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DWC 300W DIY LED SCROG Grow: AK47 and Mazar

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
Exc set up.

Word of caution: dripping water/nutes will channel into a few channels, leaving much of the hydroton dry.

Try adding a manifold with 3-4 openings to wet more of the surface area, or get drip rings


I did not took pictures with the pump running, but on the red 'drippers' (in fact those are old colored markers ) I have drilled 12 tiny holes (1~1.5 diameter) spaced 5~7 mm apart and drilled in different angles (in fact it was not drilled, but pierced with 1.5mm iron wire wrapped over a soldering iron tip).

The clay plebs are always wet because the water came out with high speed (this is why one of the tap is half closed ) splashing all the surface .The pumps run for 15 minutes each hour (this is the minimal time my mechanical timer allows me to set). I also have a DIY timer that run for about 60 seconds every 4~5 minutes, so I could use that one.

This drippers will be used only a week or two and I intend to remove them right after the roots will grow into the reservoir).
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
Drippers closeup

Drippers closeup

Hi guys,

I just checked the girls and it seems that everything is under control, as it supposed to be.

Some data :
- air temperature : 24.4C
- humidity : 49%
- pH : 6.7 on Mazar reservoir (adjusted to 6.3) and 6.6 on AK47 (adjusted to 6.3).
- EC : 1030uS on Mazar, 1059uS on AK47

I forgot to install 2 small digital thermometers on the reservoirs, but I'll do it tomorrow. Anyway, I guess that the water temperature is the same so maybe in the future I will build some chillers (I have 10 peltier elements sitting somewhere on my workshop) but I want to convince myself that it's worth the effort (one more subject to read about it).

I also took some pictures when the pump were running so you can see how the water is spread over the clay plebs. I checked both netpots and I could not find any dry spot so there is no worry. In fact, I noticed that water spread all over the surface of the clay plebs on contact, maybe because they are so porous.

I also checked the water level and it seems that almost 1L has evaporated from each tub (because the air pump pushes a lot of air into them, increasing the evaporation speed and in addition some water evaporate on clay plebs surface).

 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
Hello guys,


It's time for a small update. Today I installed the digital thermometers on the reservoirs and , as I expected, the temperature (24.4C) is just 1 degree below air temp (25.3C) .

I checked the pH and the EC and I did not like to see that the Mazar pH has raised a bit, to almost 6.7. The Ak47 was at 6.6. I put 15 drops of pH Down (from GHE) and a few minutes later it was stable at 6.2, which is good.

It's the first time when I use Canna nutes and don't know if this light pH oscillation it's normal ore may I have some pathogens all ready on the reservoirs ?

The EC didn't changed noticeably.

Some pics :

 

vukman

Active member
Veteran
hey hey my friend and European brother..:D....what is the latest news with your operation there? I am totally in awe over your skills and attention to detail and am very interested in knowing how things are going?

Let us know........please..........Don't keep us in the dark...ehhehe
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
Well, things are going pretty good, but I have not post any pics/updates because there is not much to show.

The ladies are growing slowly at this moment, they just opened the second pair o leaves (3 fingers) but the inter nodal distance is almost zero ( I guess because they are bathing in to much blue light). I think the led panel is to far from them and maybe the light it's not so intense, and to compensate this I intend to build and add a suplemental led panel, having 5x10W LEDs ( 3 cool white and 2 actinic 20000K white for veg, and 3 warm white and 2 cool white for flower).

Also I have to make time to cut the OSB board for the new silenced exhaust fan, but the time is not my ally this days, bot for the moment I can live with the noise from the fan I currently use.

I did some minor troubleshooting in the grow-room, the only purpose being lowering the noise. For this I changed the housing and the 40mm fan on the 48V PSU with a much bigger one : 12cm. It's incomparable quieter than the original one (quite a crappy one) and it runs less, being thermally controlled and much more efficient. The housing (actually the lid ) was made from 1.5mm thick aluminium, but now I replace it with 0.6mm thick expanded aluminium sheet, which allows air to flow without restrictions.

The same thing I did with the 540W 12V PSU , which is used to power the exhaust fan, the ventilation fans and also the future supplemental LED panels. I use a server PSU, but the internal fan was noisy and annoying - like a whistle ( 30mm, high RPM fan) so I change it with a 80mm , extra quiet , cheap fan . I also changed the lid with some expanded aluminum sheet.

No more noise from the PSUs, that's for sure !
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
I think it's time for a small update :

The girls are growing slowly , I don't know why, but I expect to see them grow faster than this. But every time I start a new grow from seed the slow grow speed on the first two ore three weeks is killing me. But patience is a virtue, so we have to wait ...

I had (actually still have) a minor pH issue , because it keeps growing (especially on the Mazar tub) over 6.5, even it was adjusted almost daily to ~6.3 , and this mean that the phosphorous acid gets neutralized by the salts on the nutes or by the clay plebs (which I am pretty sure that they are not pH neutral but fairly alkaline ).

No sign of roots emerging from the netpots yet, so I figure that the plants have to much water on the root zone and I decided to increase the time between watering to 2 hours ( it was set initially to 1 hour ). After one day I already notice some growth and I increase the time again, to 3 hours ( 15minutes ON and 2h and 45 min OFF).

The EC has rise a little , but this was caused by water evaporation and pH adjustment. In one week almost 2 liters of water have evaporated from the tubs but I did not topped the reservoirs yet to avoid pH oscillations.

Last night I installed a new rough 4x10W LED Bar ( 2x10W Cool White and 2x10W 20000K Actinic Blue) and I am very curios to see how the plants will respond to the light improvement.

Here are some pictures, but you can see al of them on the album 2012 Fall-Winter Grow : AK47 and Mazar:

 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
As I said in the previous post, I installed a new 4x10W LED Bar into the growbox to complete the spectrum.

I has to build this first, but I want to be as simple as possible, with less work and good results. So i decided to power the LEDs (again) without any kind of driver or current limiter circuit, but connected i series with 2 1A diodes (1N4007).

I have a 540W 12V PSU on my growroom which is used to power the exhaust fan and ventilation fans and I don't want to add any other PSU/transformer but I must have all the lights switched On and Off on the same time and this was impossible (because the ventilation must run 24/7). So my idea was to integrate a light activated switch. It was fun to do that, and it was also a very cheap solution.

The components :
- one photo-transistor ;
- one MOSFET , low Rdson ( BUZ11 - 0.04Ohm) ;
- one 10K rezistor ;
- one 100K rezistor ;

In this picture you can see the 'photo-switch' , "embedded" on the wire :



As a heatsink for this LED Bar I re-used a 100x800x3mm aluminium sheet , which have been also used on version 2 of my LED panel (this explain the small glue spots left on it - I was to lazy to remove them with some solvent)

Components:
- 2x 10W cool white 6500K LED ( Epistar );

- 2x 10W actinic blue 20000K LED (Epistar);

- 6x1N4007 rectifier diodes (as drivers) ;
- Ethernet cable wires ;

So here are some pictures with the LED Bar put together :



continued in the next post ...
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
The LED Bar has 10 fins on it's back, to help with cooling by increasing surface. The temperature of the heatsink does not exceed 50C so I don't have to worry about this aspect.

After I installed the LED Bar , I had to test the photo-switch functionality and I was extremely disappointed when I saw that the LED Bar does not turn OFF when I shutoff the LED Panel but I quickly realized that the cause was the amount of light reflected by the walls, which keep the photo-transistor opened. The solution was pretty simple : I just put a small black plastic tube over the photo-transistor and the problem was solved. Now when the main LED Panel goes on, it triggers the LED Bar to go On and most important, when the LED Panel shutoff, the LED Bar goes Off as well.

Let's see how the plants react under this new light.

 

repuk

Altruistic Hazeist
Veteran
Wow! with integrated lights on switch! clever! :)

I like the idea of driving LEDs "bare" with diodes! where did you source the LEDs?

A suggestion: isn't that too much light for those seedlings? I'd use just the 40W module. First weeks are slow, be patient, I learnt with seedlings less is more... by 3d week they'll take off for sure.

Man I had a good laugh and enjoyed your "roll a joint for beginners" photo tutorial album! I roll mine with a rolling machine also with slim filters, but just weed, no tobacco :biggrin:
 

vukman

Active member
Veteran
Show off.........:D.........ahahahah............joking my friend... You do excellent work.

All that stuff with diodes and extra chips and coat hangers with pieces of toast all wired together to make an A-bomb is a little too much 'Macguyer' for my knowledge set...heheh/

I'll learn but all joking aside, I really am lost when it comes to adding diodes and resistors onto the lines to alter either current or any other factor which may be involved...just basic driver, wires and LEDs is my skill set right now... I hope I don't mess anything up. :rolleyes:

Excellent work again my friend... keep it up!!!!!!!!
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
Wow! with integrated lights on switch! clever! :)

I like the idea of driving LEDs "bare" with diodes! where did you source the LEDs?

A suggestion: isn't that too much light for those seedlings? I'd use just the 40W module. First weeks are slow, be patient, I learnt with seedlings less is more... by 3d week they'll take off for sure.

Man I had a good laugh and enjoyed your "roll a joint for beginners" photo tutorial album! I roll mine with a rolling machine also with slim filters, but just weed, no tobacco :biggrin:

Never used tobacco with weed. If I want to smoke tobacco I light a cigarette, but I prefer only straight joints. The weed in the picture tutorial seems brown cose I used a low wattage warm white light source which changed the color balance on the camera and I forgot to adjust it.

And I prefer 'fatty' joints all the time , even so I don't use foam filters anymore but raw paper tips.
 

exploziv

pure dynamite
Administrator
Veteran
great work man! how far are the lights from the plants? seems pretty far to me.

congrats on the diy, can't wait to see how the plants will like the crib you made for them! :wave:
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
The big panel is 80cm away from the plants (but the lenses are 45 degrees). The new LED bar is ~50cm over the seedlings. I hope they will love this light and show some signs of explosive grow, as it supposed to be in a hydro setup.
 

PetFlora

Well-known member
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Hemp, love your simplified DIY skills!

Caution: High watt leds need to be much farther away from the canopy. For those who do not have sufficient height go with 1 watt leds

For those (like me) who lack Hemps skills, but want leds, buy a couple of cheap vanity fixtures + Y adapters (to double up on bulbs per vanity) and use low watt screw bulb leds. Visit my thread to see it in action
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
I think is more cost effective for beginers to start with 10W leds. An Ebay a square base 10W LED is ~5$ , while an 1W LED is 1$~1.5$ and a 3W ~2$.

But the most important part when you drive the LEDs directly is the power supply unit. If the power supply is protected and well regulated it's almost impossible to burn a 10W LED (anyway it's still possible) . When I connected such LED directly on the 12V, the current was almos 1200mA, the LED got very hot but it did not burned out after 10 minutes.

The only problem with this powerful LEDs is the cooling. Never turn ON such LED without an adequate heatsink or you will see some smoke rising from the chips :D
 

hempfield

Organic LED Grower
Veteran
Quick update :

In less than 24H after I have installed the new LED Bar, the girls took off and their second set of leaves almost doubled in size. A few tiny spots on the Mazar's first set , but this is usual for DWC systems. The funny thing is she already start to smell if I put my nose very close .

On the AK47 the third set of leaves is preparing to open but the smell is barely noticeable.
 
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