Why are they growing so fast?

NorCalGrower said:

Water Cooled Lights? That sounds interesting. Can you give me more info on what type of light and sleeves those are and where exactly you purchased them from. Do you think water cooling the lights would work better than an air cooled light system. I have 3 600watt hps' that are all cooled by 4 in fans.

Good lookin setup satire, try throwing them into flower right after they have established roots and i think your setup will improve.

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I'm very happy with the water cooled light setup. It's pricey, but they work great, and you get twice the lumens by having them 12 inches instead of 24 inches. I purchased them from a local Hydroponics shop, but you can contact the distributor, bestcoastgrowers.com, and find a local dealer. I prefer water over air cooled, because it's a more efficient cooling system, and you don't need to worry about all that hot air moving around the room. I can post some more pics of the setup if you're interested.

satire said:

The room air temp is between 26 and 28 when the lights are on, but unfortunately, that's about as cool as I can get it. The outside temp is 46 during the day!

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That's on the warm side but not too bad in the general scheme of things.

I FEEL for ya with 46C ambient temps- how fucking miserable is that?! We had a 45.3C day here on 1 Jan 2007 and I thought I was gonna DIE. At 45C EVERYTHING is hot to the touch, even plastics like mouse & keyboard.

The lights actually run extremely cool. They are water cooled sleeves [...] I don't think they can burn with the sleeve on.

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Ah OK, I didn't see your water cooled tubes in the pic on first glance- I see them and your plumbing now. Yes, even air-cooled tubes will permit plants to come in contact with the cooltube without scorching as the glass is cool, but there's still some short-wave IR that passes through both air and water cooled tubes. The radiated short-wave IR causes warming of plant tissues. Some of them, notably reproductive tissues, are pretty sensitive to heat and their growth pattern will change. Buds exposed to excessive heat will 'run' or 'bolt', making long strands of bud material instead of tight nugs. Can also explain elongation in vegetative growth, but elongation can also be caused by low light. You have plenty of light but you also have very crowded plants because of all the unpruned branching, which will limit the amount of light getting to lower portions of the plants. I think this is part of it, but vegging before flowering will also contribute to elongation between nodes. You vegged this mob for 2 weeks before flowering; I think that could be the main cause in this case.Don't veg the next lot, take them straight out of the clonebox and put them in to flower.

In a SOG set up (like what I'm trying to accomplish) it sounds like I should be trimming everything except for the main stem to encourage the growth of one main cola on top.

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Dat's it, dat's da ticket!

In the future, I guess I don't need to veg at all if I'm going for SOG. I didn't realize that they would be vegging still for about 3-4 weeks, even on a 12/12 cycle, so that's good to know.

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Yep, that residual veg growth during the 1st 4 weeks of 12/12 is enough to get good sized plants yet which are not so tall as not to be able to make best use of artificial lighting. Indoor lighting can only penetrate foliage so deeply; consider that intensity diminishes as an inverse square of distance from the lamp, so short plants are the friend of all indoor growers. I have to tell ya, I shake my head a lot when I see someone trying DELIBERATELY to grow 6 foot plants. They're shooting themselves in both feet.

calicat said:

Very nice what strain are you doing the sog with?

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Sweet Tooth #4 from Spice of Life Seeds. I sprouted these beans in 2002 and have been propagating by cuttings ever since. ST4 in beans is hard to find these days. Good luck. If you can't find ST4, choose any primarily indica dominant hybrid.

NorCalGrower said:

Do you think water cooling the lights would work better than an air cooled light system.

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I prefer air cooled cooltubes for a few reasons, notably simplicity, almost no maintenance besides periodic dusting and fewer things to break. The makers of liquid cooled systems usually recommend 50gal (189L) of cooling water reservoir capacity per 1000W lamp.

In my case, I simply don't have the room for close to 400L of water tanks to cool my pair of 1000s. Both air and water cooled cooltubes do precisely the same thing; beyond what advantages air cooled units have that I've just mentioned, the air cooled systems are much cheaper, about $60-80 per cooltube.

Mind you, water cooled tubes have a great advantage in cases where you're growing in a space that is impossible to ventilate. I recall a setup in a storage space in the sub-basement of an apartment block where there was no way the grower could run air ducts around through concrete walls. She used water cooled tubes which ran coolant water to a drain instead of to tanks and had to provide bottled CO2, but had a highly productive grow with good temp control despite the location of the op. Used a lot of water but she wasn't paying for water, so she didn't care much.

Good lookin setup satire, try throwing them into flower right after they have established roots and i think your setup will improve.

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Yep, I agree. What he's got going really looks pretty good so far, aside from the stretch.

Thanks for all the great info, and the compliments on my setup. I'll keep you posted as things improve.

satire said:

I'm very happy with the water cooled light setup. It's pricey, but they work great, and you get twice the lumens by having them 12 inches instead of 24 inches.

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Same result as from air cooled tubes.

I prefer water over air cooled, because it's a more efficient cooling system, and you don't need to worry about all that hot air moving around the room.

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Water cooled tubes are less efficient than air cooled types. They have two concentric glass tubes and a layer of water that the light has to pass through before it can get to the plants, as opposed to a single layer of glass in the case of air cooled tubes, meaning water cooled systems lose some intensity compared to air cooled types.

The 'hot' air in air cooled tube ducts isn't all that hot- and it is staying within the ducting until it is ducted out.



A 1000 will raise the temp of air drawn through them by 6-7C per cooltubed lamp. If the cooltube's intake air is for example at 18C, the exhaust from the first cooltube will be 24-25C. Even if the ambient air available to draw in to the cooltube is very hot, even 40-45C, it will still cool the lamp/s effectively and prevent the lamp heat from getting into the grow room's airmass. The exhaust from the cooltube will simply be 6-7C warmer than the intake air.

To be deadly honest, a water cooled system has many more failure possibilities. A failure of a seal in a watercooled system can immerse the lamp tube, which would be disastrous. The lamp tube would shatter on contact with water and the ballast could be shorted out.

There's no doubt that water-cooled tubes will prevent lamp heat from getting into the grow room's airmass, but they are much more mechanically complex, much more expensive, much more maintenance intensive and less efficient than air cooled types.

Thanks for the follow-up on the pros/cons of the air cooled and water cooled system. The efficiency that I was referring to was the heat removal, and minimal necessary ducting/plumbing. I would not recommend water cooled if you can do air cooled. The cost is probably x10 with water cooled, but when space is an issue, and there are no vents in the room for air removal, this is a great alternative. I will most likely be using an air cooled system for my next project, because the room will be custom built for indoor growing e.g exhaust ducting, A/C, 240v wiring. I can't wait!

I agree that water cooled tubes definitely have an application. Like I cited in the apt block basement example, there just would have been no way to carry off that op without water bottles. That room had ZERO ventilation, no windows, no ducts, nothing... and concrete on all sides. There was AC power and a mop sink, that's all. Challenging.

CO2 came from a tank- and used very little compared to a op with an exhaust fan. To get rid of humidity, a dehumidifier ran 24/7 and drained its condensation over the hot side of a modified small aircon unit, which added to a drip from the tap, so all room heat (not being shifted by the bottles) was exchanged into water and went down the mop sink drain. Bang on 24-26C 24/7/365 with 2kW of HPS in a room with ZERO ventilation. Downside was mineral accumulation on the aircon unit's hot side coil, but that op made enough buds to buy a replacement as needed. It was an exxy setup but was worth doing in the end, for sure.

Is there any functional difference between "Cooltubes" and say a ValueBright hood/reflector? I air cool my lights just as you have in the diagram, but am wondering if there are better cooling methods out there.

Sorry, I don't know what a valuebright is and can't find any pics on the web.

oh, wait, I've found one.

If a hood-type reflector has an air intake duct and a sheet of glass over the lamp, it will act like a cooltube, but that is not the case with the ValueBright. Worse, it only has a 4" duct connection. Most 4" fans only can shift about 80CFM. This hood will probably feel warm to the touch if as I expect, a 4" isn't enough suck for the job. There's no alternative with this hood but to have the fan in the warm air stream. The fan motor needs cooling too and that's not the best place to get it. The exhaust duct from this hood will require scent treatment because it is using air shared with plants for its intake.

Cooltubes with closed circuit air duct paths don't allow any mixing of warm air convected from the hot lamp tube with the grow room airmass.



This means no carbon filter is needed on the duct Closed path cooltubes direct a constant flow of air over the lamp tube and socket, making them much better at getting the lamp heat out of the room before it can get to the plants than an open hood.

Even if a hood has an intake duct and a sheet of glass, it still is missing part of what a combination of a cooltube and a batwing can do.







The light spread/focus of this arrangement can be altered by moving the 'wings.' There are small wires that connect each wing to one another, allowing the shape of the reflector to be changed. The spread of hoods is fixed and cannot be adjusted.

You cant really see it in the pic, but it actually has two 4in holes in the hood, one on either side for exhuast and intake. I have three 600w hps lights interconnected by ducting, with a 4 inch fan in between each hood, and a 540cfm fan exhausting the entire chain. The intake is passive in that i rely on the fans to create a steady flow through the ducting. Each hood has the "sheet of glass" you mentioned. I have a sneaking suspicion that the cooltubes could help lower my temps due to the total enclosure of the light within the glass? The metal my hood is made of does not dissapate heat well and within a few hours it is storing quite a bit of hea that i am unable to exhaust. Any help is appreciated.

Basically, do you think it would be a worthwhile investment? 3 cooltubes probably runs about 200 bucks maybe a little more, not much if i can get a few degrees lower temps, not to mention lumens if i can get the lights closer to the plants.

Sorry OP for the thread Hijacking.

If the hoods have intake ducting and a sheet of glass over the face of the lamp and the hoods still are getting hot, there's not enough airflow through them or there's too much restriction in the flow. The ducted cooling isn't doing the job- heat is being transferred into the room's airmass via the hot hood body. Mind you, cooltubes with insufficient blower capacity or poor throughflow will get hot, too. Sharp bends in the duct or long ducts will cause poor flow, especially when using an axial blower. Shorter ducts with wide sweeping bends work better.

I would not daisy chain hoods with 4" duct. Just too small, won't flow enough air to keep the heat moving with the air and out the duct instead of being trapped in the fixture and the heat leaving the fixture by convection.

Yes, I think a set of cooltubes will sort this out for you. Most all are 150mm (6") dia. If your duct is under 4m long and only has a couple of bends, a 150mm axial blower will do for 3 cooltubes in a row.

Al B. Fuct said:

If the hoods have intake ducting and a sheet of glass over the face of the lamp and the hoods still are getting hot, there's not enough airflow through them or there's too much restriction in the flow. The ducted cooling isn't doing the job- heat is being transferred into the room's airmass via the hot hood body. Mind you, cooltubes with insufficient blower capacity or poor throughflow will get hot, too. Sharp bends in the duct or long ducts will cause poor flow, especially when using an axial blower. Shorter ducts with wide sweeping bends work better.

I would not daisy chain hoods with 4" duct. Just too small, won't flow enough air to keep the heat moving with the air and out the duct instead of being trapped in the fixture and the heat leaving the fixture by convection.

Yes, I think a set of cooltubes will sort this out for you. Most all are 150mm (6") dia. If your duct is under 4m long and only has a couple of bends, a 150mm axial blower will do for 3 cooltubes in a row.

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Thanks Al,
What brand is the original "cooltube" made by? Or will any old generic remake work?

Pretty much, cooltubes is cooltubes. They're all just a 150mm dia tube with aluminium collars on the ends to facilitate fitting ducts. The cheapest is probably the best!

What brand is the original "cooltube" made by?

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Really good question. No clue whatsoever. I bet whomever that designer/mfr may be is kicking themselves for not aggressively pursuing patent rights worldwide.

The simplicity of cooltubes lends them to patent infringement. I know the guy who owns the worldwide patent rights for batwing reflectors. Half his income comes from settlements from pursuing infringers. If a commercially made batwing doesn't have his brand name on it, it's a fake.

Of course, making a copy of a patented device for your own use is permissible, surely to the dismay of patent holders. However, when you engage in manufacturing or commercial sale of a device based on a patented design without licensing from the patent owner, you're in the poo.