25w veg section

Surprisingly little light is required during veg cycle if you use enough plantlets that they don't need to be large. For example, to fill a 3'x 1.5' chamber you need 12 plantlets, 6 the long way by 2 the short way, meaning in my case 3 containers full of perlite with about 10% silica gel to help hold water, each with 4 plants in it. The 3 containers actually fill the chamber almost completely, like an inch between them.

So anyway, to start them off I give them 3 weeks total veg time, including rooting time, which is about a 5-7 days. They're rooted in the containers and pots shown in the image. I just put a clear container over the top for a humidity dome for the first 5 days.

The lights are 8.5w Osram/Sylvania 2700k LED bulbs. The 3 of them together therefore draw 25.5w. Due to low space, I had to position them horizontally but the light from the end of the bulb reflects down from the end of the reflector so it seems to work out okay. I used long aluminum loaf pans for the reflectors, about 10"x4"x3". The shorter ones are a little too tight and these ones also cover more area. I could only show 2 of the 3 in this image. The bulbs are also not centered over the containers but back a little from it, to compensate for most of the light coming out the front of the bulbs. With 13w CFLs I used socket extenders, those things with a socket on the front and an outlet on the side, a couple inches of extension there. With these I just left them near the back. It's fairly even light on the containers actually.

The reason I have 6 in each container instead of 4 is because I have my 2 White Cookies seedlings under the third light for now. Normally it would just be 4 per container. So this is how you save space and power while veging plants. The light cycle is a repeating 7/1, because I just like it and it works well. Gotta put some mylar on that back wall sometime I guess. But with this system, I have no concerns about excessive power usage at all, even with 21 hours total light per day. They don't even get burnt up when I transfer them to the early flower chamber, which is four 42w soft white CFLs and two 13w red CFLs. After 3 weeks in there they go to the late flowering chambers with a combo of CXBs and red CFLs. In this way, I can harvest every 3 weeks using minimal space and power. They are still small enough to move around at 3 weeks flower, and when moved to the late flower units they are ready for the support screens. It all works very well. Took a while to evolve this system. I don't actually follow anyone else's growing methods. I evolve my own based on what works and seems logical.

Interesting set up, just wondering why you dont use a bluer spectrum to start veg?

very nice man, I also use very low wattage for veg and mothers. I've had great results with feit omni 13.5w led bulbs.

Very interesting.
Would you have more pics of the different stages and grow rooms?
What medium are you using?

@ Shugglet, I don't use a bluer spectrum because I don't find it necessary and blue light is bad for human eyes, it's bad for the retina and speeds up macular degeneration. Not going to harm my eyes to make my plants slightly shorter. Mine are in veg stage for such a short time that it doesn't really matter anyway. I use 5 minutes of red light during flowering when the white lights go off to keep stretching in flowering down. There is no height problem in my grow at all. There was before I started using the EOD red and got down to using the best strain and pheno, which is one that stays he shortest of all the plants I tried. None of them ever get above 30". That's also due to my method of only veging for 3 weeks total, including rooting time. Not much point in growing a bunch of extra stalk below the 1' of actual canopy that gets enough light to grow.

I just always use the lowest CCT lights I can get and I'm happy with the results. Others can use what they want, this is just what I personally favor. Blue light is just bad for humans, especially at night (as anyone can research if interested), so I try to keep it to a minimum. I'm more important than the plants. I'm not even using the UV lizard lights anymore, after trying them a few times and finding no significant improvement. That was a big waste of money there.

@ Lucky Luke, I've shown pics of the other stages before. It's nothing much to see really, just two grow tents I made myself from Walmart portable clothes closets, which are made of nonwoven white fabric, like agricultural fabric used to suppress weed growth but thicker and white instead of black. They're 3'x1.5'x5.5'.

I put mylar inside them for more reflection, made the tops more solid with cardboard, cut a hole in the cardboard and fabric in the middle of the tops and mounted CXB 240w high bays over the holes so the heat sinks are completely outside the tents. Put 12w AC PC fans on top too for ventilation, with carbon air filter pad clipped over them for odor control, 2 or 3 layers, 3 at the moment unless it reduces air flow enough to be a problem with mold. Also a second DC PC fan inside the upper part of the tents to move air over the canopy, not so much that the leaves are moving but enough to prevent bud rot.

The medium is perlite, which I have recently started adding some silica gel cat litter to for extra water holding capacity, something like 10-15% I would estimate. Not so much that it gets really heavy but enough to hold a little more water in the upper parts of the containers between waterings, it's just drain to waste type hydro. I use AN Ph Perfect nutes, alternated with FloraNova Bloom less often but enough to give it a bit more phosphorus than the AN has by itself.

The plants are actually so short now, with the EOD red, the 3 weeks veg and the short pheno, that I have to put them on top of some other containers turned upside down as pedestals for the actual medium filled containers. I may take some more pics and post them here shortly. I really recommend the EOD red for keeping stretch down though. It makes a significant difference over plain white 4000k COBs, which you might not think would cause much stretching but actually does.

Here's a couple pics. The first one shows the early flower section, which is below the veg section in the same wood cabinet, with an air chamber between the two to pull the heat out from the bottom chamber. Still a little warm up there but nothing too serious. Helps with rooting cuttings actually. This is about 2 weeks in. Staying fairly short and filling in well. The EOD red system is in there too, like with the late flowering chambers. I clipped some cutlery containers from the dollar store on in a place where they catch the runoff from the growing containers. Makes it easy to take the water out with a turkey baster.



This one shows the pheno itself. No point discussing strains really, because it's the actual pheno that's important. Same strain can have total shit phenos and premium phenos in the same seed pack. This one I call the Yield King pheno, AKA; Tennis Ball Bud pheno. Even the bottom flowers on this one get full size by ripeness. You may say that there isn't much trichs on the bud leaves of this pheno, but that just means that they're mostly on the calyxes instead. Not that interested in growing quality trimmings. This is almost all calyx anyway, just a couple leaves at the base of the tennis balls. This pic was taken before I added the red CFLs and shows how greenish 4000k CXBs are by themselves.

I got my bulbs vertical now. The light is a lot more even this way. Aluminum pans work great as reflectors if you just cut a round hole in the middle and screw the bulb in through the hole. Then the reflector just sits on the bulb right above the light diffuser, just held in place by gravity. To get the bulbs as high as possible I zip tied the sockets to a piece of thin angle metal from some old shelving I don't use anymore. The metal also helps to dissipate heat from the sockets. I don't remove the diffusers because I actually like them. They spread the light very evenly.

This setup delivers about 5w per square foot, which is actually all you need for plants so small that they don't need much penetrating power. You may think that's too low wattage but if you research growing plants under lights you'll find that you can indeed grow small plants under 5w/sq ft of fluorescent light, and LED is a little better than fluorescent. I can attest that it does work fine. I should bend the sides of the pans out some I guess, since their angle is pretty vertical right now. I was trying to keep them square to match the square containers under them but it probably would be better to bend them out some now that I see how vertical they are in this pic.

I implemented a mini high bay solution.



Here's the lighting unit, as I posted in another thread. Just most of the diffuser cut off and foil wrapped around it to make a reflector. Does seem better. I tried 13w CFLs but they were actually too bright. These modified LED bulbs seem just about right so far. It does look brighter than in the earlier shot of the normal bulb with full diffuser. Much of the light was being directed sideways with the diffusers, as can be seen from how much light is reflecting off the pie plates. With the cut-off diffusers, there's hardly any side light at all. You can see the foil reflector is reflecting a good amount of light, all of which would have gone out the sides otherwise. Actually I might as well remove those pie pans now, since they are redundant, no light hitting them anyway.

BTW once you have the top half of the diffuser cut off with a serrated knife you can easily trim the rest more accurately and neatly just using scissors, so you don't need to be fussy about the first cut. I find I don't need more than about 1/2 an inch of diffuser left for a nice wide spread. I trimmed them shorter after these pics, so the edges are not quite vertical as they are here. That was a little too tight a spread.

I didn't find the LED bulbs to work that well so I changed to 9w CFLs and it seems better. 13w were too bright for this particular space but 9w were just right. The problem with the LEDs is that they cause bleaching, even the little 8.5 ones, and the light is too concentrated in the middle. CFLs give much more even light and I've never seen a plant get bleached under them. My flowering chambers also have a combination of LED and CFL. LED alone is not ideal for plants. It seems to have a harshness that can easily damage them.

Turned out I did have to use the 13w CFLs after all. the 9w were barely adequate. 13w seems just about right, vertical with the square pan reflectors.