Hi budgetlight growing friends,
Hoping to share a build in progress, as well as pick your brains with some light questions. I’m in the process of figuring out and optimizing a grow cabinet I’ve had up and running about 5 months now. So far it’s been working decently, but has a long way to go. As you can see, only half the tank is operational at this point in time.
My struggle right now is optimizing lighting, particularly at the base of the cabinet. I currently light with 3 arrays of 12 x 3W Cree XP-G arrays on heat sinks, no optics, with separately wired fans connected to a computer power supply. It’s a horrible nightmare of wires (4 different drivers), but the main issue is insufficient light at the base of the enclosure which is quite tall, 4ft to be exact. I designed it that way to maximize vertical space for pendulous spikes, and I have the plant rack mounted at an angle to capture as much overhead light as possible, but it’s not quite enough.
I’ve been toying with two different options for a while now, which I tried to illustrate below.
The first picture is my current setup. Now I’m trying to figure out is what’s more efficient / effective - increasing overall overhead light (image 2), or trying some sort of setup where I mount additional lights at an angle (image 3). I’m leaning towards 3 right now.
I’ve tried tall vertical tanks before in the past, using a bank of T5s mounted sideways. It was unsuccessful for other reasons, but I from the light perspective, I think it worked pretty well:
(Lights seen on right)
I’m mainly posting because those LEDs are deathly expensive, and I’ve gone through so much DIY hell (aka failures) I was hoping to possibly gather some thoughts before making the leap this time.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Experience in lighting tall tanks in order to maximize grow space?
More on top, or distributing some at an angle?
And if the angle approach:
Thoughts on mounting heavy LED heat sinks + fans?
Waterproof LED enclosures? Would something like this work?
Would passive cooling be sufficient (e.g. can I do away with the fans) if I go with the newest Cree LEDs?
Will post updates to this build as I figure things out. Currently working on several components:
Light hood - build of two wooden frames, awaiting glass inlays. Currently lights are diffusing through the 6mm polycarbonate, which is very not ideal.
Drainage basin - currently water is just dripping down onto the base and evaporating (I have some shamwows to mop up the water). Again, not ideal. Building a wooden drainage basin, and coating it with this stuff, but in retrospect possibly should have tried to get a custom aluminum basin built instead. Oh well! We’ll see how it turns out, but hard to get out to the wood shop with –20C outside!
Thanks in advance for any input!
[EDIT] Can supply light level readings tomorrow
-Calvin