growing experiment: vegging one of my plants using a wire frame and a 5050 RGB LED strip light.

Just started a little experiment with a seedling thats a couple weeks old. I used a few wire coat hangers to build support arches around the exterior of the plant, then wrapped some LED strip lighting around the frame to be used at the sole lighting source. Im keeping the plant completely isolated from any other sources of light by placing it inside an unlit cupboard. My goals are to do the following:
(1) Establish whether or not it is feasible to grow cannabis with LED strip lights and determine their efficacy
(2) Determine how well (or not well) a cannabis plant will grow using the various colour LED settings. Right now i have it set to the mode thats ~460nm (royal blue). I also plan on testing the red mode, as well as a few other inefficient ones, depending on how well the project goes. The light that im using for this is one of the cheap commercial strip lights that has the controller which can toggle the light setting between 18 different colour modes, nothing special. Id like to hear what you guys think about the subject, and ideally Ill update you guys with photos around once a week. If this thread would be better located in another forum (journal?), mods please move it for me Heres some starting pics:

Also, im not doing this because i expect it to produce superior results, or because i dont want to spend money on lighting, im doing this as a research project so that we can all benefit from the knowledge gained as a result. Big time yields is not really my goal with what im doing here. Id love to see more experimentation done with peoples projects around here, so im going to try and lead by example

I also plan on ordering some much higher powered 38.8 watt/meter LED tape light this week, which draws almost 200 watts through 2400 LEDs per 5 meter roll, which im pretty excited to play around with!

Nice I do experiment before but people knock you down here it's the books way or your a noob type of attitude....

My findings I have about two people trying it and if they get good results then we are going to keep to our self and enjoy that little bit of knowledge to our self lol..

But do keep us updated buddy because what you're doing is what's needed in the growing world new knowledge and ideas 

Labs Dexter said:

Nice I do experiment before but people knock you down here it's the books way or your a noob type of attitude....

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I ran into the exact same bullshit as well. Its too bad that seems to be the pervasive mentality around here. I kind of welcome anyone to call me out, really, I honestly put so much time into my research and study, there isn't really much you could legitimately call me out for these days. I am ready


That being said, are there any other users out there who have tried using this style light at all on here? Wouldnt mind hearing from you guys (if you exist).

New stuff hurts the brain of guys that have to say things in a know-it-all manner, because they don't know what to say. Lashing out with the tongue is all they can do.

I like your idea. I currently run clones using ruby-red strip style LEDs. I wasn't sure if it would work, so I plugged in my contraption and let it do its thing. I had 100% success so far. No blue or white light only red.

Good luck!

Looks cool man hopefully it ends up working well!

Captain Plank-Eye said:

New stuff hurts the brain of guys that have to say things in a know-it-all manner, because they don't know what to say. Lashing out with the tongue is all they can do.

I like your idea. I currently run clones using ruby-red strip style LEDs. I wasn't sure if it would work, so I plugged in my contraption and let it do its thing. I had 100% success so far. No blue or white light only red.

Good luck!

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But its not new, the know it all guys already know you can grow cannabis with any light within the red/blue spectrum. Infact these LED strips have already been used by a few people here from veg to flower with some rather impressive results but nothing special and yielded him an 8th of bud at 70 watts if i remember correctly. They have journals here somewhere, It's pretty cool actually lol but like i said, nothing special because It does the same job as with any other led/bulb within the same spectrum. Tiny plant, tiny buds but it works!

I'm keen to see the results, it would be amazing to have meters and meters of led strip lighting to grow.

Ir even in the flowering room you could add blue to your red hps or led....

Or anything below canopy get some too, I could think of lots of ideas for extras...

I could do with a few strips for my vegg room to boost my 200 watt blue cfl, the plants on the outer part of sweet spot can get a little more the op is a genius

Something that may be worth trying is the LED tubes that they sell as fluorescent replacements. Probably better LEDs than the strips. I know there are MCOB ones, at least 18w, and from what I've read MCOBs are much better than regular LEDs or COBs. They have higher lm/w output and much better heat dispersion. I guess they only have low wattage MCOBs available right now, but if you can find good ones they would be the best type of LED to get. May be more costly, IDK. I guess they're mostly used for flashlights right now.

So far everythings working fine with my test subject. Its only using 25 watts. There are some available now that have output rated @ ~300 watts per 5 meters. Id like to try something more heavy duty soon.

***I just finished making something a bit more substantial with the strip lights. I ordered a bunch of different sizes and colours of strip lights to play around with. Here is a small veg panel i plan on mounting to the inside of a cabinet. its rated @ 3,000k @ >80% CRI. Its rated @ 48w and produces ~5,500LM across the panel @ 1 foot, which gives me an efficiency of ~115LM/w. Ive had the panel running for about 3 hours so far and heat produced is negligible.

At 48w per strip, you'd need about 1 strip per sq foot, at 5 m roll length it would be about 45 rows of stripping per sq ft. Probably 9 rolls would do for 1 sq m.

I like it. I wonder if they make lights like that bright enough for something more than supplemental lighting. Like, I'd at least use it for that. I think that's pretty ingenious.

This type might be useful, it's 4 LEDs wide. You would need 3 -4 rolls per sq m. Guess you'd need to cut them to 1 m lengths and wire the cut ends together for power flow. You'd need about 5 rows per foot. At the price they want, it'd cost about $600-800, quite competitive with commercial LED grow lights. You completely avoid having to buy heatsinks for DIY COB lights too.

Well, definitely keep us posted, man. I want to see how this turns out.

The LEDs come in a bunch of different sizes, which in turn dictate roughly the intensity of the light they emit. I have a 5m role of 3014, 5630, 5050, and 3528 in red blue cool/warm white and rgb so i have a lot of experimenting to do. Right now the lights are just getting to the point where they are effective enough to use for growing. Ive seen some out that use quadruple and quintuple layered led strips which put out some serious power, but they are also more expensive. The panel i made above cost about $20 total to make, however i just tested out a 5m roll that i bought for $6 and it was pretty damn bright for the cost. Heres a picture of that one. its 300 leds x 5050 (5mmx5mm) @ 3,000k

TootyMcButtsqueaks said:

The LEDs come in a bunch of different sizes, which in turn dictate roughly the intensity of the light they emit. I have a 5m role of 3014, 5630, 5050, and 3528 in red blue cool/warm white and rgb so i have a lot of experimenting to do. Right now the lights are just getting to the point where they are effective enough to use for growing. Ive seen some out that use quadruple and quintuple layered led strips which put out some serious power, but they are also more expensive. The panel i made above cost about $20 total to make, however i just tested out a 5m roll that i bought for $6 and it was pretty damn bright for the cost. Heres a picture of that one. its 300 leds x 5050 (5mmx5mm) @ 3,000k View attachment 3619456

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You'll need at least 20w per sq ft. How many watts does that $6 roll draw? Also, the beam angle of LED strips vary. I've seen ones with a 180 degree spread, in other words straight out to the sides in addition to down. 120 degrees would probably be the highest that would be practical for growing.

BobCajun said:

You'll need at least 20w per sq ft. How many watts does that $6 roll draw? Also, the beam angle of LED strips vary. I've seen ones with a 180 degree spread, in other words straight out to the sides in addition to down. 120 degrees would probably be the highest that would be practical for growing.

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They all have 120° beam angle supposedly, i dont know that for certain yet. I just laid out a 5 meter roll of the thicker waterproof stuff and it uses up 3.5" x 24", so 0.7 sq ft and i think this one is 36w, so i could squeeze a bit over 50 watts per sq ft out of this stuff. That would be toward the lower end in terms of wattage. The run anywhere from 15w to 144w per 5m roll, so much higher wattage per square foot can be achieved. Really though, you'd probably do better measuring output in lumens instead of wattage, watts are really only useful for determining LM/w efficiency these days.

http://blog.aquanerd.com/2011/08/current-usa-truelumen-pro-par-numbers.html


A little light reading, no pun intended, might help with your research