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LED and BUD QUALITY

Rocket Soul

Well-known member
Both...they work together imho....660 is more far red......ir is further up the scale. Depending on how much 660 you have it can be supplemented also.
660 is usually called photored, your IR diodes are actually far red/730nm (if i recall correct you have the mara hydro uv/ir). Somewhere someone in the grow light game started calling far red infra red, even though far red is actually anything from 700-800nm.
Same thing happens to UV, most people call 400nm UV even though its technically violet and within the par range.
 

kro-magnon

Well-known member
Veteran
660 is usually called photored, your IR diodes are actually far red/730nm (if i recall correct you have the mara hydro uv/ir). Somewhere someone in the grow light game started calling far red infra red, even though far red is actually anything from 700-800nm.
Same thing happens to UV, most people call 400nm UV even though its technically violet and within the par range.
That's so much info to collect it becomes difficult to compute all these different datas. I've noticed some of the clones I'm running don't have enough internodal spacing but not all strains react the same way, even in the same seeds some individuals will behave differently about stretch and that's something I'd like to homogenize if possible. The idea is to find a way to boost the stretch of some plants and limiting the size of the taller one, it's easier to cut a plant than elongate it by pulling on it:unsure:
 
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Crooked8

Well-known member
Mentor
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Hi folks sanlight got some uv tests running the last 2 years. They tried 365nm or 420nm(not uv like they say) @80μmol/m2/s on top of their led @900μmol/m2/s. The seedrun saw a 15min increase of uv duration per week till 2h/d. The clone runs got UV from flowerday 21 on and was running all day.
They used this wavelenghts because they found some decent leds for a possible future product.

But their findings were strain dependent and marginal so their conclusion was they can't say if uv has an effect.

Serious happines and london mint cake were grown.

From seeds they saw
@365nm slightly more thc and less terps on both strains.
@420 SH got slightly more thc and terps but LMC got less thc and no change in totall terps.
They do say that terp composition changes. Some terps got a bump from uv others were lessened.

They also did 3 runs with clones from those strains.
@365 SH +0.6% thc, LMC +0.2% thc
@420 SH +0.7% thc, LMC -0.7% thc
Terp levels were about the same but also change in terp composition.



In the video description there are links to the other 4 videos. Video 2 shows the seedrun preharvest, video 4 a clone run. Video 3 is findings of seedrun.

Their blog about the experiment has maybe better infos for most here since google translate is way better than yt subs.

https://www.sanlight.com/news/einfluss-von-uv-licht-auf-cannabis/#:~:text=Genaue Angaben findet ihr in,Ertrag, Terpene oder Cannabinoiden hat.

So do these results scream “i better hurry and get some UV”?
 

chilliwilli

Waterboy
Veteran
What do you mean? The buds grown with the addition of UV were not better than buds grown without or worse or you didn't notice any difference?
Never made a side by side but from 2 runs i didn't like what i got. All strains developed a strange sellerie like aroma for me.
Can't really say that thc was increased. Got the impression with sensis star but didn't run that cut for some years so only in my memory it was a little weaker.
 

kro-magnon

Well-known member
Veteran
You added only UV or the IR/UV bars to your main light ? It's nice to have some feedback from growers who have grown with those new lights, there is not enough to know if it's effective or not yet. It took a while before the LED on the market were good enough to be a better option than HPS maybe the IR/UV bars will improve soon.
 

I Care

Well-known member
Never made a side by side but from 2 runs i didn't like what i got. All strains developed a strange sellerie like aroma for me.
Can't really say that thc was increased. Got the impression with sensis star but didn't run that cut for some years so only in my memory it was a little weaker.
I actually love that hydro veggie watery flavor/arome you’re describing! When I watched Bugbee talking with mr migro on YouTube, he did say that they were only using UV for only a couple hours. I got no skin in the game, honestly, but I’ve had some good smelling herb that smoked like shit and hurt my sinuses and my throat and made me feel like a weed buddy. The veggie smells are always smoothe and good strong engergetic high
 

CannaT

starin' at the world through my rearview
Premium user
1000013667.jpg

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Some Runtz Led grown under Lumatek good weed great nahhh....again non of volatiles just terps. Today standard cash crop.

Leds want ever had great amount of IR cuz they will make more of heating the boards and shorter life span of leds also if there is a lot of IR wr cant talk about light eficiency led is made about smaller electric consumption,longer life span and most importent are red and blue spectrum for growing. Its just different technology but if you want pure quality of flowers still Hids are better for that.

Leds : Bigger yild,less terps not so sparkly buds.
Hids: Lower yilds,better terps,sparkly buds.
 
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I Care

Well-known member
Another thing I’m pondering @CannaT… my trichs didn’t amber until I left it in the trunk of my motor scooter. So I think you can take into account the heat that collects in buds under HPS. I forget who (probably @Ca++ cause theyve helped a lot) suggested targeting higher ambient temps growing under LED . I even gave some of the big to the guy at the local dispensaty that I’ve found to offer more consistent quality. They said it’s pretty good, and 6 months ago we were discussing how LED is inferior. I was in the market between a 150w hps at the hardware store or spending twice as much on 250w LED, im pretty happy with the choice.

its a nice sparkle here


but it is a little airy cause I didn’t figure it all out yet
 

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Rocket Soul

Well-known member
View attachment 19043941
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Some Runtz Led grown under Lumatek good weed great nahhh....again non of volatiles just terps. Today standard cash crop.

Leds want ever had great amount of IR cuz they will make more of heating the boards and shorter life span of leds also if there is a lot of IR wr cant talk about light eficiency led is made about smaller electric consumption,longer life span and most importent are red and blue spectrum for growing. Its just different technology but if you want pure quality of flowers still Hids are better for that.

Leds : Bigger yild,less terps not so sparkly buds.
Hids: Lower yilds,better terps,sparkly buds.
Appreciate bringing some pics to the discussion. Well have to take your word for no volatiles until we get smello-pics working.
Heres a macro of some buds we grew under leds. No infra red but plenty of uv and extra reds (not just plain 660, 680, 730 and a natural peak in 630 due to our white spectrum being 90cri leds), about 20% of the output dedicated to supplementation at the end of flower with about 10% in the start. Youll have to take my word for it now, yes we had some volatile smells or maybe its what some call sulfur based compounds. Not sure what to call it but we had that smell that i remember from HPS times.

The uv spectrum was designed with a slope, more 400 less 385 and even less 365. No uvb on this one. See the suns natural spectrum for reference:
Solar-Radiation-Spectrum-at-Sea-level-showing-ultra-violet-400-nm-visible-400-700.ppm.png

I think your best bet in applying uv would be to at least start out with something similar to the sun, then expand on that. Yes, in this pic you can also see all your beloved infrared, but what proof do you have that this is the crux and that it isnt the area between 660 and 700 which no leds really cover? Cause we had "volatiles" with no cover of infra red.
Heres the pic:
Screenshot_2024-08-06-10-19-44-541_com.miui.gallery.jpg

Youre welcome to point out the "led no sparkle" bit in the pic.
The kicker about this one is that its from what we classified as a failed crop- we messed up the ramp up of lights and nutes and the plant finished much earlier than we would expect. This was cut at 8 weeks but could have been harvested a bit before.
Regarding amber trichomes: if anything i feel we have too much. Again, youre arguing against the shitty leds that rule the market today, not led in it self as a light source.
Everyone seems to just argue for the last light they grew a crop from that they really like, rather than the actual points of interest.
And if you really really want infra reds, why dont you just sort it out yourself? @greyfader did and had some really great looking results but hes such a good grower it might just be him and his genetics, and not the light. HPS against led is a finished and dead discussion; its only relevant if youre too lazy to push towards excellence. There are so many good discussions to be had around this if we just got away from the "which is best" part towards a real discussion about what is that makes HPS the previous great growlight. There are many things in the composition of the HPS spectrum that could be replicated with led for a bud that is superior both to HPS and "plain leds".
 

CannaT

starin' at the world through my rearview
Premium user
Appreciate bringing some pics to the discussion. Well have to take your word for no volatiles until we get smello-pics working.
Heres a macro of some buds we grew under leds. No infra red but plenty of uv and extra reds (not just plain 660, 680, 730 and a natural peak in 630 due to our white spectrum being 90cri leds), about 20% of the output dedicated to supplementation at the end of flower with about 10% in the start. Youll have to take my word for it now, yes we had some volatile smells or maybe its what some call sulfur based compounds. Not sure what to call it but we had that smell that i remember from HPS times.

The uv spectrum was designed with a slope, more 400 less 385 and even less 365. No uvb on this one. See the suns natural spectrum for reference:
View attachment 19043963
I think your best bet in applying uv would be to at least start out with something similar to the sun, then expand on that. Yes, in this pic you can also see all your beloved infrared, but what proof do you have that this is the crux and that it isnt the area between 660 and 700 which no leds really cover? Cause we had "volatiles" with no cover of infra red.
Heres the pic: View attachment 19043964
Youre welcome to point out the "led no sparkle" bit in the pic.
The kicker about this one is that its from what we classified as a failed crop- we messed up the ramp up of lights and nutes and the plant finished much earlier than we would expect. This was cut at 8 weeks but could have been harvested a bit before.
Regarding amber trichomes: if anything i feel we have too much. Again, youre arguing against the shitty leds that rule the market today, not led in it self as a light source.
Everyone seems to just argue for the last light they grew a crop from that they really like, rather than the actual points of interest.
And if you really really want infra reds, why dont you just sort it out yourself? @greyfader did and had some really great looking results but hes such a good grower it might just be him and his genetics, and not the light. HPS against led is a finished and dead discussion; its only relevant if youre too lazy to push towards excellence. There are so many good discussions to be had around this if we just got away from the "which is best" part towards a real discussion about what is that makes HPS the previous great growlight. There are many things in the composition of the HPS spectrum that could be replicated with led for a bud that is superior both to HPS and "plain leds".
Exactly this my man...."Again, youre arguing against the shitty leds that rule the market today, not led in it self as a light source."

But still your bud on that picture is Led grown bud...no sparkly and with different trichs than Hid Grown.
Its different tech,different light source and you get different results.
Its so simple...nothing is better its all about grow style and needs of a grower.
 

CannaT

starin' at the world through my rearview
Premium user
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Hid vs led the same cultivar.
Different light source different plant morphology.
 
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Rocket Soul

Well-known member
View attachment 19043969
Hid vs led the same cultivar.
Different light source different plant morphology.
Hard time to see much difference, at least in sparkle. Surprising similar in morphology, not what i would expect.
In this case the led bud seems to sparkle more but i think thats down to the lighting, hid bud has lower and less direct light on it. Hid bud looks a bit fluffier and less dense.
Again hard to evaluate due to differences in lighting. The last one of the HPS pic does look great, i happily admitt bit not really a slam dunk case imo.
View attachment 19043976
Hid grown Jack vs Led grown Runtz.
This one actually shows something re morphology: led bud looks denser and with a bit darker sugar leaves. This is quite usual in led buds, less infra red and heat usually leads to anthocyanin accumulation which many times lead black/purplish coloration

In general: there seems to a bit of difference in trim technique and how deep you trim. They seem a bit small, like the one from my failed crop. Trichomes look fairly similar in most cases. Best looking bud for trichome cover is the HID bud i mentioned specially.

Again, wheres the relevant argument? This is a thread about led bud quality, how to achieve it etc. If youre argument is that without HPS infrared theres no trichome coverage i cant really see that you shown a clear case. In my opinion if there ever was an argument for hps and quality it would be that even though it has minimal blue (usually ive seen quoted 6% rather than 10%) the little blue is spread out over a larger section of the spectrum. But sorry no sorry i dont really see that as a "gotcha, hps > led".
If you want help growing better with leds please hit me up over PM and ill help you out, its not difficult to setup a uv channel with continuous coverage of blues an uv. Or even a nice wide red sup for more volatiles. Stop sounding your voice just cause you cant get on board with the subject matter: how to grow better weed with leds. Im sure there are plenty of threads that have the subject of led vrs hps. If you read the paper i posted you could maybe begin to get an idea why HPS create quite good results aswell, though with more watts and heat. Did you ever grow in a really hot climate? Both lights have its advantages and disadvantages depending on climate. Nobody is making you grow with leds here. Hope it helps
 

greyfader

Well-known member
@CannaT you are still fixated on hps vs led and that is not what this thread is about. remember vinyl records? how they would get stuck on a groove? and you had to bump the turntable to get it off?

you are stuck the same way.

nobody gives a shit about a smackdown between two light sources except for you.

nobody is going back to hid lighting as a sole source. it's fixed, non-tunable, and creates too much heat that must be offset with too much a/c.

out of the 28 years i've been growing i have 23 years using mostly hps and metal halide. some cmh experience as well. i can show you pics of some of the heaviest plants to be shown on icmag grown with hps.

with hps you have a fixed spectrum that is not ideal but does a good job, not a great job.

the led has opened up a whole new world of possibilities because the grower is not restricted to a fixed source.

custom led builders are entering new, uncharted territory in plant lighting that would not be possible with a fixed spectrum source.

you do not offer solutions. you just keep banging away with "hps rules, dude"!

have you considered what parts of the hps spectrum produce the results you like? any part of the hps par spectrum is reproducible using leds.

there's nothing magical about hps that sets it apart from other light sources. it's simply a different combination of spectra.

i am growing high yielding, dense, high potency, high terp profile flowers with a combination of led and incandescent.

i could do it with leds alone but not as economically as i can with this combination.

i arrived at this combination by examining the hps and led spectrums and finding the obvious missing parts in each.

i am not done experimenting yet. i used 5000k for veg and the first 3 weeks of flower, the stretching phase. then switched them for 2700k plus incandescent for the duration of the grow.

in this thread folks have mostly been focused on the flowering spectrum. i think the ultimate solution is a completely tunable light that works in all phases of growth. you will not ever be able to achieve that with hps technology. it's a dead end path.

research has shown that a red-weighted spectrum produces mass but at the expense of quality. a blue-weighted one produces better quality but at the expense of mass.

i think that by manipulating the spectrum at different points of the plants' life you can have both.

you will never be able to do that with hps technology.

the plant exhibits hysteresis in many functions, such as acquired stomatal resistance to drought. that is, the plant reacts to previous entraining by abiotic stress and continues that entraining into a non-drought situation.

there is a lag time in the start up of photosynthesis when the lights come on. in my system, the ppk system, this is readily demonstrated by turning off the top watering apparatus during the dark phase and then observing the float valve when the lights turn on.

the system is sub-irrigated as well as top-irrigated. the sub-irrigation is accomplished via a tube filled with media displaying capillary rise that is in contact with the reservoir. so the plant draws water upward. the amount depends on many factors.

when the lights first turn on you can observe an occasional drip from the float valve. as you watch, this drip increases in frequency until it is a steady, rhythmic, drip, drip, drip. it takes about 30 minutes to reach this state.

what i witnessed was the lag time in the startup of photosynthesis.

i use this example and the stomatal entraining just to illustrate that the plant's responses all have a lag time.

and can be entrained to conditions.

it seems to me that training a plant with one spectrum and then switching to another retains the characteristics of the first, at least for some time, as it simultaneously begins to exhibit the characteristics of the second. there is a possibility of creating a synergistic effect by manipulating the light spectrum.

plants don't have vascular or nervous systems. they are hormonally driven.

it's a chemical signalling system. increasing or lessening the signals in reaction to external conditions.

you will never be able to explore this kind of stuff by using hps lighting where the manufacturer dictates the spectrum.

this flower was grown with led plus incandescent. it is the first time i have gotten hps size flowers that also have great potency and terpene profile.

it is one of the most potent strains i have ever grown, and it reeks to high heaven!

so, please, pretty please with sugar on it, help us complete the puzzle!


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