New Grower Here!!!

[USMCnoviceMedical]

Yes would love to see how it does. Looking to upgrade my 4x4 tent. Currently looking at the growers choice, two electric skies 300w or the new Kind X2.

[JohnEmad]

I have looked seriously at Growers Choice LED's and consider them a high end LED. That may be my choice when I finally build a dedicated grow room.
With your experience I think you will surpass your best grams per watt easily. I have hit 1.3 grams with my LED's growing autos.
GL Look forward to your new grows rookie.

[Tersky]

Looking forward to you're final assessment my good sir. I have switched to lec primarily but have often wondered about led's. They seem to be getting better and better every year so i may have to get some eventually. Trying to figure out which led's are good and not a rip off has been my main reason for not trying them yet...and money...always money lol

[Canuck147]

Yup - It was a good read Mr.furley - Those will keep you busy.

But seriously - great start - they look like aliens with antennas coming out the top. Great color.

[Texasbob]

Nice post! I am fairly new to this forum although I have been reading it for a long time and have seen your answers helping younger growers. In my opinion and perspective we are all still learning with every grow, like all face new challenges in almost every grow that gives us valuable insight moving forward. I hope growers wanting to become better at this craft take the time to read your post! Thanks for sharing!

[growell]

also curious about decent led i useing 600watt hps keep us posted mate

[MagicMike66]

I’ve been thinking about changing to autos with LED so I’m curious to see how these turn out.

[Mr.furley]

Well......

Ever grower face a different set of environmental challenges from the rest, what works for me may not be ideal for the next individual and that is why I love this forum. It's a broad spectrum of different styles and setups from multiple levels of experience giving this place it's sense of Family and collaboration, each and every grower on here learns new thing! even the "experts" so essentially from time to time we're all new growers especially when we step out of our normal.

The Back story: just skip to the pictures if you don't want to hear me talk

I have problems with heat like most cannabis growers that run Hid light and my best solution has always been, grow perpetually for 10 months and at the end grow a stock pile to last 4 months, shut down all but a couple 100w fixtures for July and August. I fight heat at the beginning and end of my grow year enough that the two month of summer heat make it 1) environmentally unstable and 2) not cost effective running AC on top of Hid light so I have just shut down.

This down time allows me to clean everthing, perform need maintenance and take a break from my daily cannabis heaven. This year was no different then the last at the beginning, but I didn't get that break. I cleaned my hoods, glass, ducking, fans, heater, shelves, walls, floor, bottles, ect..... replaced bulbs and decided to upgrade my ventilation from one 6" donut fan to a couple AC Infinity cloudline T6, my new idea is that one fan runs at low to medium 24/7 and the other added fan and filter only kicks on at higher temperature and this should help with that beginning and ending year heat, I also had a concern about one of my hoods wiring and decided I was going to replace my hoods.

I start looking around for new or lightly used hoods with my mind set on a couple 6" blockbusters, eBay was a bust, no luck with Craigslist or market place so I went to the local grow shop and to my surprise 6" hood are being discontinued, quite a problem to find, some of the off places on the net just produced more Cbd and erectile dysfunction junk mail, but come on man who doesn't want to be a Nigerian prince dating hot younger Asian women high on CBD with Boner medication right! right.

It became clean to me that I wasn't just a old grower but was become a outdated one, that Lec and Led had hit that point Iv been waiting for, not wanting to leave the Hid world in the past couple years had become a thing of the past. It was time to bite the bullet and move up to LED. Now I have grown led before but at a small scale, NebulaHaze did a article ( https://www.growweedeasy.com/mini-gr...led-grow-light ) about the HLG 100 in a small tent with Autoflowers and pulled over a grams a watt so last year during my down time I threw one of these in my veg table and grew some autos, to my surprise I pulled 1.30grams a watt, I can hit .80 of a gram consistently under HiD and this was some that lead me to LED, the other factor was the heat thing.
Autoflower have never been my thing, I just don't have the space and the grams per watt don't add up for me. Most new to average grower pull 2 to 4 oz per plant every 3 months under 24/0 or 20/4 with rare exceptional grows being upwards of a pound per plant under heavy lighting and ideal conditions, running 2 months at 18/6 and 2 months at 12/12 pulling 8 oz per plant by my math is less power and more grams, keeping mothers and running perpetually cuts the cost of seeds. I have grown autos but always under low light or just throwing a plant in the back but never been something Iv given a real go full heartedly at till now.....

That nail biter moment:

I decided to purchase from Growers Choice (2) ROI-E680 for my flowering room replacing (2) 600 hps (1) ROI-E420 for my veg table replacing (1) 400 watt MH (1) Hlg-100 and (1) master controller replacing (3) wall timers, the features of the master controller was the deciding factor over HLG. The reviews on this setup clam 30% lose of heat over my Hid lights, lights can be 6" yes I said 6" from the plant and great PAR readings hitting 1300 to 1500 umol/2 (HLG PAR was higher but at a cost and no integrated controller). Other factors was programmable auto dimming and shut off for heat/high temperature, daisy chaining 100 lights per controller, two separate temperature zones for two different groups of lights. Perfect for me in theory.

It has been a couple years since I have done a actual complete Grow Journal here so I have a treat for you folks

I'm a "new" LED Grower trying my hand at Autoflower( cough cough) with a added bonus of a Photoperiod Grow all wrapped into one Journal to boot, I'll start this journey with the autos and pick up more on the Photo's a little later. I'm going to need some help with the new LED from someone so please chime in.


Autos: passionfruit feminized
Germinated on August 1st, 3 of 4 sprouts on the 8th, the 4 surprised me on the 15th so 21day and 12 days
Under 420watts led dimmed to 63% at present 24/0.
Fox farm trio (5ml, 10ml, 5ml) with cal/mag(5ml), Si(5ml), every watering with micros(2.5ml) and root drench(2.5ml) alternating.
Coco 60% perlite 40% watering about every 2 to 3 days when the pots are lite when lifted.
Temps running 70f to 84f and RH 50%
3 gallon smartpots


The last 8 day:

The 21st leaf has reach the side of the pots.

The 23rd 3 auto( aboue the third) and 2 Photo( above the third, removed the first) were topped, my 2 Blue Dream clones were potted in 4" they're behind the grape ape and I should have cut them when I dropped seeds.

The 25th started some training

The 26th
The 28th
and this morning the light went to 90%


Thank you all for taking the time to read or just look at the pictures, seems I wanted to talk a little today. I'll be updating this over the next three months.

Growers Love.