LED GLH Spectra 180 x 4 - 720 watt LED SCROG

SmeLLyTreeZ said:

LoL, exactly!

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colocowboy said:

You could turn off one or two and redistribute the illuminated area also. I have wondered if there was any real benefit of having a par meter, it seems that you would have less guesswork if you had one. Maybe you know someone that has one you could borrow?

The idea of having lights that are just too strong intrigues me I must say!

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Shwagbag said:

Yeah a meter would be sweet! It intrigues me also, hard to believe these are too intense isn't it? Considering the distance MH and HPS can be ran it rattles my brain lol. I have a very hard time believing that 720W of LED can be too much in a tent this size. Shutting one or two off would suck. Its so easy to replace these with HID and I am skeptical of using just 2 or 3 of these in a 4 x 4 tent. I'm taking their core saturation into consideration and this "should" be the perfect amount of light for this tent, results are proving differently. I think it would become counterproductive with just 2 or 3 lights.... But you're probably right, that is what I should do. Perhaps I will kill one light and see how they respond for a short period.

I just can't help to compare what I'm doing to HID. Shutting lights off will be painful as I had hoped 4 x 180 would bring results somewhere in the noise of a 600 HPS.

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colocowboy said:

I agree that it seems precarious at best that it would take THAT significant of a wattage reduction to penetrate and produce on the level of a much bigger light like a 600. I think their core footprint is relative to height, so as you go up the core gets bigger and if the intensity is such that it is already an issue....
Experimenting is fun no?!

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anotherdaymusic said:

I use 1-100watt led for 3 plants about 26'' tall flowering, and they work amazing. maybe you have way too much light intensity... seems logical. New LED's are fucking bright.

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colocowboy said:

You could diffuse the light by putting each on a bias of half its lens angle either angled away or towards just so you have less overlap!

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hippy132 said:

Has anyone had success with these lites or have any insite, is it lites or ph or ?

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colocowboy said:

I am not sure that irish ever lit the third lamp either, I think he was saying that he was going to fire all four up next though. Yours are the 180 with out the reduced power supply to make them 150s? They were saying that with the 180 watt PS they need to be like 3 feet off and one or two would do a 4 ft area raised high. Stoney said that they were hard core frying plants like a hotplate.

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stoneyluv said:

hey shwag, I want you to know I've been following along and reading every post. i want ed to wait till I had more words of encouragement than: "hang in there" and "it will get better" type of response. cowboy is spot on with his comments. I have a far out there theory of why this is happening.... I am 100% dedicated to finding out what it is. the new power supplies and the new V3 panels didn't make this issue go away. i still see problems here and there from the new one even. i even have some issues here and there with mine yet. my opinion is a nutrient of some sort is needed more, and i haven't figured out which it needs yet. I don't believe the lights are to intense to burn the plants... here's why: the sun is way more intense than these lights and it doesn't burn them. my take on it is the spectrums are wrong, something in the lights is metabolically changing the plants and causing the leaves to die and the entire plant to stall. here is what we know: it seems to happen in the 3-5 week of flowering range. It hardly ever happen in veg.... it shows up quickly and within 2-3 weeks it's to late!!! it starts with a light white color in the leaves and develops from there. I have photos of it in all stages and it all starts with the whitening. It almost always starts in the bottom to the middle of the plant, it hardly ever burns the top first, again this leads me to believe it's the wrong spectrum and not the intensity. I have found that if I keep i high amount of micro nutrients and fresh castings on the soil it never gets white in the leaves. but once it shows signs it's almost impossible to play catch up. I have saved a blueberry i have now and it burned about 5 leaves and pulled out of it and is now growing buds again. but i truly believe that nutrients are NOT the solution. i honestly believe it can be corrected with time cycles. longer dark periods and maybe even other types of bulbs to supplement the frequency issues. i believe this problem has to do with the amount of far red the plant is receiving. the best results i found was the combination of V1 and V2 spectrum combined.... since i don't have these V1/V2 spectrums in the V3 I am trying to compensate with longer dark periods. I am currently running 11/13 and plan to move to 10/14 in the next few weeks if i continue to see improvement. RIU isn't the best forum to see experiments/results from GLH. bubbleponics has quite a few glh growers that are getting better and better results. I hope some of this helps and gives you some hope to not just bail on the whole plan. I really wanna see you have a big screen of buds!!!!!

Mike from GLH once told me that one V1 has enough power to fill a 4 x 4 space but must be raised almost 4' above the canopy to succeed. I never tried it..... i didn't have the head room!!

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Shwagbag said:

Thanks for that info Stoney, that is an interesting theory, you're a badmotherfucker. I am going to wait to hear back from Mike before I respond to this, if he chooses to respond. Thanks everyone who has offered encouragement and advice, I appreciate it very much.

I don't see me getting a big screen of buds with these lights unfortunately. I think this is one big expensive experiment gone very badly. That's funny that Mike told you that because he told me that 4 x 180 would work great in a 4 x 4 space LOL.

Just curious Stoney, but why are you using LED's over HID? I thought it would be fun to experiment with them and I saw some of Irish's results from his previous grows. My expectations were much higher, I didn't expect the yields, but I also didn't expect them to kill my plants lol. Granted some of this is my fault for pushing the limits on these lights, perhaps dropping them too low too soon.

Perhaps a CMH and Spectra combo would actually work and they might bring something to the table.

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colocowboy said:

You know what stoney, I have been thinking this for some time. I watch here and elsewhere and have been studying this stuff for a while now because there are some benefits that seemingly cannot be outweighed. It appears that the par band may be too narrow which could cause some issues with the proper hormonal development of certain plants. In terms of LED bulb production the par is split between two red, two blue, and an amber (5 different spectrum bulbs in a specific ratio) to cover the full par spectrum but I see nothing in the documentation as to how wavelengths are banded for par output on these lights (or any other really). Clearly they can do the job but they may be too intense in that particular wavelength with incomplete distribution. I think that your probably right shwag, the best use is probably with some sort of supplemental enhancement. This is the issue with LED lights in my opinion, to actually do the par properly it takes more spectrum which complicates the engineering to arrange the pattern of equivalent mix and spectrum inclusion across the desired footprint, additionally to make it par these technically need to be weighted intensities per band. To the best of my knowledge there are only a couple companies that are trying to emulate par and GLH isn't one (that I can tell). Not that I am dissing them but with what stoney just put in I would say it is a safe deduction that some supplementary spectrum is in order. Apache Tech had their 120 tested at Stanford and designed for NASA and only had red and blue so I figured that given good results GLH was on to the key. The Apache uses some sort of lenses on the LEDs though. They claim their 120 is designed to be a direct replacement for a 600w HID. They are a grand each too.... So some things jive others don't if there is some sort of phosphor in their lenses that would be a spectrum enhancement. It's a lot to consider, you got a guarantee with them too no? Something like he will let you try them and if your not satisfied he will refund you. Hmn, a lot to consider!

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hippy132 said:

I think the 180's have to much white and not enough red, at least that what it looks like, when I visually compare my 290 to the 180's they appear to have more white percentage and less red percentage than the 290. I am running a single 180 over 3 clones, the lite is 35 inches above 2 of the clones and 25 inches above the other clone. Starting to see yellowing of leaves and am assuming it is nutrient wanting, since still in veg and ffof and waiting several more days to add first nutes. When I go into 12/12 I will be using (I hope) 180 and 290 at 12-15 inches from lites.

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colocowboy said:

Not at all crackpot, I think there is a lot to not only darkness but variation of full to partial light. I have observed some interesting growth patterns just based on these factors where several clones were outside and had different amounts of light/shade and all had different growth patterns for it. Some strains grow most at night where you can see the lighter green fresh growth in the morning. There is obviously something to your theory if it is working. The idea of cycling in some hid light is a great idea also. I think your ideas are great ones, man maybe the next evolution is air cooled hoods with led modules in the perimeters. You guys are doing good things even if it is slightly painful.

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stoneyluv said:

my reason fro LED's was two part... one, I was only growing in a small short area and couldn't exhaust the heat at the time. second reason is the more likely and that I'm a gadget and technology junkie!! I thought is was to cool and i had to try it!! after getting lucky with my first tri band panel and got great results, I decided to try something better. i bought a V1 then a second shortly after. had terrible results with it but continued to post my results and blamed everything else i was doing except for the lights. i kept my mouth shut and continued to harvest a few grams from an entire plant. I never stopped posting and never stopped trying. the popularity of my thread and the very kind words from Irish to Mike and Mike offered to replace everything i had. I was gonna send ya a PM about this... but just keep doing what your doing and hope that in the end you have what you paid for.... quality lights that grow quality meds!!!!

Keep the faith bro!!! and thank you very much for the rep!!!! and the CMH thing.... there are quite a few of us out there ( me being one) that feel those two are THE best combo on the market today!!! (led + cmh)



all very good info cowboy!!! what are your thoughts about the longer dark periods vs. spectrums?

my theory is that the plants absorbs so much far red that it continues to feel "hot" and still illumined after the lights go out. giving the plant a shorter dark period. so by me lengthening this time it absorbs less far red to an extent. this probably doesn't help to maximize yield but for the moment i would just like to finish out very healthy plants, then work on the yield. for now I want to learn what is so important about the dark time... I mean there is nothing special about 12/12... it only happens two nights a year in nature.

what if i ran the LED's for say 8-10 hours a day and finished up an hour or two with an HID? set up to run with timers of coarse...

is this a whole crack pot idea wih the dark times or do you think there could be more to it?

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colocowboy said:

You know what stoney, I have been thinking this for some time. I watch here and elsewhere and have been studying this stuff for a while now because there are some benefits that seemingly cannot be outweighed. It appears that the par band may be too narrow which could cause some issues with the proper hormonal development of certain plants. In terms of LED bulb production the par is split between two red, two blue, and an amber (5 different spectrum bulbs in a specific ratio) to cover the full par spectrum but I see nothing in the documentation as to how wavelengths are banded for par output on these lights (or any other really). Clearly they can do the job but they may be too intense in that particular wavelength with incomplete distribution. I think that your probably right shwag, the best use is probably with some sort of supplemental enhancement. This is the issue with LED lights in my opinion, to actually do the par properly it takes more spectrum which complicates the engineering to arrange the pattern of equivalent mix and spectrum inclusion across the desired footprint, additionally to make it par these technically need to be weighted intensities per band. To the best of my knowledge there are only a couple companies that are trying to emulate par and GLH isn't one (that I can tell). Not that I am dissing them but with what stoney just put in I would say it is a safe deduction that some supplementary spectrum is in order. Apache Tech had their 120 tested at Stanford and designed for NASA and only had red and blue so I figured that given good results GLH was on to the key. The Apache uses some sort of lenses on the LEDs though. They claim their 120 is designed to be a direct replacement for a 600w HID. They are a grand each too.... So some things jive others don't if there is some sort of phosphor in their lenses that would be a spectrum enhancement. It's a lot to consider, you got a guarantee with them too no? Something like he will let you try them and if your not satisfied he will refund you. Hmn, a lot to consider!

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