Super ecstatic I just put in my order. Ordered a
Gorilla Tent Lite line 4x4 tent and was wondering if you gents would be nice enough to give me some light suggestions. My plan is to probably run about a 250 watt HPS light based on what im trying to spend and what ive been researching but i would love to have a few other opinions and reccomendations such as personal experience with HPS versus LED and which is superior and why. And if i were to run LED how much is enough? Anyways thanks for advising this green greenthumb!
I can share my lighting experience, I'm also new to growing since the first of the year, I have one somewhat successful grow under my belt using LEDs in a 4x4 tent using a 6-bucket RDWC system.
at the time, I had no idea what to use for lights but being a techie type guy, I was leaning toward LEDs. The reasons I went for LED was so I wouldn't have to deal with the heat produced by an HPS and I wouldn't have to deal with changing bulbs or trying to figure out when to change a bulb due to bulb performance degradation.
- The next step was to figure out what to buy for an LED or to build my own.
After doing a ton of research on LEDs, I decided to go with a pre-built light from PlatinumLED. for my needs, I decided to buy a p600($600) which I knew, from talking to PlatinumLED, would not cover the whole 4x4 area. Their recommendation was to have two of them to fully cover the 4x4 area. The $1200 price tag was a bit much so I used only one as I was not using the front 1/3 of the tent to grow.
Results:
I ended up Vegging and blooming with this setup. this light, set at 24" over the canopy, vegged great. The blooming was not as great as the core coverage for this light is really 2x5 and really wasn't enough to cover the four plants that I had so most of the main kolas grew large directly under the light but the outer edges only flowered small "popcorn" buds. I ended up with roughly 8ozs from all four plants, I was happy for a fist time and called it a noobie success };-)
Conclusion:
The LED worked as intended, the ambient air temperature in the tent never got above 85f, usually sat around 80 without any kind of exhaust running. The light wasn't enough to get the full potential out of all the plants I had while blooming.
Moving Forward:
I decided that Vegging and Blooming in the same tent was not optimal for me (takes too long) so I decided to build a 4x8 bloom tent(I have a thread going in the DIY LED forum). I also decided to continue to use the p600 light in the veg tent. For the Bloom tent, I decided to build my own 1000W LED lighting system using COB leds with the help from
@sixstring and watching
@growmau5 youtube videos.
I still didn't want to deal with the heat and bulb replacement of the HPS lights and I looked into using 630 and 315 CMH fixtures which run cooler than the HPS but still have the bulb replacement issue that I didn't want to deal with.
That's where I'm at now, I hope this helps a little in your decisions
