My many designs and experiments.

[Killkingkong]

So things continue to go very well in all 3 cases. It's day 35 for the bucket and about 2 weeks ago I changed the bucket grow from 12/12 to 10/14. This is to speed up the maturation process of the buds so I can harvest within the next 3-4 weeks. I'm going to keep the other boxes on 12/12 and let them flower however long they take. Things are starting to swell up in the bucket and I'm pretty sure I hit the 1/gpw mark in that box since it's only running 20w. The small PC and large PC are on day 28. The small PC doesn't have as many pistils compared to the big PC, but I think that's because budding was delayed due to light leaks. I filled out the case pretty well, but I'm less sure this one will hit 1gpw (it uses 40w). The big PC case is looking great. things are a little crowded but the buds are looking nice and there seems to be a good chance for 1gpw with that being 50w.

Small PC:


Large PC:

 

[Killkingkong]

Bucket:

 

[blynx]

Nice canopies! Looking forward to seeing the end result of this round.

 

[Killkingkong]

Nice canopies! Looking forward to seeing the end result of this round.

Thanks Blynx, I learned about the importance of nice and level canopies from your thread. I lost a lot of branches in my bucket due to heat damage early in flowering when I ran it at 50w. It definitely bounced back since switching to 20w but I think I can get even better results if i run this at 30w from beginning to end.

 

[Killkingkong]

Things are going well. Only one small change in the last week. I wasn't happy with the light output in the small PC so I switched from the 2 20w drivers to just 1 50w driver and am currently running the LEDs in parallel. Well in doing that the temps in the small PC rose higher than I would have thought for a 10w increase, so I ordered 2 really powerful 60mm Delta computer fans, similar to the ones I have in my big PC. It will be interesting to see how the 2 PCs compare in yield running the 2 very different quality LEDs, both at 50w.

Small PC Day 35:


Big PC Day 35:

 

[Killkingkong]

Bucket Day 42:

 

[Killkingkong]

All is well. Things are starting to swell up in the 2nd PC case, and I have to say I really like the bud production on the small PC. There are about 14 tops in the small PC and all of the are full of hairs from top to bottom, not many visible stems.

The big PC looks good, but the tops are over crowded with fan leaves because there are 2 plants, so not a lot of deep light penetration. This means that there are a lot of bare stems under the canopy without much bud production. The top of the canopy is looking great however. I selectively defoliated in there this week to get more light to the lower parts, so we'll see how it turns out.

The bucket is looking nice, but the buds aren't nearly as dense as the other boxes. I think when running LEDs at such low wattages (20w for the bucket) you really need to have multiple light sources to produce thick buds (like the PCs), I've been sampling a bunch of the popcorn nuggets in the middle of the bucket and they're not the strongest, but they're bagseed after all. I was planning on chopping next week at day 56. The bud looks like it's getting pretty mature to me, but I haven't completed many successful harvest, so you guys tell me what you think.

Small PC Day 42:


Big PC Day 42:

 

[Killkingkong]

Bucket Day 49:

 

[blynx]

The bucket is nice and full. I wouldn't chop until day 63. IMO better to run it a little longer than shorter.

 

[Killkingkong]

Thanks Blynx, I'll push chop day another week. My main fear is that my constant "sampling" of the buds will leave me with 1 cola left by the time day 63 rolls around, but I'll try my best at practicing self restraint. At this point I think I've ruined my 1 gpw goal on the bucket from sampling buds, but we'll see how much they swell with 7 extra days. I'm going to be water curing everything so it was going to be harder to hit 1 gpw anyway.

So kind of a big problem has come up. Recently I've been catching faint hints of smell coming from my big PC, so I changed the activated carbon pads last night. When I took out the old pads they were caked with dust, so it was good timing. Unfortunately I don't know what went wrong during this process because now there was a very strong smell of burning rubber coming from the case this morning. I unplugged the case and put the plants in my closet with the bucket while it's night time for the plants. I still haven't figured out what went wrong, but I'm starting to think a fan somehow shorted or something, maybe it's the LED, I don't know right now. I have to come up with some solution before it's lights on time or else i'll stress the plants even more.

 

[Killkingkong]

So somehow one of the heatsink fans in my big PC somehow became warped and the plastic on the blades started rubbing against the edge of the fan housing...thus causing that burning rubber smell all throughout my place. I have a spare 60mm fan around but this fan is too noisey and draws too much power to be a suitable replacement. I think I'm just going to go fanless one 1 of the heatsinks for the rest of this grow, the lights barely get warm anyway. After taking out the broken fan I also decided to switch from only carbon pads stacked as layers to a bottom layer of carbon sheet, then a emptied out 80mm is filled with carbon pellets and a top carbon sheet is taped on top as a carbon scrubber. seems to work wonderful. My bucket uses the same basic idea, but my small PC still uses carbon sheets.

 

[stealthENG]

Cool thread bro, plants are looking healthy! Sorry to hear about the fan glad you got it fixed!

 

[Killkingkong]

Cool thread bro, plants are looking healthy! Sorry to hear about the fan glad you got it fixed!

I thought I fixed it. The next day I was sitting at my computer and I caught another smell of burning rubber. This time I opened the case quick and saw the 2nd sunon fan smoking. I used both those fans before when my bucket was CFL.

For both of them to die 1 day from each other can't be a coincidence. As an educated guess I'm going to assume faulty/spliced wiring was at fault here. So I got rid of the 2nd fan and now have no active fans on my heatsinks, the temps haven't changed at all in my opinion.

After this I got rid of the 2nd exhaust fan and packed more carbon in my new carbon filter cause the carbon sagged once I turned the case back upright. Now I don't smell any weed or rubber coming from that case, even though the rubber smell lingers when I open the case. I also rewired the remaining fans so that there are no wire splices, the wires connect directly to the computer case power supply plug. I'll take pics tonight of how the fans are wired with a laptop power supply and a motor controller for speed.

 

[Killkingkong]

So another week has passed. Normally I wouldn't go against the advice as someone like Blynx, but I chopped the bucket plant. I believe this was for the greater good however. I took one of the plants out of the crowded big PC and trained that plant to fit in the bucket, hopefully that one fills out more, it has almost no buds below the canopy. I tried to train the remaining plant in the big PC, but I snapped stems twice, so I'm just going to put it in the center of the bucket to absorb the most light and leave it alone, hopefully this helps bud production.

I got what was left of the bucket plant trimmed and there really isn't much. As you'll see from the pics I smoked more than half the plant before even chopping, so hopefully this bud holds me over until everything else finishes and I won't bother those plants. I want to start using an ecig battery and herb attachment to smoke, so I'm water curing everything to get rid of smell and harshness. I took a sample water cure earlier in the week, but only kept it in water for 2 1/2, not 7 days, rest of the bud is currently being soaked for 7 days.

The small PC is my best plant so far. I'm not sure if the genetics in this bag seed are better or if the light intensity is the best in this case. It smells like a cat pissed on a cut orange. I was going to reveg the bucket plant since that was ahead of the others, but I decided to reveg the small PC plant and take clones for round 2. The buds on these stems run from top to bottom and there's almost no bare stems showing. I think I'll be using the bucket to make fem seeds in round 2, i didn't like the bud production in round 1 so it's being downgraded.

Before & After Chop:


Plant remaining in Big PC:

 

[Killkingkong]

Small PC:


Sample Water Cure:

 

[#1cheesebuds]

Hey good looken garden but I would trim some of those fan leafs to give more light to the lower buds so they can grow bigger.

 

[Killkingkong]

Hey cheesebuds, thanks for the reply. To get more light to the lower buds for the large PC I took one of the plants out and put it in the bucket. Before putting it in the bucket it had to be trained to be shorter. There's plenty of light penetration on the lower buds for that plant, hopefully it packs on a ton more weight.

The plant left in the big PC was also trained, but I damaged 3 of the stems I tried training. Some of the stems were too rough and rugged to be trained this late into flowering. However I did train a bunch of smaller branches that desperately needed to be spaced out. The biggest bud has grown past the lights but thickening up nicely.

The small PC is my pride and glory right now. The plant in there is doing awesome. The 50w driver has become too much recently cause the branches are growing into the lights. So made the small PC 40w again to prevent anymore heat damage and light bleaching. The 50w driver did a great job in early flower but I ran out of the space to support it, in the future I'll solder the wires in a way where I won't have to resolder everything when I want to switch drivers.

Big PC:


Bucket:

 

[Killkingkong]

Small PC with heat damaged bud:


And because this thread has been lacking "experiments" here's a picture of a LED light bulb that I bought a while ago. I took it apart recently and it seems like it would be really easy to switch the crappy LEDs with some nice quality ones and recycle the housing for e27 sockets. Only problem is when I hooked up the driver to my multimeter I wasn't getting a valid reading, numbers were bouncing around too randomly to guess the volt range to know if i would need 12v or 36v LEDs

 

[Killkingkong]

All is mostly well. The new plant in the bucket is doing good. I've run out of bud from my first harvest in the bucket last week (that plant had the least dense buds and wasn't very strong) so now I've been picking at the popcorn buds at the new plant in the bucket. I want strong bud so I 'm gonna stop picking at this plant and let it mature for another week before chopping.

The plant in the big PC is doing ok but seems to be showing signs of a deficient (Let me know if you know what it's lacking). The bigger fan leaves are kinda spotting up. Most of the fan leaves have signs of nute burn but I flushed for the first time this week so I'm not concerned about that. But I don't know the reason for the big spots on big fan leaves, maybe heat damage?

The small PC is incredible. That plant is swelling up nicely and smells great. It has a lot of heat/light damage, but I think the quality of the light is far superior to the damage being done by the quantity of light.

Bucket:


Big PC:

 

[Killkingkong]

Small PC: