Quote Originally Posted by jdcha1
hey kitsune I just bought the 120W LED panel from HTG (High Tech Garden Supply)

After reading this thread I feel like I've made a bad investment. I was going to supplement it with 3 or 4 42W CFLs (a mix of daylight and warm white). What do you think?

I heard you say that blue heavy spectrums are ideal. Should I buy another LED panel/ufo to supplement? Which would you suggest?

What are your thoughts on the orange spectrum? Is it useless like HTG says it is?

Thanks!
I feel I must make a disclaimer here for you - I am a light designer. I am going to be biased towards my lights but I do know of other brands that can compete very well alongside my own. I'm not afraid to recommend them, either, but only as an alternative to mine. I don't drop my site on here, I don't wish to disrespect the place by advertising my site. If I want to advertise, I'll drop a bit of $$$ on an actual ad on the top banner or something, then point you out to it.

With that being said, supplementing with CFL will work, though I would suggest supplementing with higher color-temp bulbs, 5,000-6,500K as the red-heavy panel is going to provide the most photon flux for the flowering hormones to do their job. The panel is great for PROMOTING flowering, but for actual flower production, it doesn't perform to my standards.

Quote Originally Posted by jdcha1
What do you think about adding a 90w UFO ALL BLUE to the HTGsupply 120W LED?
I think you would be wasting your time unless the strain you were growing was known-good for hash production, as excessive blue imbalance will trigger great trichome production at a lower flowering production due to the imbalance - you may get higher quality but you'll get drasticaly reduced yield. Higher blues do produce more THC-bearing trichomes, but the problem is that without a good balance of red, you get pretty cruddy results as there isn't enough energy for the flowering hormone to be active in any great amount. Balance is important. This is the biggest failing of most LED panels, as Stra8outtaweed or Weezard will tell you. They use more balanced combos of red/blue, and even in dual band, Weezard gets great results, almost comparable to my tri-band blend, VERY impressive results from his dichroics. I almost want to make a super-powered LED emitter with his particular dichroic blend (if we could make the individual emitters the same voltage and amperage so they could be all put into the same emitter package,) and call it the Weezard light. I'd donate 20% of any profits to him continuing to build better lights, the man is that incredible and inspirational and his own personal tinkering should be encouraged much more. If you want to learn about DIY LED, that is the man you want to talk to, not me. Stra8 is another good source of manufactured LED panels, and he's using higher-powered diodes than I am, for now.

On the other hand, if you wanted to learn about DIY micro guitar amps, I'm the guy to chat with!



Here's a simple overdrive amp using two capacitors, a couple of 1/4" stereo barrels, and a pre-amp chip. Off a 9v battery it can crank up to a 15" speaker cabinet. Best used in conjunction with a heavier overdrive or light distortion pedal for crunch, or standalone in a clean driven amp for an AC/DC sound (assuming you don't have sucky pickups.)