LED-elight: AutoPot Trials With Telos

If you like clerical conventions couched in ecclesiastical administrative norms you’ll love the origins of the place name ‘County Durham’. If you like horticultural innovation, cutting edge lighting solutions, and the promise of spectacular results you’ll also find County Durham has plenty to offer, as the home of Telos Lighting.

We’ve been well impressed by the Telos fixtures that we’ve run at AutoPot HQ and thought it high time we returned the favour by sending a system north. Besides, what better way to test the effectiveness of our systems than in the hands of a fellow innovator! Pushing our combined experience of lighting functionality with AutoPot to a new level, Telos are running trials using their LEDs with an 8Pot XL System. Eager to learn more we got up to speed with developments at Telos HQ.

Nothing to do with backwards pugilism, unboxing is apparently all the rage these days. Gladly, Kieran from Telos took us through their first impressions of the system for a refreshing outside perspective on what customers make of AutoPot on arrival. Subject to praise was the ‘discreet and secure packaging’ with the overall quality of contents therein rated ‘very good’. Similarly appreciated was the AQUAvalve5; ‘very nice design and the grey contrasts nicely with the black pots!’

Setup ensued. By Kieran’s reckoning ‘the 8Pot XL setup with the FlexiTank took around an hour to get finished, the most difficult part was cutting the pipework (measure twice cut once!), but overall, anyone with the most basic DIY skills shouldn’t have a problem.’

Telos have set the system up in a 2.4 m tent with two top-of-the-line 10Pro Mesh LEDs. In terms of aesthetics Kieran reports that, ‘in the tent the feed system has a professional, minimal design…and the blue pipe work of the system marries up very well with the Bluetooth mode on our Telos units.’

Into the pots will go a variety of substrate types, predominantly soil or coco-based. Telos plan to run the Shogun nutrient range through the 8Pot XL’s 16mm / 1/2” and 9mm / 3/8” pipework and fittings to a selection of chillies. The 10Pro Mesh fixtures providing the lighting for these plants are very interesting prospects indeed.

They boast some really nice Osram and Samsung LED diodes in red and white respectively. Through clever use of secondary optics Telos claim to have maximised the spread and uniformity of light patterns and eliminated the occurrence of hotspots, and it’s fair to say that on test we’ve always found Telos lights to be highly conducive to regular, optimised growth.

The groundbreaking virtue of the Pro10 Mesh is the built-in, Bluetooth controllable ballast. Within your encrypted Bluetooth Mesh network you can control anything up to thousands of lights remotely. Customisation doesn’t end there. Mesh allows ‘precise PPFTM control of the light output, as well as on/off scheduling and includes an integrated sunrise and sunset mode. Multiple lights can be grouped within the app and separate schedules and PPF levels applied to different groups.’ Verily it is a brave new world!

Normally Telos would recommend three such lights for a tent this size but will start out with two to see assess whether that is truly necessary with our systems. The benefits of this experience are that everyone gets to assess exactly how growing equipment interacts, how to optimise products, and how to shape specific guidance for customers. We very much look forward to seeing their progress which we’ll update here in the coming months. You can also get an informative and most attractive look at modern LED lighting via telos.lighting on Insta.