25% more yield with a diffused LED ?

[f-e]

I do have something eating at me. Evidence of beaming I can't (as yet) explain. Almost evidence of higher placement and diffusion helping. In an LED there is just one colour actually made, and the rest comes from a blend of different phosphors. On an atomic level, a single LED is in fact a number of different colour emitters. As what we perceive as colour, is actually different amounts of energy within individual photons, the idea of them blending, even as they travel from the sun, is ill founded. Physics has them down as particles.

What I'm seeing is much more tangible though. This is a gap in my curtains, letting light hit my tent floor. Yes it's carpeted.. and the gap is acting as shuttering, such that the rows of white and red LED's are painting there own lines from a QBs spacing. The light is a meter away.

Why a meter from my light, do I still see the 660s light fall, away from the 3500k whites.

Here we are again with a bigger gap. I can't open it further as it washes out to barely noticeable.

That is through some sparse plants which play a big part. There is separation there though. Which I just can't ignore or fathom at this time.

I'm sure @GMT will be along telling me to hoover soon. It's too good to miss




Edit: The fine lines might be nothing to do with the QB spacing, as it's not actually lined up with the gap. It's maybe 45 degrees off where you would place it trying to perform such an experiment. It's all quite boggling. It needs some thought, and is surely evidence of something..



Edit2: Perhaps in the top pic, the three red lines are actually from one row of reds. These boards are two red rows, the rest white. So this might be just shuttering, if it were not for the second pic. In any case, if a gap in the curtain can do this, a gap between leaves can.
If we move from curtains to leaves, then why not look at this atomically. Factor in what we know about more than 30% blue being bad, and think how a row of Blue LEDs would look beside the red ones. There is a picture forming.
There is a picture forming?

 

[Kimes]

@f-e seen similar patterns with my Kingbrite. Always wondered why it was so... Now using diffusing film the patterns and "individual" led castings are gone..

 

[GoatCheese]

Good photos f-e
..those shows exactly what i mean with concentrated beams

Even thou the light from a led light fixture appears to be fairly even to a human eye when youre looking at your plants from above, it’s still made out of fairly concentrated beams, which then create these hot spots, i’m thinking. You can’t feel the hotspots on your skin but it seems the plants can = Grow lights are wave length-tuned to get most out of the plants.

HPS/MH light is much “softer” and “even” compared to many plug n play led light fixtures



Imo, it’s these hot spots that, when they hit the leaf surface, warm the tissue up - the plants start to sweat and so the tissue gets dehydrated, something like that. This is why we get the dry feeling yellowing leaves under high intensity grow lights, esp. when the enviro conditions are off (temps, humidity) and/or the light is too close to the canopy.
...And then we need CalMag and Epsom salt to help grow tougher plant tissue that holds moisture better because of these led hot spots.

Hydro grown plants can handle led heat stress better than plants in soil, cause hydro plants have much more water in their tissue.

:::

The better diffuser materials pass over 90% of the light thru.


Ofcourse lenses and covers do trap heat which may affect negatively your led chips, so it could be wise to keep this in mind when your thinking about the cooling/heat sink size of your covered leds and high power use. ... esp. with COBs cause they heat up so much

 

[GMT]

@f-e ignoring for a moment, your cleaning lady's week off , I was also puzzled when seeing similar lines of coloured light on the floor outside my old wardrobe. At first I figured straight up reflection, but they stayed stationary as I moved, so not a reflection. Then I briefly considered refraction and had a word with myself for being daft, and accepted projection. It does indeed seem like led behaves like particles and not waves.
I've always argued for more wavelengths, at point sources, rather than "air mixing" a couple together and claiming all are covered.
So, are we taking it to Heisenberg, and complaining we can't measure it, or to Schrödinger to complain that when we open the door, we can only access one of our grows?
What would be more interesting would be to open 2 cracks, and see if the red lines form wave or scattergun patterns.

 

[Koondense]

It may just be that red diodes have a kind of lens on them.
SMDs and COBs are usually flat but mono diodes can have 60° lenses sometimes.
Their light cones are thus different and what you see at the bottom in just where white light is less intense for your eyes.
Just a thought.

Cheers

 

[highfidelity]

@f-e I've got a similar pattern from my lights whenever there's a crack left from a zipper:

And something strange I noticed is how it messes with the shadow of my finger when I put it within the light beam like this:

Not sure why it's behaving like this

 

[xet]

First, this is what I mean by diffused led:

From here:



There are studies online that diffused light is better compared to ones without...

I am no expert, but would love to hear from others whether they benefitted from diffusing lights, especially LED´s.

I have noticed that plants generally feel happier and dont stress so much... Also less need for calmag compared to non-diffused... Others..?

Cool, really excellent material.

Basically, yes, LEDs act more like a laser firing photons in a straight line than an incandescent bulb emitting an even spread of radiation in the form of a glowing light which, for the LED, has the effect of concentrating photons into a small area. Think about HID headlights and that hard edge they create on the landscape. To diffuse or scatter these photons is to shower more of the plant with a more even photon spread.

This is a really fascinating example because there could even be less wattage hitting the plant because anything in front of that light source will to some degree lessen the amount of power actually hitting the plant so it goes to show how technique is an ever evolving thing.

I have studied LED more hours than I would like to admit and this is an area of study I definitely want to learn more about including how to reflect those photons to as high of an efficiency as possible.

Overall I can say LED growing, LED manufacturing, is not really yet understood as a sort of a fine line balance between penetrating the whole canopy at the cost of sacrificing weight. Obviously the best of both worlds can be had but cost can definitely be a barrier to entry for achieving these desired results on a consumer scale. And what I mean is, I can design an LED that does everything it needs to do and 90% more than anything else on the market even comes close to but it could be a single cob that costs $4,000 + $4,000 in installation.

It is an area of research I am heavily vested in from a philosophic and scientific standpoint. Obviously someone has to take the brunt of the pain for innovations to be made and maybe interest / time brings the cost of something like what I described down to $400 or even $40 (remember when a flat screen TV was $14,000?).

My main concern would be designing around the extra heat/photon loss as a result of shielding the light e.g. special care into heatsink and PCB e.g. program temperature controls/fans.

Cool stuff, please post more things like this.

 

[Creeperpark]

Very interesting Xet

 

[Koondense]

That finger is making many shadows and as they overlap they draw these interesting patterns.
Xet, what are the advantages of a single strong cob? I have parts to build a multi cob fixture with 6 cobs but it's on hold as I found it not too convenient to use in my tent. Still prefer the separated cobs for now.

Cheers

 

[GoatCheese]

That finger is making many shadows and as they overlap they draw these interesting patterns.
Xet, what are the advantages of a single strong cob? I have parts to build a multi cob fixture with 6 cobs but it's on hold as I found it not too convenient to use in my tent. Still prefer the separated cobs for now.

Cheers

What kind of a tent you got? Why can’t you make 6 cobs work? Dimmer is ofcourse a must with six cobs but those should give a nice coverage and warm up the tent nicely as well. I have three cobs in my 50cm x 90cm x 160cm tent but of course i can’t run them on full power, not even close.

:::

A single COB running at 75-100 watts you ‘d have to hang up very high- higher than people can in most grow tents. I have a single 75w Cree CBX3590 light (with a 120 degree lens) and it’s very powerful

With COBs you get better penetration than with Samsung etc. chips but it’s still better to have few of those than just one cob - and divide the total out put between them rather than blast it all out of a single cob cause that’s an easy way to toast your plants.

A single cob light also has a very small or narrow point of light source, meaning alot of shadowing is going to happen if you’re using a single cob. Any branch or top that is largely behind another one is going to be in a strong shadow. I have the single Cree cob in my veg cab – it 100% needs other supplemental lights on the sides to help with better light coverage when i have many plants in the cab.

A single cob is good for flowering 4-5 smaller plants around ,autos and small scale seed ops etc, but for serious plant growing even for just 2-4 mid sized plants i’d buy atleast two cobs simply because of light coverage (single cob and shadows).


COBs are better for growing sativas/taller plants than strip lights but i still recommend you have more than one of them if you have at least a 100cm x 100cm cm grow space. I have three 75 watt Cree cobs for a 50cm x 90cm foot print – thou i can only use about 30-35 watts max from each cob cause they’re so powerfull -It’s good for light coverage. But for a 1m x 1m tent i’d like to have four of them for better coverage.

 

[JKD]

Perhaps combine a COB with the fresnel and focusing lenses of an overhead projector to go from one point of light to diffuse lighting.

 

[Three Berries]

I ran 3-100w home made cobs back in the day. 2-32v power supplies and the cobs had a glass dome diffuser. Used some T4 bulbs as sidelights.

 

[xet]

That finger is making many shadows and as they overlap they draw these interesting patterns.
Xet, what are the advantages of a single strong cob? I have parts to build a multi cob fixture with 6 cobs but it's on hold as I found it not too convenient to use in my tent. Still prefer the separated cobs for now.

Cheers

For now, KD, your amazing question gives us an open-ended answer in which I will continue to explore with my cob.

With new LED innovations it is possible to pack a lot of light into a very small space and that can mean many beneficial things including penetration of the canopy which is a topic most LED manufacturers want to avoid because it is a science unto itself that they are either unfamiliar with because they do not understand the value of the green spectrum of lighting or worse they know about it but they intentionally hide the education from their market to keep customers from demanding it. (Why add cheese to the potato egg burrito and sell for the same price as the potato egg?)

Unlike them I really want to crack the code and share that information. I digress.

Another key benefit is strategic placement or even added height when combined with more cobs or cobs of higher strength.

It is possible with high-bay cobs to go 20 feet, 30, 50, or even 70 and 100 feet high placement and this is really remarkable.

Conversely how about the little grower with the 8' ceiling? A single strong cob aims to solve that. Cobs right now are very poor representations of this technology's horticultural ability.

There are all sorts of innovations we can discuss from this point. All the different 3d shapes of the board the chips are placed on, the angles those shapes are at and why, the wavelengths, the programmatic light patterns, graphical user interface for the LED which is simultaneously streaming real-time data analysis from all different sources of your choosing even the completely mind-blowing processes like mimicking the moon phases, whatever you want, it is really unimaginable what pandora's box LED's have opened. I am even wondering when we will have gravitational manipulation in our grow tent's but that is another conversation.

I do have ideas about lining a room with LED strips for a comparison as well so I really cannot at this point have the knowledge to share which is the better solution at this point, or even if there is one, or whether there is an extraordinary mixture of LED styles, and I am sure that one exists like a maxed-out hot-rod that for whatever reason will not blow up but runs 7's, or maybe it is just that we are passionate about our hobby and passionate people stick together and passionate people kick ass.

Lastly, it could be fun to use your extra cobs for additional vegetation or clone space.

 

[GoatCheese]

I’ve been thinking about getting some type of clear diffusers for my diy Samsung strip veg lights. The lights have too small number of chips so they are abit stingy for seedlings and for blooming small male plants.

The light transmittance of clear diffusers i’ve seen have been around 93-95%, so it’s not a huge light loss. I’m thinking the material will also act as sort of a heat shield taking out some of the heat radiation as well as 5-10% of the light. ...if so, thou there is light loss perhaps i can then keep my Samsungs closer to canopy, which would then compensate the light loss, at least some.

I don’t mind if i have to turn my lights up abit cause that will generate more heat into the cab and upping the RH% along with temps as well. Huge help during northern winters.

I’ll chime in when i have some stuff installed on my lights and when i have used them for few weeks. ..who knows how long that will take but i have found some stuff that i might be able use.

 

[Ca++]

 

[Three Berries]

Alien tape.........

 

[growshopfrank]

The old school way of dealing with hot spots and poorly designed reflectors was to use light movers. with a little planning you can actually benefit from the extra canopy penetration the trick is to move the light but not too much be creative there are gains to be made.
Have the light mover on a separate timer that switches on with the lights then runs 5 to 10 minutes after lights out.

 

[Three Berries]

The old school way of dealing with hot spots and poorly designed reflectors was to use light movers. with a little planning you can actually benefit from the extra canopy penetration the trick is to move the light but not too much be creative there are gains to be made.
Have the light mover on a separate timer that switches on with the lights then runs 5 to 10 minutes after lights out.

I was looking at some plant pot rotators. But that's not much good if you are doing some sort of training and tying things down.

 

[GoatCheese]

Spending 10-50 bucks on diffuser material is cheaper and easier than a light mover system for most of us home growers

 

[xet]

I’ve been thinking about getting some type of clear diffusers for my diy Samsung strip veg lights. The lights have too small number of chips so they are abit stingy for seedlings and for blooming small male plants.

The light transmittance of clear diffusers i’ve seen have been around 93-95%, so it’s not a huge light loss. I’m thinking the material will also act as sort of a heat shield taking out some of the heat radiation as well as 5-10% of the light. ...if so, thou there is light loss perhaps i can then keep my Samsungs closer to canopy, which would then compensate the light loss, at least some.

I don’t mind if i have to turn my lights up abit cause that will generate more heat into the cab and upping the RH% along with temps as well. Huge help during northern winters.

I’ll chime in when i have some stuff installed on my lights and when i have used them for few weeks. ..who knows how long that will take but i have found some stuff that i might be able use.

FWIW all heat an LED produces is lost photons.