Shooting for far red/photo red target lighting in a 2x4 tent. These will go on sale the 22 Aug.
I ordered a full kit. Looking forward to comparing against a grow without spectrum targeting. I am targeting 460nm at veg, 660nm at bloom, and UVA/UVB/420nm at flush…
Will keep you guys posted 
I got the two SunBlaze T5’s in today. Gonna run a Eye PowerVeg UVA&B lamp in one and Actinic in the other. This is for the last two weeks. The new light I ordered will be for all of Bloom with far red running for 15 minutes solo from week 5-9ish
I have been using photo-red and far-red to influence both growth and flowering for two grows.
The results are excellent. The article points out some important facts regarding red light spectra.
Indiscriminate exposure to red light (at various wavelengths) can cause some undesirable responses from the plant while carefully managed red light can be very beneficial.
Glad to see folks interested in red light.
I am also running Actinic T5’s during flush… I am playing with spectrum targeting this next grow. Wish me luck
Good luck.
My overall setup is a combination of 100 watt COB’s (16) and 100 watt Chilled Logic pucks (8) plus photo-red, far-red and UV supplemental.
I wake them up and put them to sleep with 5 minutes of photo-red. I run photo-red and far-red when the main lights are on. During flower I keep the far-red alone on for 20 minutes following lights out to force the phytochromes to convert (allows for shorter nights during flower). The UV does not start until 15 days after flipping and starts with 5 minutes of UV in mid-morning and 5 minutes in mid-afternoon. Each day I lengthen the UV time by 3 minutes until the UV is on for one hour each mid-morning and mid-afternoon. My flower schedule is 13.5 ON and 10.5 OFF.
I flipped 10 days ago and all plants have started stacking. I expect the stretch to be finished in a few more days although there is still a bit of uncertainty on that. Not an issue as I plenty of vertical space to work with.
This light schedule has worked very well after all of the fine tuning was done.
Again, good luck!
Awesome!! Very similar to what I am planning. I need a really good timer now…
I am gonna run 440nm T5’s for veg. Running 300watt Vero COBs for mains. Wake with red 10 minutes before mains then shut down. Sleep for 10 with red. UVA/UVB two weeks before chop. Actinic (420nm) one week before chop
The control of this must be fairly precise. I would recommend looking into a low end PLC such as an EZRack PLC from EZAutomation or a programable relay. The programmable relay is much cheaper but is not as capable. TECO makes a line of inexpensive programmable relays that are available from factorymation. com.
EZAutomation has a line of PLC/HMI units that might be interesting as well. My system and the system that I am designing for near by grower is the EZRack PLC.
Thanks a million!!! I appreciate it
It may not have been clear earlier, either the programmable relay or the PLC will be able to handle ALL of your lights, fans, A/C, Dehumidifer, etc in addition to accepting analog inputs for temperature and humidity control.
A single unit drives both of my flowering rooms and a veg tent. Will add the drying box in the near future.
This is my system:
And the touchscreen interface panel (one screen out of 12):
I used to design DSL networks for large hotels… I have seen ALOT worse…
Thanks again for all the info. Your setup is awesome!! My room is much smaller but I want to automate some…
Time to do homework on options for my little setup
For my money, automation virtually guarantees my growing environment will be on point, everything from temperature to light schedules. Battery backed up time of day etc…
I can then focus my attention on caring for the plants rather than the room.
Automation is not cheap but, in my experience, worth every cent.
The downside is that the system must be programmed. I am just finishing a system with two growing areas and two drying areas. The program has taken about 40 hrs so far and if you can’t figure out how to program it, a decent programmer will be very, very expensive (think $50 - $200 per hr, mostly around $125). Learning to program is fairly easy for some folks and really difficult for others.
Most of these controllers are written in C… Is yours? I got a “D” in college for that crap…
I have to hire programmers from time-to-time… about $150 an hour for older languages/machine language… If you can get it yourself, huge savings!
This is true for programming “microcontrollers” for embedding in equipment.
This is Programmable Logic Controllers used for industrial automation. There are several “languages” for programming them but the most straight forward (for most folks) is ladder logic.
I programmed microcontrollers and PC’s using C and C++ for over 30 years (primarily for industrial FAB robots that I had designed). This is much easier than that.
I bow to you… that crap is hard
Only if you don’t know how to do it, like about anything else in life. If you know how, it is easy, if you don’t know how, it is difficult.
The main things are a methodic approach and paying close attention to detail.
