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Purple Afghan breeding project

THC4SIM

Active member
mmmmmmm, interesting...

so thats what you were explaining to me! lol
ill keep an eye on how it go's
 
G

Guest

Hiya mate

Yup, hope it makes a lil mroe sense now!

I've just added a second light, a much bigger, badder 72W mofo with 18 LEDs in 3 strings of 6, and stuck 3 Purple Afghan clones and a Cheese clone under it so I now have 7 plants (6 PA, 1 Cheese) under 96W of LEDs, which should be interesting. Sorry for the shitty phone pics but I lent my camera to a friend for a couple of weeks.

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I've got all the parts to build a second, identical 72W unit, apart from the LEDs, so when I have the cash, I'll build a second one and get rid of my 250W HPS.
 

bodhiseeds

Member
Veteran
thats awsome, your putting your stoner super hero powers to good work. i love the colors, looks like a plant disco, too cool. your one step ahead of the game. crossing my fingers for a purple pheno those afghan shots are unbelievable.
good luck and many blessings
b
 
G

Guest

Some shitty pics of my 50cm square flowering setup I quickly bodged together to house the LED lights. There are 6 Purple Afghan clones in there in coco. WIth the two lights I have about 50W of LEDs running, which will do, but is only half the potential of these two lights, so when I do get the other LEDs working, I expect this setup to rock. It is designed to take 9 plants in 2 litre square pots, and just have the one light in there with 24 LEDs delivering 96W, which should be ample.

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Sammet

Med grower
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Hey bh that LED array is pretty cool - do they get hot? I noticed you've got one hell of a heatsink on the back and you mentioned it barely gets warm - think you could get away with a smaller one? Kudos on making it yourself mate, very impressive. I'm all thumbs when it comes to electronics.
 
G

Guest

Hiya Sammet, yes they get very hot, but the heatsink takes care of that. The array is actually just 6 Akasa CPU heatsinks fastened together with one of the heatsink fans bolted on top, so it's just one huge mofo of a heatsink and I don't even think the fan is necessary as it runs very cool. You need 9 sqaure inches of aluminium surface for each LED, hence the huge heatsink. I knew bugger all about electronics myself until I started reseraching LEDs for growing, it's not complicated to wire these high power LEDs together - just conenct them in a string with + connected to the - of the following LED.

Hehe, don't worry about the camera, those 5 pics are all I'll be taking for a while, you have lots of things to photograph and I don't, so snap away happily, these clones under the LEDs have a long time to go yet so plenty more picture taking opportunities!
 
B

BeAn

Ganja Pasha said:
Some shitty pics of my 50cm square flowering setup I quickly bodged together to house the LED lights. There are 6 Purple Afghan clones in there in coco. WIth the two lights I have about 50W of LEDs running, which will do, but is only half the potential of these two lights, so when I do get the other LEDs working, I expect this setup to rock. It is designed to take 9 plants in 2 litre square pots, and just have the one light in there with 24 LEDs delivering 96W, which should be ample.

Photo-0027.jpg


Photo-0028.jpg


Photo-0029.jpg

Some of your posts make me think your a twat, but thats niether here nor there...All things aside, will be interesting to see how this lil test ya got going turns out...might produce a nice blunt at the end..:D:yes:
 
G

Guest

As long as docleaf doesn't turn up with his wet blanket appraoch and start saying LEDs are useless I won't have a problem.

The plants seem to love the LEDs so far, certainly the blue and white LEDs in my veg light are doing a great job, lovely stocky plants.
 
G

Guest

I've made two 160-LED arrays to go in the corners of the box and provide extra side-lighting, they consume almost 12W each and have 120 645nm red LEDs and 40 white ones, they are a pain to make compared to the high power LEDs but very cheap, only about a tenner per panel.

Photo-0030.jpg


The Jahwi's Joy Ghanaian sativa I have is done, not producing anymore pistils and yield is tiny, just lots of tiny foxtail buds all over a huge plant, but the smoke from a speed dried sample is earthy, very potent and as well as having a strong heady high also has a mean body stone. I pollinated her with my PA male and have put 5 of the F1 beans into paper towels as I really wanna see what this turns out like - Purple Joy!
 
K

kenned

Nice with the led's, Ganja...!

Have you tried the led's before or know someone who has, since you wanna switch them out with the 250w hps?

how do you connect all th small led's to each other, on that last picture?
 
G

Guest

I haven't seen any other LED grows apart from the odd one online, and those all use the red and blue only approach, which I am sure isn't correct.

The LEDs are soldered to the board, I bend the legs over to bridge them to each other like this:

DSCF0001.jpg


DSCF0002.jpg
 
K

kenned

Well, it sure looks exciting!
It looks like there is more LED's on the front side, than on the back...??
If you know what I mean??

Can I we se a picture with the led's turned on?
 
G

Guest

Sadly I don't have a camera right now, but the panels are quite bright, however, the high power LEDs are far brighter, painful to look at.

I'm adding a load of high power UV LEDs next week, see if UV really does increase resin production.

At the moment, I'm using 500 blue 5mm LEDs and 100 white 5mm LEDs to build 10 60-LED panels for my veg space to replace my fluoros. The the panels will run off a 19.5V 3.34A Dell laptop PSU and judging by how well my prototype 15W blue/whte seedling light is working, they should do a great job.

DSCF0017.jpg


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If you look at the energy savings between my old and new setups, it's pretty amazing how much energy I'm saving:

Old Setup LED replacement
Seedlings 65W CFL 15W 5mm LEDs
Clones/veg 160W 2ft fluoro tubes 25W 5mm LEDs
Mothers 125W Envirolite 25W 5mm LEDs
Flower Space 1 250W HPS 50W high power LEDs
Flower Space 2 250W HPS 72W high power LEDs
TOTAL: 850W 187W

Overall power saving: 663W

I'm gonna add some more LEDs to the flower spaces as funds allow, so my overall power consumption will end up about 250W, but that's still a piffling amount of power to consume and still have as much space and useable light as before.

LEDs (or rather the methods required to make them effective) may still have some way to go as regards flowering cannabis, but for vegging plants, they work fantastic and I highly recommend a combination of blue and white LEDs to replace fluoro lighting for vegging - no heat, no stretch (the blue prevents it) and increased growth rate, what's not to like? 500 blue LEDs and 100 white LEDs cost me 30 dollars and the circuit boards and resistors to make 10 panels cost another 20 dollars, so for 50 bucks (and the effort of making the panels) I have two extremely effective and efficient veg lighting setups.
 
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K

kenned

Dont you need something to melt connect the leds to each other? What does that cost??

And are you sure the white and blue leds are as good as cfl's??

Got some links to the led's?

And last, how does (for example) 100w led compare to 100w cfl?? Does it give more or less light???

Sorry for hijacking your thread, but using LED's for veg and bloom really sound like something I could use, as heat is a problem for me... :)

thanks,
kenned
 
G

Guest

No worries kenned, please ask away!

You need a soldering iron, they are very cheap, mine was 4.99ukp.

This is the cheapest place to get 5mm LEDs:

ledshoppe.com

Their red is a very useful 640-645nm, good for flowering, nearly all other cheap red LEDs are 625nm, which is less effective.

My 15W seedling light has 150 LEDs, 75 white, 75 blue, and it is working just as well as the 65W CFL it replaced, I even removed the exhaust fan as it isn't needed now and used up 5W.

When the bigegr veg lights are up and running I'll do some tests to see hwo well they veg plants, but so far the 15W unit is producing rapid growth with very tight internodes, half the spacing on the same clones vs CFL.

It's hard to make comparison detween 100w of LED and 100w of CFL as the lumens ratings aren't applicable. If a typical 20w CFL produces 2000 lumens, you are getting about 10000umens from 100W of CFLs. How much of this is actually useable by the plant thopugh?A lot of the light is in the un-needed yellow, green and orange wavelengths, and therefores, only a small percentage (for arguments sake, let's say 20%) is actually used by the plant, so that 10000 lumens is more like 2000 useable lumens.

With LEDs, you can customise the spectral output by choosinf specific wavelength LEDs, I reckon with a ratio of 75% blue, 25% white, 100w of LEDs would give you way more useable lumens than the CFLs.
 
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G

Guest

Just checked the PA clone I've been spraying daily with colloidal silver, and it has turned full-blown hermie, the top bud is now an even mix of balls and pistils, when it's grown more I'll take some pics, at the moment, the flowers are too small for my phone cam to get a decent image. The Cheese cut I'm also spraying with CS is a week behind but is also showing signs of tranvestisism (is that a proper word?)
 
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K

kenned

How do you know how many watts the LED-board is using?
And what about the other things, dont know the english names, resistance's??

and is 6000mcd 5 mm good enough, theres also some 13.000 mcd??
 
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