Upstate New York in the winter. Snow piled high but warm inside. A friend of mine in the Army was from Watertown. Makes me cold just thinking of it.
The propane heater is a twofer—heat and CO2 but, yeh, 2k PPM is too much.
I didn't realize that it got that hot upstate. 85+CO2 is a good combo. How are you sealing the grow area?
If you can get that much CO2 in there, that's great. I'd add more photons and go easy on the time using the blue channel. Blue photons are great for "short, compact plants" and blue encourages the formation of more leaves but it has a downside, per the attached paper.
The Kind maxes out at ~950. With that level of CO2, another few hundred µmol would do well for you. I'm keen on the GlowR80's which add about 250µmol of 660nm light. I added a pair to my Growcraft flower light for my most recent grow.
I used Grok to work through some of the details of adding them to your Kind and the results are, well, about as close to optimal as you can get. I uploaded the flower spectrum and the 12" PPFD map for your light as well as the PPFD map for the GlowR80's. Grok got the PPFD wrong the first time though but the second pass looks good. The "conversation" is
here.
The 57% estimate from Grok will be lower in real life because the PPFD for the R80's falls off pretty quickly but you're still going to get a good PPFD boost from just 80watts of input power for $120.
At high light levels, a pound a plant (auto or photo) is no big shakes. The trick is lotsa photons but it's got to be lotsa photons early in the lifecycle. The goal is for "canopy closure", meaning that the plant covers the entire lighted area. Blue photons will reduce plant size but encourage lotsa leaves. I've used a veg light for a few years and, yup, the plants are short and stocky at first but the flower light (now flower light + the R80's) will tend to give bigger plants.
For my next grow, I'm going to run the veg light for 4-5 weeks, instead of the normal 6-7 weeks, and then run the flower light. That might be a good recipe for you, as well. I get it about the benefits of blue light but I the Bugbee paper on what I call "the blue photon penalty" makes me want to cut back a little on the amount of blue.
Yup! Someone described autos as being like a dragster—they go really fast but one screw up and, you're done.
the good thing about hydro, to my way of thinking, is that there aren't many surprises because nothing is in the root zone unless we put it there. As long as we "measure twice,
cut pour once", we should be in good shape.
"Dif" is an issue. Will your daytime temps, sans light, be lower than your night time temps when the lights are on?
Interesting idea. I sounds like a good idea but, my degree was in history, not physics.
Key issue is to ensure that there's lots of consistent contact between the buckets and the coils—you can get that by forming the pex around the bucket (I had to look up pex - cross linked poly = the same stuff that's in my hips!).
What about a bucket within a bucket with the cooling water running through the outer bucket?
$100 is dirt cheap and that's for a cooler plus the tubing. That's a great price.
looking forward to my next 3 runs of white truffle , GYAT , and apes in space …
