FlowerNose's Electric Fruit Auto Grow Journal 2017

[420Girl]

Do you have a carbon filter in there?

 

[NezFleur]

Do you have a carbon filter in there?

We had a sock (an actual sock) with carbon dangling behind a fan. Currently, I've turned a drier sheet into a catch pocket which is filled with carbon in the tube exhausting the left chamber. Works quite well, so far.

 

[420Girl]

Wow, that's genius!!

 

[FlowerNose]

Do you have a carbon filter in there?

This may help. I never thought to take pics here.

 

[420Girl]

Wow that's really cool. Much cheaper than buying a proper one no doubt.

 

[FlowerNose]

I didn't know he had that in there for a while.

 

[Jurf]

Hi! We had three main goals for our lights and a few features crept in as well. Our main concern was price. We sourced most of our stuff off eBay from China. Our second goal was for control. The drivers I am designing will allow me to control the power levels from other devices (pic, plc, simple resistive circuit, etc). The third goal was to limit the heat into the cabinet. Using water cooling we can remove the heat instead of dissipating into the air.

The LEDs were the cheapest I could find, 10 for $25. Plan is to significantly under run them to limit heat. The heat sinks are 40x200mm off eBay at around $10 each. The water pump was around $3. The radiator and reservoir were $30 each. Heat past was $1/30g. The temporary drivers are 2x 50w @ $5 each and 1x 100w @ $10 each. 3x 120mm fans @ $3 each. And several hose clamps.

Think that covers everything for hardware. I did test ahs request replacements for the LEDs with issues which I'll post on in a thread for the lights, at some point. But it was all plug and play less some heat shrink to size barbs.

Hello there! Nice to finally meet you. Very impressed by your engineering! Inspired, actually.
The light looks fantastic. Looks like you did a great job at spreading the light more nicely across the box. The plant looks like it's in the perfect place, light-wise.

Can I just ask a few questions, not including this one? I'm very new to all this light-building business, and until a few days ago I didnt even know the very basics of circuitry. lol yeah I know its terrible but I never came to a point in my life where I needed to understand it. But it looks like Im there now.

What are the specs on the LEDs you got, and was it difficult to find drivers that fit your LEDs? I've looked at COB kits from various sellers, and they're all expensive enough to consider just buying a pre-made light instead.

Am I right to think that, in terms of having a setup that actually produces light and has some longevity, all you need are the COBs, appropriate positive and negative wiring, and an appropriate driver? Am I missing something?

EDIT: Oh yes and heat sinks (I think I intend on using passive heattsinks, as temperature is actually in the lower part of the spectrum for me. Im looking to increase it)

 

[NezFleur]

For COBs there are two data points of interest for the driver; voltage and current. The driver must be able to supply the voltage the LED is rated for. Mine are 32vdc. The current is where you get dimming/intensity. My drivers are rated for 100w & 50w which, at 32vdc, would be 3 & 1.5 amps respectively. My COBs are 100w rated so should be able to handle 3 amps each.

The purpose of the driver is to produce the needed current at the rated voltage. Thing is you can get there a few ways. The most efficient is from line, mine is 120Vac, while others choose to drop to 12v then have the driver boost up to 32vdc. Only reason to do this is to use any left over pc power supplies but this is inefficient and more expensive; driver and supply.

The wires are possibly 22 gauge. Short distances aren't a problem, from what I've seen. Jumping to 16 should be overkill, I think.

You need a good bond between COB and heatsink, use thermal paste. A pc cpu heatsink should be enough for a single led. Could also go with a heatsink bar, think $15 for 4'. Might need fans. You could learn thermal transfer equations or just run a test and get fans if it gets hot.

As I only have 3 drivers but 8 lights I run multiple lights off the same driver. Turns out all the current limiting resisters for small LEDs, as taught in school, lead to the notion of no LEDs in parallel. This concept is not the case with power LEDs. There could be COB imbalance, one light brighter than another, but I haven't seen that yet.

The current lights are running at about 25w/COB. 4x red on 100w, 2x white on 50w, and 2x blue on 50w.

I did only have 1.7a on my white during initial testing with the 100w driver but haven't gone back to see if it was the driver or LED acting up. Think the voltage needed for full power is over the 40v driver limit but driving several COBs in parallel should be pulling the full current.

Really need to break over and start a separate thread for the lights.

 

[NezFleur]

I really should add, having a driver that isn't capable of supplying full rated current of the COB is less than ideal. I would highly suggest a dimming driver. This bring the driver price up significantly, about $50 for a 100w, but it gives you a potentiometer, a knob, to turn down the lights. They do this either by dropping the current or by pulsing the current to the COB at a very high frequency.

 

[Jurf]

For COBs there are two data points of interest for the driver; voltage and current. The driver must be able to supply the voltage the LED is rated for. Mine are 32vdc. The current is where you get dimming/intensity. My drivers are rated for 100w & 50w which, at 32vdc, would be 3 & 1.5 amps respectively. My COBs are 100w rated so should be able to handle 3 amps each.

The purpose of the driver is to produce the needed current at the rated voltage. Thing is you can get there a few ways. The most efficient is from line, mine is 120Vac, while others choose to drop to 12v then have the driver boost up to 32vdc. Only reason to do this is to use any left over pc power supplies but this is inefficient and more expensive; driver and supply.

The wires are possibly 22 gauge. Short distances aren't a problem, from what I've seen. Jumping to 16 should be overkill, I think.

You need a good bond between COB and heatsink, use thermal paste. A pc cpu heatsink should be enough for a single led. Could also go with a heatsink bar, think $15 for 4'. Might need fans. You could learn thermal transfer equations or just run a test and get fans if it gets hot.

As I only have 3 drivers but 8 lights I run multiple lights off the same driver. Turns out all the current limiting resisters for small LEDs, as taught in school, lead to the notion of no LEDs in parallel. This concept is not the case with power LEDs. There could be COB imbalance, one light brighter than another, but I haven't seen that yet.

The current lights are running at about 25w/COB. 4x red on 100w, 2x white on 50w, and 2x blue on 50w.

I did only have 1.7a on my white during initial testing with the 100w driver but haven't gone back to see if it was the driver or LED acting up. Think the voltage needed for full power is over the 40v driver limit but driving several COBs in parallel should be pulling the full current.

Really need to break over and start a separate thread for the lights.

Going to need to read this about 20 times with breaks in between to fully digest everything, plus googling. "Im in school again, Ma!"

Answers just keep producing more questions lol. And yeah I think a seperate thread for this Light business is a good call. I'll be on the lookout for that thread, and I'll continue you hounding you for information then! haha Again, excellent work. I dont think I personally will be physically building a COB board* until perhaps my second grow, and my first hasnt even started yet. SO Im going to take it easy and spend the next few couple months ensuring I know just wth Im doing.

You mentioned a lot of stuff about this was learned in school. Not for me it wasnt! at least I dont remember anyway

 

[NezFleur]

Just some numbers for those interested. The reds are running 110-120f, the blues 130-140f, and the whites 160-170f. When I ran one of the whites solo under the 100w driver the temperature climbed to over 250f. Higher temps produce higher heat transfers but is still undesired.

 

[FlowerNose]

Good night, everybody. I'm going to go dream about my garden.
.

 

[Blazinjones]

FlowerNose, you should check out Kind soil (google it) when you decide to try organic. I chose it after countless hours researching the soils available and talking to people who have used it. Its been so simple for me, literally water with PH water 6.5-7.0 (can't use chemical PH up or down....gotta use an organic stuff called "Earth Juice" Natural Down. Aside from that just use the amount of soil relative to your pot size (7 lbs for a 7 gallon pot, 5lbs for 5 gallon pot, etc) ensuring that you are using a big enough pot to support your grow length (the bag will tell you how much you need for how long you plan your grow to be). Then you fill the rest of the pot up with Coco-Loco or other similar product (I went with Bushdoctors Coco-Loco). I am vegging longer to play around with training techniques and to learn. So I will be using 7 gallon pots.

I didn't want to worry about messing up nutes on my first grow and I have to travel occasionally and I don't want to stress out Ms Stank with taking care of the girls when I might have to travel. So I decided to give the organic soil grow a go and I am totally loving it. My brother grows commercially in Washington State and was blown away by all the crap he has to go through for feeding them. I wanted no part of that on my first couple grows. Water and train, thats it for me. I will let you know via my grow journal if I hit any bumps in the road.....but as I am following their (Kind Soil's) directions to the tee and not adding anything, I don't expect any issues. Seems that everyone that either didn't use the right stuff to PH down their water, or added extra nutes were the ones that had issues. All the people that followed their directions all had really good and easy grows and all said the flavor of the bud was so much better than soil-less soil, or hydro grows. Though I can't attest to the validity of that.

Im doin a los mix (living organic soil) from buildasoil.com n tht is no ph down need or up or nuthn i am tweeking the recipe by doing malted grain teas among other kinds of teas but it doesnt need it im jus makn xtra effort to get bigger better frostier yields lo but yea bas.com even has an ammendment tht alows u 2 reuse there soil kit so u dnt need to keep buying soil for awhile jus water an go n its every 2days for me once i get em in final 5 gal home depot buckets but the begining babies in 1 gal get feed everyday jus ro water n some teas every now n then but mostly jus ro water till they get established then i start cranking the teas which are all organic n man i love the taste of organic washed buds nuthn beats it in my opinion i started out using fox farms nute line n was gettn good results but thn a buddy convinced me 2go2 buildasoil.com n check it out well i decided to get there soil kit n it was super cheap to so tht was nice got it n mixed it up n well i never went back lmao i gave away all my chem bottled nutes n stuff n been doing organic ever sense n only been getting better n better results over the pas 6 months roughly give or take since i went all organic

 

[FlowerNose]

Good morning!

It's somewhere around day 55.

I woke up, answered the call of nature, then went to the garden. I visited with Widow first. Pics in my other journal.
FlowerNose's White Widow Auto Stealth Grow

But then I went over to see Fruity. Imagine my surprise when...

"NEZ!" He came running and said he'd flipped it to just red when he woke up because he was afraid that one of the leaves was reacting poorly to the lights.

I didn't know we were capable of single colors.

The leaf in question got pretty scorched with the previous LED setup.

So we've turned the blue and white lights back on and I no longer imagine my plant is growing in the bowels of hell.

Sexy parts are filling in. I. Love. This. Part. I love how they seem to swell every day. And I love the white virginal pistils all stretched out begging for... You know what she's begging for.

And one more pic for the road.

.

 

[Jurf]

If the leaves are showing signs of burn, could it be that the white light is delivering some infrared? From what I know, infrared is the part of the spectrum which is most likely to cause leaf burn, as it transmits heat quite substantially, far more than other parts of the spectrum. If its burn and if it burn continues, maybe consider only turning off the whites, and leave the blues and red.

 

[FlowerNose]

I think the problem that caused the burn has already been addressed. But I'll keep an eye out for further damage.

 

[NezFleur]

The red LEDs are much closer to infrared spectrum than the whites. Infrared is better at transferring heat but also useful energy for the plant. The whites are just blues with a phosphorus coating dropping the high energy blue through the spectrum. The blue is higher frequency and thus more energetic. This is compounded by the clear coat for blues, less loss to heat. The blues are also closer to the ultraviolet spectrum. Ultraviolet can cause chemical breakdown.

When the damage happened we had 2x 50w red and 1x 100w white quite close to the canopy. Not sure if these lights, at the current power levels, Will do any damage. 200w over 8 COBs instead of 3.

 

[Van Stank]

Im doin a los mix (living organic soil) from buildasoil.com n tht is no ph down need or up or nuthn i am tweeking the recipe by doing malted grain teas among other kinds of teas but it doesnt need it im jus makn xtra effort to get bigger better frostier yields lo but yea bas.com even has an ammendment tht alows u 2 reuse there soil kit so u dnt need to keep buying soil for awhile jus water an go n its every 2days for me once i get em in final 5 gal home depot buckets but the begining babies in 1 gal get feed everyday jus ro water n some teas every now n then but mostly jus ro water till they get established then i start cranking the teas which are all organic n man i love the taste of organic washed buds nuthn beats it in my opinion i started out using fox farms nute line n was gettn good results but thn a buddy convinced me 2go2 buildasoil.com n check it out well i decided to get there soil kit n it was super cheap to so tht was nice got it n mixed it up n well i never went back lmao i gave away all my chem bottled nutes n stuff n been doing organic ever sense n only been getting better n better results over the pas 6 months roughly give or take since i went all organic

Well I have to pH my water down or use my drinking water because my tap water has a pH that fluctuates between 9.2 and 10. So there is no way I am using that on the plants. My water is so bad that I am trying to figure what options I can do with my outdoor veggie garden. Its too big to water by hand with pH'd down water. I am looking at dropping to the pH of the soil down to try to compensate for the extremely high pH levels of the water.

 

[Jurf]

The red LEDs are much closer to infrared spectrum than the whites. Infrared is better at transferring heat but also useful energy for the plant. The whites are just blues with a phosphorus coating dropping the high energy blue through the spectrum. The blue is higher frequency and thus more energetic. This is compounded by the clear coat for blues, less loss to heat. The blues are also closer to the ultraviolet spectrum. Ultraviolet can cause chemical breakdown.

When the damage happened we had 2x 50w red and 1x 100w white quite close to the canopy. Not sure if these lights, at the current power levels, Will do any damage. 200w over 8 COBs instead of 3.

Doesnt making the light white make it full spectrum? I thought if the reds arent specifically in the infrared zone, they wont produce the qualities of infrared at all. Maybe Im wayy off hahaha. I just thought that white light delivers all of the spectrum, including infrared and ultraviolet. Not sure where I picked that up or if i learned it in a lesson I had in my dreams lol

EDIT: Yeah no, I was wrong. Sorry FlowerNose. Back to school for me

 

[NezFleur]

The whites start off as blues. Energy levels, frequency, only drops so the light coming from the blue LEDs is the highest energy we get. It might be producing ultraviolet but it won't jump from blue to ultraviolet if it isn't producing ultraviolet already. The phosphorous consumes a large portion of the blue and then emits the energy at a slightly lower level, getting close to green. This gets absorbed by the phosphorous dropping it further, finally getting some reds. Hopefully most of the light has been emitted as different spectrums of light by this point, we have made it through all the phosphorous,and not much of the red gets absorbed and dropped to infrared.

At least, this is my current understanding of full spectrum lights. There are whites which pinpoint spectrum by using specific led flecks (100x 1w flecks in a 100w led; flecks isn't the proper term) to give the light very specific starting frequencies or to fill in the spectrum where there is a lacking. This must be done correctly by the manufacture to prevent imbalance between fleck strands (10 strands in parallel of 10 flecks in series).