Important Cannabis Grow Update!

What was old is new, once again the wheel turns..
UPDATE: 2 - 3 Days Later....

I had plain old 300w CFLs going where the old purple LEDs were going and now replaced them with the far more efficient Mars Hydro 600w LED fan-less grow light. The plants looked so much better and happier than they have in a long time and they did it so fast I wanted to share it so heres the video of a few days later....



Original story...

Greetings Folks, Jeff here...I know my writing here of late has suffered, my only excuse is a degenerative brain disease chipping away at my ability to do this. But keep on is what I shoot for  and this update is pretty important for anyone growing indoors today.

I talking today about light, one of the four basic elements all cannabis needs. For a long time the home growers had home-made light rigs and the bigger ops all had metal-halide or high pressure sodium going...and then LEDs came along, promising greater brightness at lower electrical cost and lower generation of heat, all very desirable to the home-grower. Problems were they just were not that good for what the plants wanted so it was a good while before they got to where they were good enough to sell in big-box stores. Now you can find 300-1000w LED grow lights on Amazon for a fraction of what any other option costs....and the current batch works OK BUT I have noticed something over several crops that sometimes I got hit with what looked like weird nute deficiencies or or odd problems, the easiest to identify was the dreaded "taco leaf" where your fan leaves curl the long way so they look like tacos and as funny as that may sound, its a harbinger of worse shit to come.

I lost much of a crop to this not long ago and never found the cause of it. pH, nutrients, general lighting, air, temps,. all were fine yet these continued to wither and die to the point 4 weeks into flower I had to just throw them out.

Now one thing thru all of this was it was maybe my biggest use of LEDs to create alot of "wattage" like I think I had 2400 watts in a 8x4x6 grow tent. Almost every one of those output this rose/purple glow to everything, making picture-taking a bitch on wheels:



And this is where I first really started watching the taco leaf problem and tracking attempts to fix it. No luck.

However recently, I needed to replace a 600w grow light so I snagged the latest from Mars Hydro w/o paying attention. Mars is a good solid name and lights really haven't changed in like forever so I was surprised AF to find this light from Mars Hydro had no fan, no motor, no electronics to speak of and barely any housing.


The Mars Hydro 600W Full Spectrum Grow Light
Now heres the thing as they say. This grow was kind of a Frankenstein affair anyways and as luck would have it, the way the old LEDs got mixed in with newer ones is that all of the newer LEDs were in one cluster (all blasting the golden yellow of newer LED grow lights) and the old ones (a mish-mash of 300-900w LED grow lights from a variety of sources) all blasting that purple light.

What I noticed blew me away with the stark clarity it provided. Every plant under a purple light was starting to exhibit growth problems and one problem every one had under the purple light was that fucking "taco leaf" problem. As the plants were growing as if they had malnutrition and so on. And any plants under the yellow lights were thriving, beyond healthy and most importantly, NO FUCKING TACO LEAF ANYWHERE! The plants were uniformly green with well-formed fan leaves, little to no irregular growth and so on.

The kicker though were a few plants that just happened to be bigger to begin with AND under both lights at once, one on each side. Those plants were the killers because the sides under the yellow were perfect and the sides under the purple, taco leaf, miscolored leaves, crappy growth and more.  Remember this is the same plant so same nutrients, water, soil, air, all of it. The light is the only difference....

So I guess this is Jeffs way of saying if you have these cheaper LED lights that you can't even take a photo under, consider swapping them for something with a more yellow or golden spectrum. Your plants and yield may thank you. I have another of these Mars Hydro 600W babies on-order to swap out my last two purple 300W LED lights. Until then I yanked out the purple ones and re-hung lights from my VERY FIRST GROW which was nothing more than dirt in pots and cheap-from-Walmart 300w CFLs hanging as you see it in the picture at the top of the story....

One cool thing I will tell you about the newer Mars Hydro lights like this is the way they are designed, they run cool naturally and so have just a simple reflector as the "body", no fan nothing so its going to not just run cooler, it runs quieter as well. It runs so cool in fact that I have been able to leave the industrial strength exhaust vent I have set up for bloom off for a week now, no heat problems at all.....

So here is a quickie video I made, no effects, titles etc and you will have to turn it up but this shows the problem as best I could and you can see the evidence....



Few more shots of the Mars Hydro 600w wonder...

Very golden output and the plants seem to love that.

Also rare, the purple lights never let you take a snap of the plants without ridiculous lighting tricks...the plants look so much more natural under these lights....


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