Quote Originally Posted by bkbbudz
been reading a few posts and checking your pics. Seems like you really know what you are doing. Was wondering if you can offer a small piece of wisdom. I am a total newbie, never grew a single stem. But I am going to start very soon and i want to used LED. I was contemplating getting a 90 watt UFO from HTG on ebay. I read in your posts you design and build your own and wonder if you can tell me anything about their product or can steer me in the right direction. Of course they want to sell their product but they claim this thing is so great that if God needed an LED he would get theirs!

I would also use the UFO in conjunction with 4 CFL's. I am trying to do this thing right the first time. There are alot of things that can go wrong especially on my 1st grow so I want to get all the expert advice I can.
Pardon me for the late reply, I'm in the UK right now performing new tests on stuff with my boss.

I have used HTG. For a vegetative panel, it's good, but it needs more blue during the flowering stage IMHO. If you were to go with HTG, I would supplement with 6500K CFL or other efficient fluorescent type lamps.

Do not use the fluorescents for underlighting. Chlorophyll has a one-way reaction path, this has been proven in centrifugal-separated samples of chlorophyll. If you took a test tube of chlorophyll, put it in front of red and blue light (between you and the light source,) it would pass through and you'd see purple. If you were to place a light source at nearly your same position (say right at your side, you holding onto the lamp pole,) and hold the tube of chlorophyll in front of you and the light, you would get a majority of the light reflected back to you depending upon how little you disturb the test tube of centrifuged chlorophyll, and it would appear green. With this in mind, use the fluorescents for inner-canopy lighting if you have a deep canopy - just a simple tiny thin glass or plastic case to keep the plant from being burned will be sufficient without causing detrimental losses.

If you want to talk more about this personally, feel free to use the contact buttons that you see at the top right of each of my posts (AIM, Yahoo, Skype icons.) I might be slow to respond, depends on what I'm doing at that moment, but I will help you out. And if I can't, I'll direct you to Stra8outtaweed or Weezard, who will have a fair share of their own to say and can likely help you further on stuff I haven't done test-wise yet (They pretty much cover what I haven't done test-wise so they can give you the straight dope, no pun intended!)
khyberkitsune Reviewed by khyberkitsune on . LED Ahoy! Okay, this becomes my new official grow journal. There's still the krusty/DWC update, but that stuff is going to be hash. pH swings like mad and heat issues from poorly-ventilated spaces caused that to be a complete cockup. The gear: 1 new prototype 50w quad-band+4500K white LED, combo 120/90 degrees. 1 Current-gen 50w tri-band solar-insolation spec LED, fully 120 degrees. 1 current-gen 120w tri-band solar-insolation spec LED, fully 120 degrees. The 120w gets my two largest mothers, Rating: 5