100w led panel???

GroErr said:

With some CFl's in there and not vegging too long you could get 3 smaller plants. You should be looking towards 100W/plant if you want to grow them big/bushy, you could do that in a second round. I vegged these 3 (pic) under 405W, they're at week 14, 22 days into flowering but the 100W panel wouldn't get them near this size, not enough coverage/light.
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longarms90 said:

That's the answe I was lookin for! Sucks its not what I wanted to hear, but I know what I have to do then. I'll probably look into a 300w or bigger. I need something that will cover 4 plants flowering in a perpetual. I'm going to journal how the 100w does once I get it, and once I can get a bigger one, the100w is going to be a clone starter and early veg light.

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GroErr said:

Glad it helped, and thanks, I'm pleased with the results this 2nd indoor round, very pleased with the LED's, they rock and cost next to nothing to operate, win-win. Do what you can with what you have and slowly build up. No use wasting a bunch of power/time trying to push the 100W farther than it can go. But with some CFL's added you can probably get something small and go from there. I'm expanding as I go, started with the 405W, got a few ounces first round but mainly dealt with temp/environment issues, did some fine tuning and these are the result, I'm guesstimating about 12-14 dry oz's from the 3 plants which is not bad for my second indoor grow (many years outdoor but indoor is a whole different beast!). Next round is 6-8 plants (new room) under about 900W plus I have a small 2x2x4' tent going for clones/mom with a 150W LED and some CFL's. Love them and they'll love you back

Hint, watch the LED's for clones, keep the light a good 24-30" above at first, until they root/establish, then move closer, 18-24". I fried a few clones in my tent at first, lights were too close, they're responding well at 24" above them now.

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GroErr said:

Yeah, I've found you should treat them somewhere between HID/HPS and CFL's. Young plants keep them far away (24-30"), once established you can go closer (18-24"), once they're "plants" around 1ft and filled out I moved them to as close as 13-15" with no burn or bleaching. However, there's a point and in my case that seemed to be in that 13-15" range, where you loose the coverage/spread of the light and mix of the colours/bands. Going to monitor a bit closer next round but I think the ideal sweet spot for my panel config will be keeping them in the 16"-20" range through most of the cycles.

All in all, I'm glad I went with the LED's, recently calculated the cost of running my whole setup, bought a meter which plugs into whatever you want to measure, measures the AMP/KWhr draw, and calculates your cost based on your KWhr cost input. In my case and I think most indoor folks here run their lights-on at off hours, it's huge difference, in my area I pay 6.9 cents/KWhr off-hours vs. almost 15 cents during peak and around 12 cents in between. The lights account for approx. 50% of the total operations cost, fans, exhaust, fresh incoming air use up the balance. Total cost in the $40-$45/month range for a 2x4x5' cabinet with 3 decent size plants. I don't know any different for indoor because I went straight in with LED's but when you consider that the cost of the peripherals (fans, exhaust etc.) account for 50% of the power usage, I can't imagine HID/HPS setups could come close to that, you have to add significant environmental controls just to manage the heat output which would drive your operational costs through the roof. The only question in my mind was whether LED's would cut it in comparison to HPS/HID, close to the end of the second round I'm convinced that if you manage all the basics (light, water, soil/nutes, heat, humidity) the end result will be the same or close, at a lower overall cost. We'll see, I may eat those words at some point but I'm not seeing any downside to-date…

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