My budget 5X5 setup

Northwood

Well-Known Member
I'm growing my Canadian legal limit (4 plants), all White Widow X Jacky White from fem seeds. It cost me less than $300 Canadian dollars to adequately light the 25 square feet with over 33 watts per square foot (840 watts total right now). Not my first grow with these, or with this soil. The soil is getting better with each use. I'm using a water only from seed to harvest system. Just tap water, no pH measurements, no EC, no nute mixing, no teas. I'm incredibly lazy, just ask my wife!

Here they are today, exactly 28 days (4 weeks) from the flip to 12/12.



Peeking into one of the tent side doors:
 
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whytewidow

Well-Known Member
I'm growing my Canadian legal limit (4 plants), all White Widow X Jacky White from fem seeds. It cost me less than $300 Canadian dollars to adequately light the 25 square feet with over 33 watts per square foot (840 watts total right now). Not my first grow with these, or with this soil. The soil is getting better with each use. I'm using a water only from seed to harvest system. Just tap water, no pH measurements, no EC, no nute mixing, no teas. I'm incredibly lazy, just ask my wife!

Here they are today, exactly 28 days (4 weeks) from the flip to 12/12.



Peeking into one of the tent side doors:


Wow.... are those all screw led bulbs lol. How many are there total?
 

Northwood

Well-Known Member
Wow.... are those all screw led bulbs lol. How many are there total?
There are 60 various household, 100 watt equivalent LED bulbs up there. Plus 5 silly little Amazon lights in spare sockets in between, but that's just decoration. It's about a half/half mix of color temps I have during flower time. I managed to get most of them much cheaper than Amazon, with "Environmental Discounts" (Ontario), and just watching for sales on RedFlagDeals. Lol

I'm pulling I guess about 840 watts from the wall.
 

Northwood

Well-Known Member
Those screw ins are pretty decent for the price. It's crazy seeing so many though lol.
It started as a micro grow... but I kept finding even cheaper bulbs on sale that were more efficient! lol

So things grew over time and grows. I became really curious to see what the I could grow on the cheapest LED budget in a 5X5 (25 square foot) tent. A person if they pay FULL price for the number of bulbs I use will only pay $213.75 cents in total for the actual bulbs. Depending on your DIY skills, you might end up paying between $60 and $120 for the fixture(s) to screw them into.

Edit: Dollar figures are Canadian. Lucky Americans likely pay nearly half the damn price.
 
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whytewidow

Well-Known Member
It started as a micro grow... but I kept finding even cheaper bulbs on sale that were more efficient! lol

So things grew over time and grows. I became really curious to see what the I could grow on the cheapest LED budget in a 5X5 (25 square foot) tent. A person if they pay FULL price for the number of bulbs I use will only pay $213.75 cents in total for the actual bulbs. Depending on your DIY skills, you might end up paying between $60 and $120 for the fixture(s) to screw them into.

Edit: Dollar figures are Canadian. Lucky Americans likely pay nearly half the damn price.

Personally I'm intrigued. I've seen 100 bulb cfls. And whatnot. But not those. Two thumbs up man. I love leds. One the best ingenious ideas I've seen on riu since ive joined. Awesome man. And that you took the time to lay them out in line like that. Siskel and Ebert two thumbs up.
 

Northwood

Well-Known Member
Personally I'm intrigued. I've seen 100 bulb cfls. And whatnot. But not those. Two thumbs up man. I love leds. One the best ingenious ideas I've seen on riu since ive joined. Awesome man. And that you took the time to lay them out in line like that. Siskel and Ebert two thumbs up.
They've been popular among the microgrow community for awhile now as a replacement for hot, inefficient CFLs, so I unfortunately can't take credit for the idea. After seeing such great results, I decided to see how well this lighting system could scale up and at what cost. Part of the motivation for it came from the legalization of growing 4 plants in Canada. Not everyone can afford quantum boards with the lastest diodes and drivers who want to exercise their right to grow for noncommercial purposes. Legalization will bring forth a lot of people new to growing, who find the government sanctiond weed too expensive, not properly cured, or dry AF. They might only be looking to produce only 3 kilograms of cured bud each year with our limited plant number in the simplest way they can. This is one way of doing it.

There are two major advantages I've seen using regular household LED bulbs .

The first advantage is flexibility. While the diodes they put in these bulbs can't be the most efficient on the planet LOL, they do put out around 110 to 120 watts per lumen, rated with covers on I assume. With covers popped off, intensity is much higher. To turn off an individual bulb, all I need to do is unscrew it in the socket - and screw it in to turn it on. I can turn off all the warm white colour temperature bulbs, and only keep the daylight on during seedling and veg. I can start with 2 bulbs on each seedling in their permanent spot in my tent, then 3 bulbs, then 4 per plant, etc. as they grow. This flexibility saves an amazing amount of electricity over the course of your grow while allowing precise control over colour temperature for each stage of growth. I don't care how efficient your lighting is, if you're lighting your tent floor you may as well me sending me money instead rather than just throwing it away!

The second advantage is that such a system spreads out the lighting source evenly throughout the tent. Colas and branches don't compete with each other to reach a directional source of light, because the light is everywhere! So everything just grows straight up, and great for organic no-till systems where it's impractical to move around plants. I don't SCROG (anymore) or train much (topped once), yet once you spread your light source equally across the entire canopy, it's almost like it trains itself to flatten it's own canopy to maximize surface area under a flattened light source.

I guess there's a third advantage. If a diode or entire bulb burned out, a child can replace it within 1 minute. LOL
 

Northwood

Well-Known Member
Us unlucky Europeans pay about £4-7 per bulb!! I wont even go into 17pence per kilowatt hour electric rates..
I guess I shouldn't whine then!. No green energy programs in the UK? Many bulbs I accumulated were discounted through incentives our provincial government was giving out in order to lower the country's carbon footprint. Sadly we have a new anti-environment premier in our province, so all incentives were discontinued. But I always thought it was cool that the government helped pay for my some of my weed grow lights. I'm just doing my part and trying to make the world a greener place. Lol
 

Northwood

Well-Known Member
The Cree bulbs were like $12 each for 800 lumens 6 years ago when they were released.
I'm not surprised. When Walmart first got in LED bulbs I remember them selling for something like $22 CDN for a pack of 2 (the 800 lumen 60 watt equivalent - no 100 watt eq. available at the time). No one bought them back then, including myself. But like every other new technology in the marketplace, the price has dropped pretty steadily every year and quality/efficiency has gone up.

It's probably only within the last 2 years or so that doing this on the scale I'm now doing with 1600 lumen bulbs is cost-effective and feasible. I must thank you guys for pioneering the use of these for growing even when they were so expensive! It should be interesting to see how household lighting technology continues to advance over the years to come.
 

coreywebster

Well-Known Member
I guess I shouldn't whine then!. No green energy programs in the UK? Many bulbs I accumulated were discounted through incentives our provincial government was giving out in order to lower the country's carbon footprint. Sadly we have a new anti-environment premier in our province, so all incentives were discontinued. But I always thought it was cool that the government helped pay for my some of my weed grow lights. I'm just doing my part and trying to make the world a greener place. Lol
When cfl was first pushed upon us here to replace incandescents we got amazing government subsidised discounts, you could pick up a 6 pack of 20w cfl for 10 pence. I think they are around £2 each now. Alas we have not had any schemes to promote LEDs as of yet. Still though I swapped out 1000w worth of halogen downlights around my house for 100w of LED.

Its good to be Green though ey :weed:
 

BIANCAADA6

Well-Known Member
I'm growing my Canadian legal limit (4 plants), all White Widow X Jacky White from fem seeds. It cost me less than $300 Canadian dollars to adequately light the 25 square feet with over 33 watts per square foot (840 watts total right now). Not my first grow with these, or with this soil. The soil is getting better with each use. I'm using a water only from seed to harvest system. Just tap water, no pH measurements, no EC, no nute mixing, no teas. I'm incredibly lazy, just ask my wife!

Here they are today, exactly 28 days (4 weeks) from the flip to 12/12.



Peeking into one of the tent side doors:
Awesome. Is that 840 true watts?
 
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