the base, and added in a bunch of garden compost from my compost bin, along with dry organic ferts and a bit of dolomite lime for Mg, Ca and to balance the ph. I’ve been ‘cooking’ this mix in a large bin outside for about 2 months, and even added a few worms from my garden to the bin to improve the soil with their castings. After each grow I plan to mix in some additional compost and some fertilizers to the soil, and re-use it for the next grow.
Current status:
Here's the current status of the plants. I've got 1 Satori, 1 Sour Diesel, and 1 Fire OG in 3 gal smart pots in the flower chamber. They were potted up a few days ago, and I plan to give them a couple more days veg before flipping to 12/12. Temps have been abnormally cool lately so I've had the light running at 100%, but may dim it a bit when the hot weather returns to control heat. Height is an issue in my cabinet, and since these are all 10-12 week strains that will stretch (2 of them are sativa dominate), I can't veg too long or I'll have problems later on.
This will be a grow journal, but I probably won't update too often until a few weeks into flowering since there's not much to see right now.
About 3 months ago I didn't know a COB from a hole in the ground - I did some google searching on LEDs thinking blurple was still the way to go, and then stumbled my way in this forum where guys like Supra are taking things to the next level. Very cool stuff going on here - hopefully the BS dies down and we can continue pressing forwards with all the new tech that is coming out. Hell, I think my light is already outdated and i just finished it a month ago, lol.
