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Mylar vs Matt White: The Truth About Grow Tent Reflectivity · Hydroponics Daily

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Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, your go-to podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, and today we're talking about grow tents,
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so not relevant if you're growing in a greenhouse or a polytunnel.
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We're particularly interested in the material that grow tents and grow rooms,
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indoor grow rooms, are made of.
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Particularly going to look at their reflectiveness and
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the color and some of the some of
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the parameters and variables are counterintuitive
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so some of the things you think would be the optimum for
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grow tent and grow room design is actually
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the opposite or certainly not the opposite but not
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what you think would be the best and then finally i'm
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going to go on to what i am using
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for the interior of our new grow room
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at utreema hq and it's
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a material and a color that
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has never been used for a grow room before and it's
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we're going to do that for a reason that i've only just found out
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about and i'll explain more at the end so
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yeah very very interesting it will be a one of
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its kind grow room so stay tuned
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to the very end so obviously you can have a grow tent that
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you put in a room or an area or you can actually convert
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the whole room itself into a grow
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room and there are advantages and disadvantages of both situations
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grow tents don't look as cool as
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a grow room on its own however grow tents are better for sort of retrofitting
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a domestic situation or a room that's already it might potentially be used for
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different uses in the future and you can hang things off the frame and you can
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exclude pests and disease. That's one of the best reasons for using a grow tent.
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Whereas a grow room, you maximize the space, but you potentially also have to
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have a way of excluding pests and diseases.
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Now, most grow tents are black,
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you do get some well what look
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like they're white or cream colored in on
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the website but actually often like a light brown when
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you when you see them in real life the most growth
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ends are thick woven polyester and they're
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black on the outside and that's to prevent light
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getting in so there you have they're rated from 600d to
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2000d for light tightness and durability
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i have no idea what the d stands
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for it's a capital d if you know let me know i'm not
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that bothered to be honest though basically a good
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grow light will keep all the light out and it will have vents
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to keep pests out
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and maybe mesh i some
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more some of the good grow tents
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let themselves down by not being completely sealed and have velcro like home
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box i really like the the color of the home boxes i like the interior of the
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home boxes but they let themselves down by having velcro so that pests and diseases
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can get in on the inside of a grow tent that's where the magic happens they have.
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Normally metallized pet film or mylar
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you'll often hear it referred to as mylar with a diamond emboss
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now the diamond is there to spread the light so that you
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don't get hot spots and light spot densities
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and so you have a more even growing system
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so in grow rooms uniformity of
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light is very important so the premium ones will have a diamond mylar brands
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like gorilla ac infinity bud box will have different will have a higher if the
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more more expensive the more reflective the interior is now you might think.
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Will you the optimum would be a mirror like just
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have a glass aquarium that is mirrored and then
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because that would you think would reflect the most amounts of light and
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then secondly you might think well a aquarium with silver or
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like aluminium foil would be the best option because that
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would reflect lots of light however that's not always the
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case and not all materials are the same
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so let's break it down reflective silver in inverted
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commas or aluminiumized PET or mylar it's
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not silver because it's not made of the element silver how reflective
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are they well they use vacuum deposits about aluminium on
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a clear film that's very reflective so 85 to
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95 percent of the light will be reflected it depends
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on the thickness the the amount of
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how thick the layer is the surface finish so you could get vendors quoting 90
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to 97 percent but whether there's lab data to back that up you know it's so
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80 to 90 reflective tracks with a lot of research it's almost mirror-like,
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but it can create spot hot spots that's why they use the diamonds in there,
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to provide to create waves and crinkles and so you don't get hot spots on your plants,
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less important now that you've got led lights that are coming from a more,
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from a much larger area of light whereas before it was a sodium lamp or a high
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pressure light and that was coming from one spot whereas now the LEDs are much larger.
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So very high reflective, they're standard intense, they're easy to wipe and clean.
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The disadvantage is that dust can degrade the performance and,
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The main disadvantage is they don't look as good as white-lined tents and white-lined grow rooms.
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And if you're taking pictures in your grow room and you want to impress people,
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whether that's customers or investors or fellow growers, you know,
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ego is a big thing amongst growers, then a white one just looks better for taking photos.
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Silver looks a bit amateur hour, it looks a
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bit like you're growing illegal crops in your loft sort
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of thing so often you might choose reflective white
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but it can reflective white be as reflective
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as silver surely not well you know
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you can in a grow room you can use sort of
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architectural matte white paint that uses titanium dioxide.
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Pigment and that delivers 85 to 88
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percent reflectance which is across visible spectrum
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where plants are photosynthesized which is.
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Near enough the same as the the aluminium
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the in inverted commas silver so and some
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specialist lab whites can hit 90 into
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the 90s so you can get right up there similar to
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what you would with the aluminium reflective one the other
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advantage is that because it's matte and it's not
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you're not going to get any hot spots reflecting concentrating
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on the leaves so that's one
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option you can you can buy premium white films as
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well that you can clad a grow room in
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and they they can have reflectance of up
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to 94 percent some of the brands there orca grow
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film 94 percent very high diffusion
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as well so most grow
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rooms grow tents will be metallized pets the
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aluminium ones but you will be able to get white ones as i
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said homebox have them i think bud box pro
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do white reflective as well so when i'm
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buying a new grow tent i always go for white if it's
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a grow tent other options you
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could look at there's some panda film which is
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another another trade name durable washable.
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And they quote around 90 reflective foil
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on which is a tough tough and easy
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to clean version quoted at 99 to 95
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percent with less creasing that's a premium choice for long longevity diamond
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where else have we got rigid white panels you could actually go for panels rather
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than film paint advantages of panels would be that um the larger grow rooms
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you potentially more you could you could um.
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Make it more look more like a food prep room i don't
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know what these are options maybe heat insulation or
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heat exclusion from panels perhaps i said about mirrors and kitchen foil sort
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of diy you'd find on reddit sort of things they're not good because they will
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exaggerate hot spots and their reflectiveness is not as good as you would think
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don't judge the human eye as being the,
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indicative of what is good at reflective and light levels especially because
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the human eye is optimised to green light and so whether it reflects as much
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in red light and blue light your eye is terrible at judging and your eye will
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adapt to the current lighting conditions so you always need to use a proper
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light sensor to measure any sort of light variable.
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In the future we might start to see nanotechnology being
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used to modify the lighting in agrarium
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or on the outside of a grow room a really premium grow tent could use specialist
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nano pigments to exclude light or nano pigments that reflect light even more
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so you could potentially get above 95 percent and those are some options if
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people were prepared to pay for it people would look at developing.
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Novel technology that could be used in grow tents to reflect even more light
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if it's something that was looked for and it was a premium so electricity costs
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are one of the biggest costs of growing hydroponically and so if you can reduce
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your electricity costs then you could potentially make growing indoors a lot
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more profitable and that is what everyone's looking for.
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Now on to the new eutrema grow room and what we're going to be cladding it with.
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Now it's a grow room it's not a grow tent and I wanted to use it a lot for recording
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podcasts and for recording videos so particularly with microgreens.
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So I wanted something that we could showcase the plants with and we can record and,
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myself and my colleagues could be in and around and would make
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really good youtube videos so i was thinking well we
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need a white background well because at the moment we've got in
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the room it's magnolia boring office colored walls
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and so i was thinking well we need to go white
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and then and my wife said have you
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actually researched what's the best color for
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filming in on youtube videos and it
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turns out that the best colors when you
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think about everything with youtube you think we always talk about getting the lighting
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right getting the lighting right you'll think well white light must be
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great because that reflects loads of light turns out you want your walls to
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be pretty as dark as possible like navy blue
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or dark gray they don't want recommend black because you have to actually it's
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really depressing to operate in a studio that is really black so i was thinking
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about this and i was thinking about you know growing these high value crops
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and then i thought about michelin star restaurants and how they have if you
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ever been to a michelin star.
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Restaurant, a Michelin recommended restaurant, they always have a plaque,
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a maroon red plaque outside.
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And then I thought, oh, maybe that's a good color for a YouTube.
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And I thought they would contrast really well with the green because they are
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opposites, aren't they?
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Spectrally red and green, they're opposite ends of the color spectrum.
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And so they bounce off each other and make the other one more vivid.
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So I thought a grow room that's really dark, a dark red,
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it would be really good for filming youtube
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videos with plants in so i've bought a
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big tub of really dark red
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matte paint and i've been painting my
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well i say i have i haven't been painting my wife has
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been painting our new grow room on the
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weekend this color and it looks very dramatic.
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She said she wouldn't want to work in there but i
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think it will make really good youtube videos it will
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not reflect light so the led lights
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the grow lights that are in there will have to work harder but hopefully
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it will make some eye-catching really good
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videos and that's really the aim of it
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because we're going to be using it for r&d and marketing purposes
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so it has to do both functions and
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so hopefully as well the beauty of having apparently dark
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colored lights is that they don't reflect on you and so you
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don't look shiny my big six head
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um i haven't got a forehead got six head won't
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be as shiny and look like a baldy nut
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i'll look very handsome in my maroon colored
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grow room so let me know what you think when the
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videos finally go up might have to be repaint the
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room eventually i think because um i don't think our landlord would be very
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happy with it's leaving it in a maroon red state either i don't know anyone
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else who's got a maroon red grow room i think it will be a one of its kind and
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who knows maybe the red to far red ratio will be improved and the plants will grow better.
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We haven't talked about red to far red ratios yet on Hydroponics Daily.
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It is a key environmental variable that affects plant growth.
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So I think we might talk about it next.
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I'll check out whether we have talked about it yet, but if we haven't,
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that could be a good topic for tomorrow's episode.
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In the meantime, thank you very much for listening. Thanks to everyone who has
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done an Apple podcast review. It's really helping us bump up the charts.
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And if you haven't yet, please do so. It
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means a lot to me because it means we can promote hydroponics and get hydroponics
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in the top 10 of the gardening podcasts on apple and then once we do that then
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there'll be loads more interest in hydroponics and hopefully we can get the
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sector back to where it was a few years ago thank you very much for listening until tomorrow goodbye.