The guy at my Hydro shop tells me that LED panels are junk.
Personally I don't know, just passing along info from a trusted source.
For 2 plants all you really need is that single 1000W (its actually enough for more plants than that!)
If you can get a MH conversion bulb for vegging you would be golden with just that one light.
Heat would be less of an issue as would your electric bill.
If you can, see about using GFI outlets (Ground Fault Interrupt) just tell your relative he will know.
They are the ones that you should see in your bathroom or kitchen with the little buttons on them (Test/Reset)
they will stop providing current should you get a short or something and are meant for use near H2O.
(better to not explain this to the wife as the thought of a short may cause more worry, but good your your piece of mind)
just air cool the hood using a carbon filter in the room as an intake then go from there to the hood and finally out of the room (hopefully the house)
If your electric is wired correctly you should not have much of a hazard to worry about.
My wife worries too so my advice is trim the OP down to a manageable scale and spend more time with her and less with the kids in your Grow OP.
Does wonders.
Find time when she isn't around to tend your garden.
They will do fine all on their own for a while now and then.
If you obsess about them she could get jealous.
Just a few tips from a guy with an anxious wife.

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NO tell - NO smell - NO sell First Grow

I know there have been threads about those ufo style Leds on this forum , try a search. May even be in Faqs, worth checking if you are interested in those lighting fixtures. Good luck and keep us updated on your progress. Consider a journal. If I was able to post pics I would do one. Need to reinstall a program first, and must find disc( I know it's here somewhere )......
Edit- Alto posted while I was typing, I second what he says about one 1000 watter with conversion bulbs. A 600 might be enough for your space. Also he( or she) is right about a ground-fault receptacle , put one at beginning of circuit. Have fun , but don't burn down your house . That would really get the ol' lady POed!!!!

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What,Me Worry??

P.S Aside to Alto,shouldn't the carbon filter go on the exhaust air, not the intake? I always assumed that the idea is to remove the odour leaving the grow room not entering it.

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What,Me Worry??

thats right!
I have the carbon intake inside the grow room(IMAGE), next in line is the "in line" fan, then the "sealed" light fixture, then out of the fixture to outside the room.
I found sucking the odor thru the filter first then thru my "sealed" light fixture, then out of the room the most practical.
The Crabonair filter I have is like 16" diam. by 16" (or so) tall and I just don't have a place on the end of the exhaust line to put it where it won't be noticed.
The dryer vent style exhaust hose I'm using (4") blends in pretty well as a bathroom exhaust in the ceiling of my basement. Stealth is good.
Filter-Fan-Light-Outside seems to be used a lot.
I have another passive duct that brings fresh air into the room which is separate from the exhaust system.
It is also good to (if you are able to) place the filter near the top of your room so as to catch more heat/ Odor as heat rises.

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NO tell - NO smell - NO sell First Grow

Oh OK I get it , Room air into filter , into light housing , out of room, that makes sense to me now, sorry about the confusion.

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What,Me Worry??

i have a quick question. what color cfls should i use im gonna buy two and i wanna get two different colors.

I searched for the LED's but couldn't find anything....that's why I asked. I've considered a journal, I just don't know how paranoid to be, I don't exactly live in a 'friendly' state so I'm either covering my ass or fueling a split personality....I wish I could scan in my notes so you guys could see them....pages and pages. I'm just trying to get a nice amount for personal use only, I keep thinking how sad it is that I can get it everywhere but home.

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Don't judge me monkey.

Does anyone know how to overdrive a ballast ?I am sure someone out there has . Happy 420! Peace pot and micro-dot!

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The Power is Yours!!!

By Jim Haworth
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Overdriving fluorescent bulbs is a method of getting more light from each bulb than is normally obtained. It involves taking the light fixture apart and rewiring the insides. Each electronic ballast normally drives either two or four bulbs. The ballasts are then tied together in such a way that a two-bulb ballast now drives a single bulb and a four-bulb ballast drives only two bulbs, sometimes it only drives one. Usually, an extra ballast is put into the fixture and wired into the bulb circuit. For instance, if you have four bulbs in the fixture and they have a four-bulb ballast, this ballast now drives two bulbs and another four-bulb ballast is used to drive the remaining two bulbs. If the directions in this article are carefully followed, this rewiring is not dangerous and the bulbs won’t blow up, they simply become brighter. The bulbs are limited by their design to draw only so much current and no more. If you double the amount of current, you won’t get a bulb that’s two times brighter because the efficiency drops off a bit. So even after the increased current is made available, a bulb driven by a factor of two times its normal supply, only gets 1.7 times brighter. You can do a 1x, 2x, or 3x overdrive with a four-lamp ballast, but the efficiency drops. (4x output into one bulb is only 2.4 times as bright as normal).
Put another way; the output of the bulbs does not increase in direct ratio to the amount of power the ballast consumes. The more times you overdrive a fluorescent bulb, the less efficient it becomes, as it is starting to drift out of the bulb's optimal design parameters.
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The information for this article was partially gleaned from postings on forums all over the Internet. The forums included gardens (seed starting), fish/aquarium (freshwater and salt water), houseplants, pro studio photography, reptiles, electronics, and others. If you see postings here that you’ve seen elsewhere, keep in mind that I’m just trying to bring some semblance of order out of the inherent disorder of every forum out there that deals with this subject. If you have a question about your particular application, please try some of these forums. There are people who are very knowledgeable about the process of overdriving and they are willing to help you. Many, many people have rewired their fluorescent fixtures with no explosions or house fires that I know of. There are people out there that are deathly afraid of electricity, and if you are one of them, perhaps you shouldn't rewire your lamps. If you haven't overdriven your own fixtures, please don't be a nervous nelly and post gloom and doom predictions of disaster for those who want to try this. The data took many hours to put together into a more or less readable form. Sorry there’s no way to give proper credit to everyone who contributed to this huge Internet pool of information.
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This is a rather long article and seems to be very complicated, but really, it’s not bad once you get the core idea of what’s involved. Don’t be apprehensive. Check each step carefully and then recheck. You’ll be fine!
I must issue a warning or three. If you don't know much about working with electricity, you should read up on electrical wiring techniques.
Don’t even think about using a magnetic ballast, it won’t work for overdriving fluorescent lights, and you might have a very smelly incident as the internals melt down.
Utilizing ODNO (Overdriven Normal Output) fluorescent lighting technology will likely void your warranty on ballast and/or bulbs. We are not responsible for damage caused by improper use or failures due to overdriving fluorescent lights.
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Use or install a GFCI fixture to plug your fluorescent fixture into after you’ve rewired it. Use a power strip with a circuit breaker on the strip if you don’t have a Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter. This will offer a degree of protection for you, if you’ve made a mistake in the wiring. Always make sure a ground wire is connected to the fixture! This is for safety and it helps the lamps to start when the metal reflector is grounded.
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Be careful if you’re using this setup to power lighting for an aquarium, you know, electricity and water. Nuff said.
Fluorescent lights have notoriously been known for flicker and hum. This is no longer a problem with the new electronic ballasts. This is because with magnetic ballasts the fluorescent lamp actually drops out of ionization and get re-ionized 60 times a second. Electrical engineers discovered that once you speed the process up to at least 4,000 Hertz (cycles per second), the gas stays ionized (no more flicker). This is also a bit more efficient. And, since the notorious hum would now become a squeal, engineers design electronic ballast to oscillate above the range of human hearing. No more noticeable hum.
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First, you are not rewiring the ballast. You are rewiring the outputs of the ballast (nothing internal). Electronic ballasts which operate more than one lamp often show several wiring options, so the same ballasts can be used in several configurations, thus saving the manufacturer money. What rewiring to overdrive lamps does, is cause the circuitry to see a different load drawing the current. The output transistors can do this and still be functioning within proper specifications. This is neither dangerous nor illegal; it’s simply the way electronic ballasts are designed. The most telling thing about the results is that, using a 2x overdrive; the ballast draws less power with one lamp than it would draw normally with 2 lamps. The two output transistors are teaming up and actually drawing less amperage than normal (with 2 lamps).
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Put another way, when you re-arrange the output of the ballast wiring to overdrive a lamp, you are sharing the "lamp load" between the individual lamp circuits. The ballast itself is actually UNDERDRIVEN, since it is now sending LESS total current to a single lamp than it would normally be sending to two lamps. It is the lamp that gets OVERDRIVEN. The ballast is running cooler, the bulb running hotter. This does not burn out the bulb, although it's life is shortened a bit.
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The ballasts used for overdriving are actually running below their normal capacity, sharing the duty, and drawing less than normal. I have done this with 7 different types and wattages of electronic ballasts and they ALL worked well.
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In a two-lamp fixture, overdriving (which requires a ballast that drives 2 or more lights) involves disconnecting the wires from both ends of one lamp's socket, and joining them to the wires of the remaining lamp. This results in a 32w lamp being driven to put out approximately 1.7 times as much light as normally produced. This will reduce the life of the lamp somewhat, but in the overall picture it is very economical to replace a 32w bulb-even twice as often. With fluorescent lights, over 95% of the total cost of using the bulb is the electricity, since the bulbs last so long to begin with. I used both a current meter and a light meter to compare my results. Your own eyes can DEFINITELY see the difference.
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This is the way the tombstones look on the other end after the ballast is rewired on the Rapid Start system. Diagram to the left.
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It was a pain-in-the-butt to figure out how to get the existing wires out of those “push-in-and-stay-in” type sockets. Do not pry the back off of the sockets. I did that once, early on, and broke the plastic socket apart doing it. I finally developed the knack of doing what I can only call a “twist and wiggle” technique to get the existing wires out of their slot. Although I can get most of the wires off, I still end up breaking off 10-15% of them. Since you end up with a couple of extra sockets anyhow, you can afford to mess up a few of them. As a last resort, I would have gone ahead and cut and spliced the wires if I couldn’t get the wires wiggled out of the socket. Once you push that wire in, it wants to stay in. Trial and error will hopefully lead you to a useable technique.











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The Power is Yours!!!

Quick question. I am working on a grow room design to suit my grow space. I am thinking of a fixed lighting system instead of on a pulley like I've often seen.

From reading the very first post in this thread, am I correct in understanding that it ultimatly does not matter the proximatey of the light to the plant as long as the plant is receiving around 7000-10000 lumens?

(and would a light meter tell me my lumens?)

Thanks!

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