They look pretty nice...

Week 8

One last update before harvest. I had to wait for an appointment with a plumber before I could stink up my house with plants. So, I'm harvesting tomorrow, and not a moment too soon: The LED plant has started falling over under its own weight.

I snapped some root pics for you SME. The test plants have relatively small rootballs because they had to be kept small to fit under the LED, so I took a pic of one of my other plants for comparison.

LED plant - falling over.


LED flower


LED rootball - the orange coloration is staining from the nutrient solution.


HPS plant


HPS flower


HPS rootball


Large plant rootball at week 3 - newer roots are bright white, and older roots are stained orange.

Yeah, you can't expect massive roots with small plants that didn't veg long but you can still see how well *DWC works anyway. I had some pictures of my massive roots in DWC but I had a recent hardware failure and I lost 6 terabytes of data including all of my pictures and logs. I'm still trying to recover the data but it's not going well and I'm not paying thousands for professional "clean room" data recovery.

Oh man that sucks about your data. As mmj becomes more widely accepted I've become more comfortable with keeping my pics and stuff in "the cloud". And posting on forums.

I have/had too much data to put on the cloud because I'm kind of a packrat but I do need to build better storage. I've just been lazy and cheap lately which I would never do professionally but I tried to get away with personally.

Both plants are dried and manicured, and they've gone into jars for curing. Yield was 6 jars from the HPS, 3.5 from the LED. I get up to 1.25 ounces per jar, so that's up to 7.5oz from the HPS, and 4.375oz from the LED. I'll post final numbers after a week of curing.

HPS left, LED right




Looks like the bud on the left needs a little more trimming

Have you had a chance to sample any? It looks delicious! Great job. Whats your overall thoughts on the light?

I did sample a little when I was trimming, and it seemed really good. The HPS produced the same quality as far as I can tell though. I'll do a blind test after they cure a bit more.

As far as the light, the quality of the light itself is superb, and CLW's support is fantastic. However, the numbers don't look good. The SS400w retails for over $900, and a nice 1000w setup with a digital ballast is under $600 (much less if you shop wisely). The footprint of the two plants that I grew were about the same when they finished, but the HPS yielded much more. I also could have grown 4 plants under a 1kw light.

So, for $900+ you could grow ~4.5oz, or for $600 you could grow ~28oz.

I know that I could do better if I went another round with the LED. I would veg longer and probably use a screen to support the plant all the way to the edge of the 2.5" footprint. I would also keep the light a little bit higher, at around 14-16", because at ~11 inches or so it starts to bleach the growth tips and stunt the flowers. The LED doesn't penetrate past 5" of canopy in full flower, so any bud sites below that will be popcorn.

It's an unfair comparison, but 1kw HPS bulbs will penetrate 8", which increases the volume of the canopy quite a bit. For 2/3 the cost and much greater production potential, HPS lights are a bargain IMO.

That's exactly what I was expecting, with some system "tweaking" and experience I'm sure you could get more yield. I've said it many times; LED can and does grow decent plants but HID is still king due to penetration, coverage and cost. LED has made a lot of progress in the last 5-10 years but it's still not quite where it needs to be to take the proverbial crown. I still think CLW should put me on their R&D team.

Economically speaking and regarding grow area coverage, HPS can't be beat. Period.

Penetration wise, LED can only keep up until they start getting taller and denser. Costs aside, LED is best suited to the clone/veg stage and, if flowering, short SOG or SCROG in a smaller closet or tent will yield the best for LED.

That said, the 5w diodes that CLW uses really do help, the 1w-3w alternatives really are weak in comparison. I've had the CLW lights in my hands so I know that they are well built but I've never grown with them. Their service should be a model for every company and they earned my respect even though I'm not a customer yet.

Great pics Beefxer, looks like some really nice product. However your test doesn't seem very fair. You are comparing a 1000 watt HPS which uses 10 amps of power and all the fans and ventilation needed for the heat produced to the Solar Storm 400 watt which uses 2.9 amps of power with very low heat production and no need for all the fans and ventilation, quite a difference in electric consumption ! Viewing the growth pics and the finished product pics the Solar Storm 400 watt out performed the 1000 watt HPS if you take into consideration the amount of power used, the amount of heat produced and the cost of HPS bulbs ( at $100 a pop) which last only 3 to 5 cycles where the SS 400 lasts for 50,000 hours or more. Your thoughts both SME and Beefxer ?