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    How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs
    How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs
    How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs
    Ebook215 pages1 hour

    How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs

    By Robert Manes and Toby Stumpf

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    About this ebook

    In How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs, the authors provide a well-educated insight into the still-controversial world of LED grow lights.  Robert's 16+ years of solid state lighting design (Over 12 years designing effective grow lighting) and Toby's extensive experience growing with LEDs will help the reader to:

    • Understand what lighting plants really need
    • Choose the LED grow light that best suits their needs
    • Separate fact from the fiction when dealing with LED lighting marketers
    • Grow some of the finest marijuana (or any other plant) under LEDs
    • Increase the size of their harvests significantly using LEDs

    With almost 2 decades working with some of the biggest names in the LED manufacturing business, the authors identify the hype surrounding LEDs, and particularly, LED grow lights, and show you how to evaluate every aspect of any grow light design.

    While this book does not claim to be a complete replacement for the volumes of information available concerning all aspects of horticulture, a practical, step-by-step grower's guide is provided for all levels of expertise, using real-life tried-and-tested methods for growing the highest quality cannabis under LEDs.  LEDs can't be used the same way as more traditional lighting, such as High Pressure Sodium lamps, and this guide will put the reader well on their way to harvesting the best-looking and tastiest plants possible.

    This book is for you if you:

    • Want the largest, most consistent yields in indoor growing
    • Want the highest quality indoor crops possible
    • Want to save money on energy costs and parts replacement
    • Want to reduce fire risks and heat signature in your grow area
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRobert Manes
    Release dateMay 16, 2018
    ISBN9781386784661
    How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs
    Author

    Robert Manes

    Bob Manes earned a B.S. in Computer Management Information Systems (minor in Aviation) and a Master of Business Administration.  Bob has designed and manufactured solid-state (LED) lighting for over 16 years, ever since the first high brightness white LEDs were introduced for illumination purposes (to see by, rather than to be seen).  In addition to LED grow lights, he has designed frequency-specific lighting for several purposes, such as for algae manipulation, for national parks to preserve the sea turtle population, and for areas around large-scale optical telescopes, to defeat harmful light pollution. He enjoys biking and flying – he has been a pilot since 1977. Toby Stumpf has cultivated cannabis since he was a young boy.  He cut his teeth on growing cannabis outdoors, but in 2010 he became licensed to grow indoors through the state of AZ, which he continues today. Toby believes in the greater good of marijuana, always understanding the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.  As laws relax and decriminalization spreads, he’s happy to help usher in this new era and contribute to research in the industry. Toby is a caregiver for several patients that rely upon his expertise and products to satisfy their medicinal needs.

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      Book preview

      How to Grow Marijuana with LEDs - Robert Manes

      Introduction

      Well-designed LED grow lights work!  There really is no question that this is true.  What is in question is how well they work, and if they are cost-effective. 

      All lighting technologies have their idiosyncrasies.  For instance, High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lights have been around for so long that just about everyone is familiar with the intense heat they put out.  We don’t think twice about the need to keep them far from our plants, so we don’t burn our crop.  We also know we will need to move large volumes of air to keep temperatures within acceptable levels, and that we will be replacing light bulbs every other crop, if not more frequently.  Similarly, when growing with LEDs, we must adapt our environment, methods of growing, and perhaps more importantly, our way of thinking about light to get the most out of them.

      We must begin by identifying the requirements - what kind of light that plants need.  As growers, we pay close attention to our plant’s nutrient needs, water quality and pH, temperature, humidity, and airflow.  We watch every leaf and flower, and our growing methods and maintenance processes are designed to get the most out of every plant.  However, with lighting, we are still very much in the dark (very sorry for the pun).  Let’s face it, new nutrients come out all the time, but how often do new grow lights come out?  We need to think equally hard about our plants’ lighting requirements and how to satisfy them. 

      In the following pages, we hope to convince you that LEDs are the only technology currently available that can potentially satisfy most of a plant’s photobiological needs.  Also, we will explain how spectrum plays a significant role in nutrient uptake, circadian rhythm control, aesthetics, and flavor for almost any plant.

      We repeat some important material in this book, sometimes many times.  We want you to be able to navigate the mis- and dis-information flying around about LED grow lights.  We purposely attack the important topics from several different angles to better familiarize you with selecting equipment and growing with LED grow lights.

      What Is Photobiology?

      The study of how plants react to light is known as photobiology.  Falling under the science of photobiology are photosynthesis, photomorphogenesis, and circadian rhythms.  While these topics may seem boring to most of us, when you think about it, how a plant works is miraculous!  There is nothing else currently known to humans that provides the return on investment that plants do.  A little air, water, food, and light - and look what we get! – food, oxygen, medicine – and more plants!  I’m not the only person to ooh and ahh when I look at some of the 10- or 15-pound cannabis plants that professional growers cultivate – it boggles the mind just to think that they were originally grown from a seed so small.

      Our first topic of discussion within the science of photobiology is photosynthesis.  Light, and more specifically, photons, are the catalyst for photosynthesis.  Photons trigger the photosynthetic process, so a plant can produce carbohydrates to build mass, as well as to produce energy to feed the growth process.  To simplify it quite a bit, photons trigger pigment-oriented components in a plant’s photosynthetic reaction center (where the chloroplasts are) to kick off photosynthesis.  The key word here is pigment, which denotes color, and this is very important to understand.  It is color (a frequency in the lighting spectrum) that determines whether a specific photon will trigger a specific light-absorbing chlorophyll molecule in a chloroplast.  In short, the wrong color=no reaction.  Also, if you provide too much light in any specific color, the photoreceptors that respond to that color will deplete.  While a plant is continually creating more photoreceptors for all colors of its usable spectrum, sometimes it can’t catch up to be able to use all of the light shining down on it.  This is more commonly known as saturation.

      Photomorphogenesis is defined as changing the way a plant grows (except for photosynthesis), using light.  Most of us unwittingly do this in our horticultural endeavors.  In the vegetative stages, we routinely use Metal Halide (MH) lamps (bulbs), as the blues provide a lot of what plants need at that stage of growth.  When we flip our plants into the flowering stage, we switch to High Pressure Sodium lights, as the reds provided by HPS lamps bring about photobiological changes that increase the flowering sites, size and potency of our crop.

      Touching briefly on circadian rhythms – we can manipulate our crops’ respiration cycles by manipulating their photoperiod.  Photoperiod is defined as changes in a living organism based upon seasonal changes.  How plants know that the season has changed is the length of the days and their exposure to sunlight.  We can manipulate our lights on / lights off schedule to trick our plants into thinking it is a specific season.

      For instance, longer lighting periods are common during the spring and this is the time seeds and plants germinate and root to create vegetative growth.  As the days become shorter, plants are signaled that it is summertime and growth shifts to flowering and seed production (reproduction).

      Grower’s refer to the grow cycles created by this timed lighting as vegetative and flowering stages of growth.

      We once designed an LED light, using specific frequencies, to keep outdoor plants from entering the flowering stage.  Just 15 minutes exposure per night was enough to do the job - illustrating just how sensitive plants are to light.

      Spectrum

      The issue of spectrum is currently one of the biggest controversies in LED horticultural lighting.  Many studies have definitively proven that almost all plants use every frequency in the visible spectrum for photosynthesis and photomorphogenesis – including green light.  However, there is no end to the information being thrown around, as depicted in the graph above, which shows only a small section of the visible spectrum is necessary to the healthy development of plants. 

      Figure 1 - ChA and ChB Absorption Peaks

      Most LED grow light vendors have adopted this minimal information as being the total lighting requirement for plants, and subsequently, this is the only portion of the visible spectrum that their lights service.  This couldn’t be further from the truth. 

      Many LED grow light vendors and experts claim that no other frequencies (colors) are used – most even claim that green light is not used at all.  This is incorrect – and we have proven it in the grow room – we have grown plants from clone to flower using only green (550nm) LEDs.  Granted, they were not record-breaking, lacked substance and flavor, but they grew, nonetheless, proving that green light is not useless to

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