Gonmon's grow chamber and plants

[naoki]

Very nice. Wow, you can bloom these high light orchids with 72W of Cree white LEDs? Do you grow them 100% under light or do you put them outside in the summer? How much light (foot-candles) are you getting at the leaf level? It will be great if you can share more info about your DIY LED rig (e.g. which Cree, where you get heatsinks etc)!

[Gonmon]

Originally Posted by naoki

Very nice. Wow, you can bloom these high light orchids with 72W of Cree white LEDs? Do you grow them 100% under light or do you put them outside in the summer? How much light (foot-candles) are you getting at the leaf level? It will be great if you can share more info about your DIY LED rig (e.g. which Cree, where you get heatsinks etc)!

Actually I haven't been growing under the LEDs long enough to bloom anything, my chamber's only been up for a month. The Blc and Neo I bought budded. Most of my plants I've only had a few months. My Kegeliella atropilosa (Stanhopea relative) is the only plant that has budded entirely while under the LEDs. The Bulbo maq and Masd erinacea are in a vivarium under two 24w t5ho. I got a really old light meter with a bunch of other junk, and I'm not sure it works. It is a LIMHID Light Intensity Meter. Under my lights it read 50 fc, outside in the sun it's over 5000. I borrowed a PAR meter from a local fish club a few months ago, and took readings of the LED light before I put lenses on the LEDs. If I remember right it showed ~250 micro-mol/m2/s 18" below the light. I think the light is little low for catts and such right now, based on leaf color of some plants.

My LED light has 24 three watt CREE brand LED pcb stars. I bought them used from a fish forum. There are 10 XPE Cool White, 10 XPE Neutral White, and 4 XRE Royal Blue. New ones would cost about $5 a piece, so I you wanted to make a light it wouldn't be cheap. I built mine for experience before making one twice the size for my reef aquarium. The heatsinks are just 3/4" aluminium U channel from home depot. The LEDs are attached to the heatsink with thermal pads, double sided heat conducting stickers basically. Twelve LEDs are soldered in series, + from one to - of next. Each group of twelve is connected to a ELN-LPC-700 driver. The driver plugs into the wall and outputs a constant 700 milliamps of power to the LED string. 700mA is half of the rated power for these LEDs, so I could run them twice as strong as I am now, but I'd have to buy new drivers. There is also a 1ohm 5w resistor in each string of LEDs so I can use a multimeter to read how much current is running through the strings. That's basically it. It's really not as complicated as it sounds If you want more info on doing a DIY LED pm me and I can link you to some threads on the fish forum.