A room full of LEDs

I don't know why people still say LEDs can't grow. I swung by a place today and took some photos of a room full of the boards we made. They're doing fine.

These are all in coco run-to-waste. The strain is mostly Mental Floss with a Wappa in one corner. The panels are double High Lights with a bit of UVA and near-UV on matching heatsinks driven at 400W a pair with HLG-480H-48A drivers.

Each plant/light yields up to 24oz. 1.7gpw is pretty good for a non-water culture grow, but there's still room for improvement IMO.

Got some more pix. This is the Wappa. There's a nice Mental Floss behind it under a pair of QB324s.

What do the QB324s and High Lights have in common? They both use high CRI Nichia LEDs and are both around 3000K.

And last two.

how are they powered? looks like power coming from below? why not from above?

nice room!

Nice! Just hit the 1.8 gpw on an 11-12' length myself. Pretty exciting. Nice set-up Prawn.

Prawn Connery said:

I don't know why people still say LEDs can't grow. I swung by a place today and took some photos of a room full of the boards we made. They're doing fine.

These are all in coco run-to-waste. The strain is mostly Mental Floss with a Wappa in one corner. The panels are double High Lights with a bit of UVA and near-UV on matching heatsinks driven at 400W a pair with HLG-480H-48A drivers.

Each plant/light yields up to 24oz. 1.7gpw is pretty good for a non-water culture grow, but there's still room for improvement IMO.

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1.7gpw is great. Can i ask what is roughly the watts per square ft?

Go large or go home they say!

sethimus said:

how are they powered? looks like power coming from below? why not from above?

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Yes, remote drivers. We run all our drivers remotely - never saw the sense in putting drivers on heatsinks, as it just adds heat to the LEDs which hurts efficiency

Warpedpassage said:

1.7gpw is great. Can i ask what is roughly the watts per square ft?

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Each station is roughly 3x3 with 400W hanging over it - so that's just under 45W per sq/ft. The room is obviously bigger - I think it's about 12x12 - so the actual watts per square foot are closer to 25 - but you wouldn't use that metric for growing.

Nice job @Prawn Connery

Quality LED's can definitely yield. Done it myself. Gonna be doing more and more.

Mighty fine work. And to think only 400w a section used.

Renfro said:

Nice job @Prawn Connery

Quality LED's can definitely yield. Done it myself. Gonna be doing more and more.

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Yeah, it's been a bit of a journey. Like most commercial growers, he was very skeptical of LEDs at first. So we bought some QB324s and trialled them over two stations. The results were good, and he expressed an interest in buying some more. But by then HLG had sold out/stopped making them. So we decided to design and build our own boards - the High Light being the result.

We trialled the first High Lights at about 345W (HLG-320H-48A drivers) and the results were just shy of the QB324s running at 410+W, so we decided to bump them up to 400W and hang them a little higher. He's obviously mainly interested in yield, so didn't mind using a bit of extra power.

Yields went from 22oz at 345W to 24oz at 400W - so a slight drop in gpw (1.8 down to 1.7), but an increase in overall yield.

Prawn Connery said:

Yields went from 22oz at 345W to 24oz at 400W - so a slight drop in gpw (1.8 down to 1.7), but an increase in overall yield.

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Over how many runs were those results averaged? Really the difference could be within an error percentage caused by factors not attributed to lighting.

Renfro said:

Over how many runs were those results averaged? Really the difference could be within an error percentage caused by factors not attributed to lighting.

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You're right, of course - there are lots of variables to consider. The first average was over three runs when the boards were initially being trialled with a HLG-320H-48A driver. The last was the most recent run after switching the drivers for 480s and setting them at 400W. I posted the figures to give an idea of what the initial switch from 345W to 400W showed. I'd expect those figures to improve as he keeps dialling in his system.

I've run different configurations in my own 4x2 tent with eight High Light panels driven by either two 240W of one 320W driver, and I've settled on the 320 for now. One thing I noticed after switching from CRI80 3000K Samsungs (strip builds) to the High Lights was the added UVA was quite strong and had the potential to bleach sooner (at the same power setting and distance), so I've had to back things off a little.

But I multi-crop, which means I don't have similar conditions to compare grow-to-grow. Certainly the same strains haven't fallen off in yield since the switch. I typically yield 24oz, but have yielded as high as 32oz with staggered grows.