LED Info needed

[StoneyBud]

I have seen some led grows were the light actually turned the tips of the plants white.

The light didn't do it. There is no reaction to light that would do that.

The problem was more than likely caused by a nutrient problem.

 

[babysnakess]

Stoneybud I just looked at pictures of addicted2grow's 2-120 watt powerLEDS grow journal, at day 58 flowering, and before, the tips of some of the buds are white and he figures its from the light being too close. These are big fat healthy looking buds other then that. 120 watts is a lot more intense then 28 watts.

 

[StoneyBud]

Stoneybud I just looked at pictures of addicted2grow's 2-120 watt powerLEDS grow journal, at day 58 flowering, and before, the tips of some of the buds are white and he figures its from the light being too close. These are big fat healthy looking buds other then that. 120 watts is a lot more intense then 28 watts.

What I'm saying is that it would take either heat, or improperly balanced nutrients to cause that reaction. Light that is in the proper spectrums and intensity of light won't do that.

I've had buds do that from heat damage when they are too close to a heat source. Are you sure this guy isn't also using another type of light?

IR damage will also do that. LEDs don't have enough IR or heat to do either.

"Bleaching" from light just doesn't happen. There is another cause. Unused photons just pass through or reflect from plants. There is nothing in the physical makeup of a photon that can cause this type of reaction.

Those 120 watt LEDs are made up of many small wattage, individual LEDs. Count the bulbs, divide by the total wattage and you have the output of each bulb. Probably either 1 or 2 watt LEDs.

Lets say it's the higher number. A 2 watt LED isn't strong enough to do any type of damage, even if it were within 1/100" of an inch of touching the plant matter. If you put 2 of them that close, still not happening. Put ten that close and it still won't happen. No way can you get 10 LED lights within 1/100th of an inch of the plant, because the bulbs take up too much room to get them that close.

Increasing the numbers of LED bulbs won't "combine" IR or heat output. They simply are too far from the plant to do anything harmful to them in the quantities of IR and heat that they produce.

Do you see what I'm saying?

addicted2grow has some other problem that you and he/she are unaware of, but I can absolutely assure you the LED lights are NOT bleaching the tops of the buds.

You can put 10 thousand watts of LEDs over one plant and it won't "bleach" anything. As long as the nutrients, oxygen and CO2 are of sufficient quantity to supply the needed growth rate that the light will enable the plant use, the plant would just grow like crazy.

Now, if you deprive the plant of any of those parts, it creates an imbalance that could cause it.

Something lots of people don't understand is that when you radically increase the amount of light on a plant, it proportionally increases the cell activity in that plant that has to be supplied with the needed resources to utilize the ramped up photosynthesis and the resulting cell growth rate throughout the plant.

It's kind of like a child in one way; if you supply a kid with 500g of sugar, it will give them an insane amount of energy. If you block that child from using the energy by making them go to bed, thier body will revolt. It will have an overload of energy that it can't find an outlet for. The kid will upchuck all over it's bed and be sick feeling. The sugar didn't really *cause* the sickness, the lack of ability to USE the sugar did.

However, if you also give the kid a trampoline, a gym set and a room full of other kids to play with, the child then has a way to use all that energy it has now and no harm will result.

Its very similar with plants. If you give a plant a huge amount of light, you also have to provide it with a way to use that light or you'll create an imbalance within the plant. It's cell activity rate will exceed its store of nutrients, oxygen, water and CO2 and it will develop problems.

In this case, it may have resulted in abnormal growth at the tops of the buds, where the plant sends the largest amount of growth hormones.

The light itself will not cause this bleached effect. Something else is, or a combination of other variables are.





.

 

[babysnakess]

The leds are 3 watts x 90 = 120 watts. I pulled this out of an article word for word from someone who knows more about lighting then I do. Theres a top limit to the intensity that a plant can tolerate. Differs with strain, but at 91 LUX most plants stop growing the leaf will thicken here in da tropics as plants protect themselves from too much light there's a mechanism called thylakoids that will stack together, edge-on to the light which makes the leaves visibly thicker. All that "sunblocking" takes energy so growth slows. Above 91 LUX, light bleaching begins. The leaf turns paper white, I dunno if chlorphyl gets destroyed, or resorbed but the leaves never recover.

 

[StoneyBud]

The leds are 3 watts x 90 = 120 watts. I pulled this out of an article word for word from someone who knows more about lighting then I do. Theres a top limit to the intensity that a plant can tolerate. Differs with strain, but at 91 LUX most plants stop growing the leaf will thicken here in da tropics as plants protect themselves from too much light there's a mechanism called thylakoids that will stack together, edge-on to the light which makes the leaves visibly thicker. All that "sunblocking" takes energy so growth slows. Above 91 LUX, light bleaching begins. The leaf turns paper white, I dunno if chlorphyl gets destroyed, or resorbed but the leaves never recover.

3 watts x 90 bulbs equals 270 watts, not 120.

Again, the light is not causing the problem when this happens. The example you gave for the tropics is caused by IR light, not plant usable lumens.

No, there is NOT an upper limit to the amount of light that a plant will "tolerate" but there is one to how much light a plant can use.

There is no such thing as light bleaching from plant usable light and there surely isn't any problem an LED could cause.

I can see that you're not going to be convinced about this. I'll quit trying.

My Mom used to say "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still".

You've been convinced of something that is impossible. Either you've misunderstood the information or the information itself is incorrect.

Good luck to you.

 

[JustAnotherAntMarching]

Hey Stoney You are very wise and up to date on your LEDs but i think your wrong... take a look at this journal....

hxxps://www.mjp.com/ic/showthread.php?t=161259&page=3

Ive been following it for over a year & the only plants from this growers chamber that produce the "fluffy bunny" (no chloryphyl sp?) white tips are from under the LEDs....

Seems like you might not be correct in your assumption that LEDs cant cause this...

 

[StoneyBud]

Hey Stoney You are very wise and up to date on your LEDs but i think your wrong... take a look at this journal....

hxxps://www.mjp.com/ic/showthread.php?t=161259&page=3

Ive been following it for over a year & the only plants from this growers chamber that produce the "fluffy bunny" (no chloryphyl sp?) white tips are from under the LEDs....

Seems like you might not be correct in your assumption that LEDs cant cause this...

Chlorophyll production is highest when many plant processes work as nature intended. Several nutrients in conjunction with plant usable light are what make chlorophyll happen.

The only way to really settle this would be to dry and analyse the best green and also the parts of the plant missing the chlorophyll for their mineral content. That would immediately show what the differences are.

If you study exactly how chlorophyll is made by a plant and which minerals are responsible for it's production, you'll see that the minerals and thier balance are 99% of what makes chlorophyll happen properly.

Much like water in humans. It won't keep you alive all by itself, but without it, you'll die for sure. Light to a plant is the same. It takes all the parts to make the whole.

If, like the grower you use as an example says, the low-chlorophyll buds are only on the LED side of the plant, then that would lead me to believe that when a mineral study was done on that plant matter, those low-chlorophyll parts would show a marked lacking in one or more minerals which are responsible for chlorophyll production.

The reason the minerals in that part of the plant did not get used properly are what the real question is. It could be anything from physical stress, low-light in comparison to another part of the plant that has the HPS hitting it or a plant response to cell processes that are restricted somehow.

Again, the light itself cannot cause this. Not being aware of how chlorophyll production happens doesn't make it more likely that something impossible is happening.

Please, go to a person who is a plant biologist and ask them this specific question and you'll get the same answer I'm giving you:

"If a LED light is used where the strongest possible bulbs are packed as close as possible in the unit, and all minerals, water, oxygen and CO2 are in thier most favorable quantities, can the intensity of the LED light alone cause a lack of chlorophyll in the parts directly under the LEDs?"

Their answer will be no.

They will say that something is causing an imbalance of minerals which in turn is causing the processes withing the cells from functioning correctly.

What is causing the imbalance of minerals is the culprit.

It could be, (in this case), a problem that results from the uneven lighting from having HPS over part of the plant and LED over another part of the same plant. I could see where this may cause an imbalance within the plant of enzymes and hormones that could possibly extend to the imbalance of mineral take-up and in turn cause lockouts or deprivation response in some plant cells.

Like I said, the only way to tell would be to dry the parts and test them for mineral content. Once this was done, the end-cause of the lack of chlorophyll in those parts which show lower mineral content would be known, but then the root cause of the mineral difference would have to be investigated to find it's cause.

It should be clear from what I've said that it's not possible for the light by itself to be the root cause. It may be part of the problem, (light differences over the same plant), but I believe that there is no way for the LED light to be the root cause.

 

[babysnakess]

Stony 120 watts is the power the light actually uses.

 

[StoneyBud]

Stony 120 watts is the power the light actually uses.

Can you give me a link to the actual light being used?

Thanks!

Hey, to make myself more clear, we all have our different opinions of how things work. We all have our different levels of learning about various things.

I would not pretend that I am absolutely correct in anything what-so-ever. I can be just as wrong as anyone else can.

In this case, I obviously think I'm correct. hehe

 

[Growdude]

Hey Stoney You are very wise and up to date on your LEDs but i think your wrong... take a look at this journal....

hxxps://www.mjp.com/ic/showthread.php?t=161259&page=3

Ive been following it for over a year & the only plants from this growers chamber that produce the "fluffy bunny" (no chloryphyl sp?) white tips are from under the LEDs....

Seems like you might not be correct in your assumption that LEDs cant cause this...

From post #36 "i get these gnarley white fraggle head crystaline entity nugget tops on the LED side of my closet... perhaps the LED/HPS combo is a bit much... blows out the chlorophyll somehow..."

 

[babysnakess]

the light is a powerLed from ledgrow.se. se. = sweden. I checked out the site and its not in english. The 120 watt is only about 340 dollars addicted 2 grow wrote. Most leds seem expensive as hell and over hyped by the sellers. But if I had the money I might try these for a summer grow due to heat. But I'm inclined to think that any intense led too close to the plant would have the same effect.

 

[The Hemp Goddess]

Stony 120 watts is the power the light actually uses.

That is not possible or correct. Ninety 3 watts bulbs are going to use 270(+) watts.

 

[babysnakess]

Someone from another forum said that he went to california and saw the sg602 and a 1000 watt horilux doing a side by side grow and from what he saw the led is out performing the horilux. Leds are changing fast and maybe in a couple of years or less the price will justify buying one. If you go to the stealhgrow site it will say the wattage of the sg 602 is 600, but the actual power draw is 350 watts.

 

[StoneyBud]

That is not possible or correct. Ninety 3 watts bulbs are going to use 270(+) watts.

Hey THG, from the research I've done on this product, I've found that it's made of 40ea, 3w chips that draw 180 watts of power and provide 120 watts of output to the diodes.

The information was scattered across several tech forums about LEDs.

The chips used are a standard, Chinese made product that is an effort to reduce labor costs and manufacturing costs by combining the power circuitry for LED lights into 3 watt chips that supply 3ea, 1 watt LEDs. The reduces the amount of components and labor to attach them.

The electronics techs that have reviewed the 3W3chips aren't favorably impressed with the design or function of the chips.

It seems to be a consensus of opinion among the techies that standard 1 watt chips have better quality and less risk, as if one chip goes out, only one bulb goes out, contrary to the 3 watt chip that will make 3 lights go out for each chip failure.

That's about all I've found about that particular product so far. I'll post any other info I find.

 

[StoneyBud]

Someone from another forum said...

Babysnakess, please don't take this as anything but my opinion. I don't pay much attention to the "he-said-she-said-she-knows-someone-who knows-someone-who-saw-someone-who-knows-someone type of information. It's almost always distorted in it's path to print and generally either missing information or giving incorrect information.

When I hear information that is second hand, (from the person who did it to one other person who told me), I still research it before believing it. Third hand and fourth hand information is something I pay almost no attention to other than as a starting point for investigating the data.

I've used LEDs now for 3 vegging crops. I'm using 28 watt panels that are resulting in great growth characteristics. The branching and node formation has impressed me. That's why I've decided to use them for each crop now.

However, I see the higher powered LEDs as nothing more than a scam. They cost too much and use too much power. HID lights of comparable power will grow MJ with less up-front costs and with great results.

The benefits of LED growing are saved power and less heat. The power conversion from source to output does create some heat, (all power conversions do), and using the same amount of power with an LED as what a HID requires seems crazy to me.

That's why I chose to use the 28 watt panels for vegging only and have had wonderful results with them.

It also helps that I used to be a NASA certified Electronics Technician and have built and performed troubleshooting on equipment used in the Shuttles and other advanced aircraft. I understand the technology.

My experience is now outdated, but the basics haven't changed. LED technology is pretty basic stuff so far. Nothing "High-Tech" about it really, beyond the bulbs themselves. The power circuitry used to light them is the same stuff used 20 years ago, in a new box.

 

[babysnakess]

I would like to use the 28 watt panels for veg too. I read someone is using them to supplement a 400 watt hps in fowering and they're working great.

 

[babysnakess]

Verticle side lighting.

 

[StoneyBud]

I would like to use the 28 watt panels for veg too. I read someone is using them to supplement a 400 watt hps in flowering and they're working great.

If you'd like to watch the progress of 8 plants with each having a single 28 LED over them and no other lighting for vegging, post 21 in this thread: http://www.marijuanapassion.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56230
is a good place to start. Then you can watch how they work without any risk. I'll be taking new pics each week and measuring each plant's height.

 

[sallyliao]

The panels that use 3watt LED seem to be the best choice according to a couple other using them that I talk to else where.

 

[Roddy]

I have been very busy, so I haven't had much time to post in the forums lately....but did have an update on an LED experiment a local grower has been doing. The guy bought 6 150w cannister style LED's to use for budding, seems that isn't enough though since I note he has ordered 2 4'x8 bulb BLOOM T5's to supplement....and heard he was considering a 350w cannister style LED as well.

Seems he isn't having the success he had hoped lol