LED Grow Light Forum

I was feeding daily for two weeks with 25% of regular feeding but quit doing that last week. I flushed them with straight water last week and then started them on a twice a week feeding schedual of full strength nutes plus cal/mag. Had to rebalance the PH as it was low. I had'nt realized that the Fox Farm Bloom nutes lowered the PH so dramatically so I had'nt checked it for a couple of weeks. That's when the problems started. I think I will be checking the PH twice a week for all present and future grows.
For a while I was distilling my own water but the processing costs are pretty high. I used my small essential oil still which only holds 2 gallons per run and it was fairly efficient but I did'nt have enough time to produce enough water. When I switched to my larger five gallon essential oil still I could run a lot more but the fuel costs for heat up were a lot more also so it did'nt save on costs.
So now I'm buying distilled water untill I can get an RO system.

A good water only flush every few weeks is a good idea to flush out salt build up. You could add some CalMag Plus to your feeding regimen but I'd start slow to make sure you're not adding too much. The problem is that I don't know if the pH problem (that should be fixed now) caused that cal/mag problem or if your nutrients just aren't providing enough.

Hi, I've been out of town for a couple of weeks so I'm a little behind on posting.
My son has been taking care of the grow and while I was gone he harvested two more of the plants. So far we have harvested 74 grams off of three 13 inch tall plants. Not a great harvest, but considering our lack of experience we'll take it.
We have one more plant still going which will be ready for harvest sometime within a couple of weeks. It's a little taller, at two feet, than the others and looks to be more of a Sativa than the others. It has a great citrus aroma and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Don't be afraid to start a new journal when you're ready and we'll see if we can help you do better next time.

Hi again, I forgot to add a couple of pics to my last post, so here they are.

Hi, not much change to talk about. The trics are starting to cloud up but not to the point where I want to harvest yet, maybe next week sometime.

Hi, this will be the final entry for this journal.
Well after all the mistakes my Son and I made we ended up with a total of 175.2grams dry weight, about 6.26 oz. Our last plant gave us a finished dry trimmed weight of 86.4 grams. That was the best of the 4 plants.
We believe the SS400 light is a very good product that is fully capable of producing a bountiful crop, especially if the user knows what their doing, unlike us.
That said, we did have some heat issues which we didn't expect to have with the LED light after hearing how much cooler they run. Part of the heat problem I'm sure was due to the size of our grow cabinet which is 2'X4'X7', not the best shape or size for good air flow. The shape and size was determined by the space we had for our use.
The light distibution to the plants was hampered by the width of the cabinet so we ended up needing to rotate the plants regularly in order to maintain a semblance of even light distribution. If the cabinet was 3' wide instead of 2' we could have arranged the four plants in a different manner and the light would have covered them a lot better. I'm going to rectify this problem by building another larger cabinet and use this one as a starter/cloning cabinet.
We've decided we like the SS400 light enough to purchase another one in order to have two of them for our next grow room.
That way we will have a larger light distribution than with the SS800 alone and also have twice the UVB lights. Yes we know it's more expensive this way and also draws slightly more ampherage but we think that two SF400 lights will give us better coverage than a single SS800.
For one young man and one old codger this has been quite an experience. We've learned a lot and know we need to learn a heck of alot more so our next grow will be better.
Would like to thank SME and CLW for the help and the product respectivly.
My only negative comment about CLW would be a phone call I made to them two and a half months ago. I spoke to Brandon about linking a SS400 and a SF200 together, Brandon said he wasn't sure but would check on it and call me back. I'm still waiting for the call. I have made a few calls to CLW and to be fair everyone else I've talked to were very helpful and polite.

Last but not least here are a few pics of our last plant on harvest day. Thanks

When you get your new light feel free to start a new journal and we'll help you next time too!