Lots of talk about lighting here, just thought to throw this trick into the pile. There is a school of thought that indoor will never do as well as outdoor because of the light, not just the quality but the fact that the sun moves across the sky during daylight hours and indoor the light source is always stationary. Well with the advent of the new light Mars 600w wonders I hacked together an idea I have had for a long time and now its not only possible, its easy and works great. I took a spare el-cheapo oscillating fan and strapped a 120w LED grow panel to the front and now when I put it on oscillate, the light is played across the room in about 3 second cycles…tomorrow I up the panel to the Mars 600w model, convert a second fan to do this and tomorrow I have moving lights in the grow tent! For cheap!
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OK here is a better look; my mistake for trying to sandwich this into a single GIF…I am an amateur, no excuse…anyhow this is cool and I will upgrade both the fan and the light tomorrow. What would be cool (no pun intended) is if I were able to perforate the LED panel to capture the air-flow in addition to the moving light…man the thrills are cheap today…
Dunno why this got detached but here is the final version running in Tent #1 today; Tent #2 will require a heavier gauge fan base than what I have available. The Mars light weights little but these are fans are designed to hold up as much plastic as a bag of potato chips and these are just over the line. Anyhow here is the finished-ish model in action:
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Upgraded tent 2 to use a tower fan which was otherwise useless as a fan…
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Final iteration of this trick for now; I have pot to grow!
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Hey a few anecdotal things about this “technique”:
- I tried four models of common desktop, crap fans and one thing they all had in common was pretty much the same …not sure of word…range of oscillation. IOW didn’t matter what fan I used, they all covered exactly the same amount of plant/wallspace: about 8-10 feet. Since my grow is unique and against all walls, this trick works well for coverage…but the way I am doing this is having not just the 8 feet of wall in front of the fan going but also 4 foot of plants on each end. Therefore I see two options: 1. Hang TWO LED panels from each fan (the tower fan this would work, the desktop not so much) at angles to each other in front. Con: To do this right I would need more $$$ than I have to spend on it. Had the Mars 600w wonders not shot up in price, I would be there. As it is, I must make do with what I already have which also means no stronger/stouter (read: new) fans to use as oscillation drivers. I DO have a spare pair of cheap-d!ck 120w no-name panels I got like way back and they are the right size and all but they are heavy on the cheap purple light which I have already seen causes problems with its too intense, or its the only band being shown, its too close, not sure but they fuck my plants up, why I don’t use them anymore. Of course if anyone wants to buy one, they are the greatest invention since Chicago style pizza.
B. I can see in my head taking one of those wall-mounted fans you see in greenhouses only mounting a panel to it and rigging it to the ceiling.
C. Fun/nice discovery. Two days ago I engineered the first one with a night-mare of tie wraps, bread ties and worse trying to hang one of those Mars 600w wonders. Today I set up the tower fan in my target spot, grabbed the Mars light and…it hit me: you know those screwy odd hanger clips that come with those? Like really short? Well I discovered that if you remove them both (there is a pair) and connect just one along a long side, you can just hang the light on the front of the tower, draping the wire over that little hand-hole they all seem to mold into the plastic just under the control panel. IOW whole thing was up and running in less than a minute and used no materials outside of the fan and light itself.
D. OK I am getting carried away here BUT the tinkerer in me must OUT! OK This first bit is assumption that I will prove or disprove tomorrow after sleep: these fans probably oscillate using a cam attached to some form of stepper motor. If that is true, then you could use that to push a light …light (as in not heavy) along a track mounted on the ceiling. These stepper motors are made to be ran slowly for long periods of time.
E. As stated in the video I know this works now based on the plants directly in its path maturing/blossoming more/faster than the ones outside the arc on either end. As positive as that sounds however I don’t see this being of much use to anyone growing traditional ways. The mere fact that my plants are flattened (well, best I could do given limitations) AND sort of wrapped around the center of the room lends itself to the path a typical cheap fan will handle I think if they were any other way, moving the light in such a manner really would not help the standard plants. Most of our lighting techniques revolve around blasting light to the top/middle of the tent, given thats where the plants are on the standard grow.
