No problem. I'm not in the RO camp. I also have great quality surface tap water from a lake. It's 80ppm and I still consider it quite pure. Water treatment is good with very low residual chlorine / chloramine levels.

If you are loosing whole crops, a chiller seems like a reasonable expense.

Bro, that sounds brutal. I am just finishing up my first rdwc grow (3rd grow overall) and by your standards my process was lazy and unsanitary. I replaced reservoir every 4-6 weeks with tap water, and used no bleach or h2o2 of any kind. And it's going really well. It does have a slight pond smell wh...

I was running 30W per sqft in a 4x8 space. Strips running about 1A each, one fixture 480W covering 4x4 and two fixtures 240W each covering 2x4. I had my lights suuuuuper close relative to @Nuggie . Some buds stretched past the lights. Many were within 3 inches or less. I don't have a lot of free spa...

Awesome, thanks man.
I'm running a scrog just shy of 30w/sqft.

Very good intel.

Raise lights for this grow but for future grows dial down the wattage.

Hey gang, I have about 440W of bridgelux gen 2 strips running around 800mA without heat sinks. I noticed some buds had begun foxtailing weeks after I commissioned the strip light fixture (from a blurple led light). The height I set the lights was admittedly quite low (within 3 inches from some of th...

Well, I have changed gears a little bit and am going to test out this gear with growing microgreens, 3 strips to a shelf. Here's the latest build, I just have to wire it up! 20190518_123059.jpg As for the grow tent, I'll probably just pack them tight at 3" spacing and try just the 240W of lighting p...

About 3" spacing between strips is it?

With my first builds I just tinned the stranded ends with solder, welding the strands together. Worked great but takes time. Now I don't even do that, just twist the strands as tightly as I can and ram it home. No problems disconnecting and reconnecting with either method - I always twist strands c...

Thanks guys, here's the latest build. I used some 1/2" EMT conduit I had laying around, which isn't particularly lightweight but it's pretty cheap. This adds up to 30W per 5.4 sq ft of growing space (using Ikea shoe trays in lieu of 1020 trays) or 5.5W/sqft; certainly a good place to start. I'm feel...

Rather than do shelves I went with one long bench and fastened the 12 strips over 8 feet. At half draw 120W spread over 16 sqft is 7W/sqft so I think this is a good starting point to experiment. But.... I only realized this when I was mostly done... I fastened them to wood thinking this is just a te...