using more watts in veg and reducing watts in flowering = better yield?

[glockdoc]

what u think lex, if i started with more then 150 w then dropped to 150 w during flowering, u think since the plants vegged on 200+w or so that they will be more likely to put out at least a g.p.w when they flower under only 150 w?

 

[LexLuthor]

If your judging gpw based on the 150w and you Top the plant and LST to get an even canopy also keep the light close I think you can definately get a gpw, give or take a few .1 Good luck I hope you get 2 gpw :D

 

[glockdoc]

yea based on the 150 is right.. top or fim'd. heres my plan im going to put a 150 hps and 80w of cfl in a 1.44 sq ft cab. ill have almost 250w total. i plan on putting 2 soil grown plants to fill up a 1.4 sq ft screen and i will have a 3rd thats going to be a 1 gallon aero grown plant used to fill up a 2.8 sq ft screen running vertically up the cab. coming flower time i will remover the 2 cfls that are hanging vert in the cab to leave the 150w to do its shit. if you maximize space potential i think it will be easier to obtain max yield...that and some advanced techniques.

 

[LexLuthor]

Sounds great, for your question I would Top the plant, after the 2 new sites get big enough I would FIM them and you would end up with a decent amount of tops. There are other ways of Topping and a thread by ttystick is in the Advanced Techniques section I will try to find the link. He basically explains a very good way of training a plant he says "when the plant is about 6"-8" trim bottom growth to get 4 main branches then Top them and when the new sites grow out 6" Top them again and tie down the branches as they grow to keep an even canopy". I did not quote him exactly but thats the main idea of his thread if I can't link it here I'll tell you where to look.

 

[LexLuthor]

I don't know how to link it here but its on the 2 page in the "Advanced Techniques & Problems" forum and the title of the thread is called "Topping and Training Tech for Yields and Quality" by ttystikk. Good luck and I think you can get a gpw with your setup and proper training.:D

 

[glockdoc]

thanks bro! as u can see in my avatar a nice fim job from my last grow in 09'. but ill def check out that thread.

 

[LexLuthor]

Yeah that is a nice job...I told you about the thread not cuz I think you can't do it but I thought it would help if you never Topped or FIM'd before, and more knowledge never hurt anybody LOL...Good luck and you should start a thread on your new grow

 

[squiggly]

great input guys, all of you! yes lex that is what i am basicly talking about. the title of thread says more yield but it should say without loosing any yield.
sup squiggly you following me or am i just in good threads?!? i got a question for you about this whole watt thing..dont you think we should be going by watts and such because the unviersal goal to reach is measured at grams per watt? i am about to get a 150w hps, and im thinking if i used 250 w during veg and dropped to 150 at flowering; yes the potential gpw i could yield is a 100 gram loss at 1gpw, but im starting to believe in doing this, there would be a greater chance of me yielding 150g to reach my 1gpw goal. hey i could be just over imaginative but it seems realistic to me.
what do all u guys think?!?!
how do you go about your grows squiggly? if lumens are the measurement of intensity do u go by lumens? do u aim for lets say 10,000 lumens per sq ft like the sun? that another thing i think about too. figure the sun puts out around 10,000L per sq ft. or 108,900 lumens per sq meter. a 600 and 1000w put out this number give or take some. do you think even thou the measurement are g.p.w that someone could use lumens as a measurement? think about it we dont use gpw outdoors i would hope. the sun is millions of watts but we dont yield millions of grams. just pounds. it really leads me to believe that the measurement of yield should be based on how much water the plant consumes...idk, too much to think about.

The GPW argument sort of underlies this idea of "hippy-science" that the community at-large undertakes.

Measuring yields in grams per watt is less useful in the same way and for the same reason as in the above argument. Plants don't grow according to wattages, and the same wattage used in different fixtures may produce physical quantities (which the plant does grow according to) which vary between the two.

As a "general case" scenario this can be useful to some extent--but this is not the most useful data we could be collecting. Using wattages does not afford the opportunity to do a 1:1 comparison of our different data (unless we have corrected for the different quantities produced by each fixtures).

While the GPW figures can be useful, we are already having to correct for the multiple differences in our environments, our strains, light cycles, nut schedules, etc. There are many confounding variables--and doing it this way only introduces one more.

I'm, in a sense, trying to get the community to do better science. If this stuff were corn we could rely on scientists to do it for us--but it's not, and we can't. So we need to ascend to their level, rather than bring the understanding (and the results) down to a level we can deal with. The only point I'm trying to make here is that scientists actually aren't that special. Most of what I learned/am learning in school can be read in a book. The degree is only a certification that makes it cheaper to insure me if I'm working with fuming sulfuric acid or something like that. If it weren't for the insurance I'd be an excellent hire at any chemical plant in the world right now, but as it stands the masters is a bit better in that department.

Same goes for botanists. There's no reason we can't adapt to their methods and get much better results.

If we can get the whole community to come over to this way of thinking--there is no reason we can't crowdsource MJ research that would've cost 100million to complete for .01% of the cost and 1% of the work (from each of us).

 

[Aerojoe]

Whilst I do agree w/ squiggly on scientific methods could be better amongst the farmers, and I myself love scientific papers, but as far as the goal of getting this info to be most useful to the people of this website your methods maybe too much and can not be reproduced by the average person as I don't have access to expensive testing equipment. If OP were to say I had this wattage w/ this ballast/bulb/hood I can come close to replicating his setup, where as if you said you need this amount of lumens/density of light, The OP/myself/other farmers simply would not be able to replicate this due to lack of expensive equipment. It's more likely for me to have similar grow equipment than it is that we even have expensive testing equipment that is unnecessary for a successful grow. In this case I'd rather know simple things I can deduce info from(bulb/ballast/hood=lumens, intensity, spectrum/wattage/spread) rather than complicated things that are useless to me w/ my current testing equipment.
With that said I'd love to see you post your results w/ the better testing equipment. Although I'd like to see it one day, I think it's wishful thinking for experiments on the forums to ever make it as scientific papers. How would you file your scientific research in the U.S. for something deemed illegal?

 

[ttystikk]

Hey Glockdoc! You're on a subject near and dear to my heart; that is, how to grow as much usable product as possible while using the least watts.

Thanks to lex0415 for mentioning my thread on topping for better yields, I'm glad it's helping people out! Here's the link: Topping and Training Tech for Yields and Quality

Here's another thread where I go into some depth about a technology I'm working on to reduce overall wattage for a given result: Built my own light rotator- wanna see?

Now, because I AM trying to meet a more rigorous academic standard for the data collected pursuant to my experiments, I need to consult with Squiggly to ensure that A. I am measuring what I think I'm measuring, and B. that I'm doing it in a quantifiable way so that others can reasonably expect to replicate my results.

Moving on; whazzap is well known on this site as an authority on lighting, as he is an employee at Gavita. He has said on many occasions that the way to increase yields is to increase lighting and that time is an important factor; keeping in mind that if you run your veg. for 18 hours of every 24, then when you flip to flower, you're already losing 33% of the total light to the plants, simply because they're only getting light for 2/3 as much time. Hence his recommendation (accepted industrywide, I might add) to increase lighting intensity in flower to compensate.

On to another issue; 'lumens are for humans'. Lumens, or lux, is not a good lighting intensity standard, as this measurement is based on the human eye's sensitivity to light; we see yellow and green best, where plants definitely do not. Hence, it would be better to use PAR. Here's what Gavita themselves have to say on the subject:

Lux vs PAR

What is the best unit for light, used for plant growth?

Most lighting products are designed for the use of people. These products will use the term lumen and Lux. The term Lux comes from the photometry based on the average sensitivity of the human eye. The maximum sensitivity is around 555 nm (yellow light) and decreases with longer (red) and shorter (blue) wavelengths.

In practice, often still the term Lux is used.But does this apply to today's greenhouse? Plants have a different sensitivity to light of different wavelengths. In green plants, the sensitivity to red light is highest and green the lowest. Therefore, the term Lux is not right for the exposure of green plants. Light sources can be considered as sources of energy particles, which are called photons or light quants.

Why is the term micromoles (μmol) used in the case to specify lamps?

Research shows that the growth of plants is determined by the number of photons between 400 and 700 nm that they absorb. This is called the Photo Synthetic Photon Flux (PPF). The higher the PPF value per watt, the more efficient the light source is for plant growth.

Grow light is an important factor for many breeding plants. Photosynthesis and ... growth must be balanced to achieve optimum production.

When investing in assimilation lighting consider the 3 following factors; added grow light, the quality of light and the lighting installation heating temperature.

Since the end of 2004 lamps have been specified in μmol. All guarantees of lamps are issued in μmol values.

This is marked with the short term PAR and is the only reliable measure to indicate whether a lamp suitable for photosynthesis.

The higher the PAR values of the lamp, the more efficient the lamp. Therefore we specify for all grow lamps the PAR value, expressed in micromole photons per second (μmol / s).
What is a micromole (μmol)?

"Micromole" is a collective term for a certain number of light particles called photons.
Micro (μ) = 10-6 and mol = 6.02214 x 10 ² ³ photons (Avogadro number).

Micromole is 6.02214 × 10 ² ³ x 10^-6 = 10 ^17 photons. One micromole = 602,214,000,000,000,000 photons or light particles.
Which light spectrum gives optimal growth?

This is very dependent on the application and the crop that is grown. The greatest efficiency of photosynthesis is in the wavelength between 600 and 630 nm (orange area). For some crops it is important to use blue light spectra to avoid the plant stretching. Overall, the proportion of blue in natural day light is enough to this kind of stretching. That is the reason to why grow light manufacturers strive to imitate the natural sun light. When growing without day light (e.g. when it comes to climate rooms or multiple layers cultivation) a light source selected with a higher proportion of blue, such as a metal halide lamp (HPI-T or HQI-BT) is highly recommendable.

 

[ttystikk]

Another way to reduce the total expenditure of watts during your flowering cycle is to slowly shorten your daylight times. For instance, if you start flowering with 12 on and 12 off, you could run week 2 in flower with 11.75 hours on, and 12.25 off. Week 3 could be 11.5 on and 12.5 off, and so on, until you reach week 8, which would be 10 hours on and 14 off. This has several advantages, including the fact that you're replicating the shortening of days at the end of the growing season, and that you're not doing anything too drastic which might stress the plants and cause problems- like hermaphroditism.

I'm currently (informally!) experimenting with this approach, myself. So far, it seems to be working and I'll report back what I observe as time goes on and the days get shorter.

 

[LexLuthor]

Whilst I do agree w/ squiggly on scientific methods could be better amongst the farmers, and I myself love scientific papers, but as far as the goal of getting this info to be most useful to the people of this website your methods maybe too much and can not be reproduced by the average person as I don't have access to expensive testing equipment. If OP were to say I had this wattage w/ this ballast/bulb/hood I can come close to replicating his setup, where as if you said you need this amount of lumens/density of light, The OP/myself/other farmers simply would not be able to replicate this due to lack of expensive equipment. It's more likely for me to have similar grow equipment than it is that we similar expensive testing equipment that is unnecessary for a successful grow. In this case I'd rather know simple things I can deduce info from(bulb/ballast/hood=lumens, intensity, spectrum/wattage/spread) rather than complicated things that are useless to me w/ my current testing equipment.

Hahaa thank God somebody understands my point of view LOL. Its almost near impossible to get hundreds of thousands of growers to go by photon density when most of us can't do it. Lots of growers get fantastic results goin by watts as in relation to intensity and thats what people understand. Squiggly you ARE correct from a scientific viewpoint but consider when people are doin closet grows their easiest way of knowing how powerful a light is by watts. I also understand plants DO NOT use watts to grow but watts produce the light that plants use. Therefore the more watts a light has then the more light it produces, so it's easy to estimate intensity based on watts.

 

[ttystikk]

Whilst I do agree w/ squiggly on scientific methods could be better amongst the farmers, and I myself love scientific papers, but as far as the goal of getting this info to be most useful to the people of this website your methods maybe too much and can not be reproduced by the average person as I don't have access to expensive testing equipment. If OP were to say I had this wattage w/ this ballast/bulb/hood I can come close to replicating his setup, where as if you said you need this amount of lumens/density of light, The OP/myself/other farmers simply would not be able to replicate this due to lack of expensive equipment. It's more likely for me to have similar grow equipment than it is that we even have expensive testing equipment that is unnecessary for a successful grow. In this case I'd rather know simple things I can deduce info from(bulb/ballast/hood=lumens, intensity, spectrum/wattage/spread) rather than complicated things that are useless to me w/ my current testing equipment.
With that said I'd love to see you post your results w/ the better testing equipment. Although I'd like to see it one day, I think it's wishful thinking for experiments on the forums to ever make it as scientific papers. How would you file your scientific research in the U.S. for something deemed illegal?

Ill bet a nug of my finest against yours that the 'expensive equipment' he's referring to is actually... a light meter. A basic one can be had for $20, and even really good ones used in photography and science generally aren't more than a few hundred. I doubt that the scientific measurements required here would need a high end unit.

I happen to agree with Squiggly that we could all be at least a bit more rigorous in our discussions of experiments and findings. At the very least, we should mention what sort of bulb and reflector we're using as well as wattage, AND that we consistently discuss the exact distances we're keeping those lights from the growing surface, or canopy. This would give someone trying to replicate our results at least a fighting chance of being able to match our setup.

 

[glockdoc]

ive read that 3000k puts out the best par. how come we all dont use it?!? that 400 in my avatar was a conversion mh bulb that was 3000k and i believe it worked wonders.
what do u think ttystick if i was to use "alot" of watts during veg and reduce during flowering idea?!

 

[Aerojoe]

Ill bet a nug of my finest against yours that the 'expensive equipment' he's referring to is actually... a light meter. A basic one can be had for $20, and even really good ones used in photography and science generally aren't more than a few hundred. I doubt that the scientific measurements required here would need a high end unit.

I happen to agree with Squiggly that we could all be at least a bit more rigorous in our discussions of experiments and findings. At the very least, we should mention what sort of bulb and reflector we're using as well as wattage, AND that we consistently discuss the exact distances we're keeping those lights from the growing surface, or canopy. This would give someone trying to replicate our results at least a fighting chance of being able to match our setup.

I don't disagree on that we could do a better job of science, like I said earlier I love scientific method/papers, I disagreed that it would be the best way to get useful info to more of the people on this site, because a lot of us don't have access to expensive testing equipment.

I'll take you up on that bet, lol. I have a 20 dollar light meter, it measures in foot candles, I don't need a light meter to tell me it's brighter directly under my bulb than to the side of the light, biggest waste of money ever. My friend bought it for me as a bday present. I need a meter that reads par/ppfd/spectrum in order to reproduce experiment that accurately. My current light meter just tells me how bright something is according to my own eyes(lumens), otherwise you won't know what type of light generated those lumens? I'm not saying don't be scientific, what I'm saying is be scientific but also add in real world info for the majority of the site, in this case wattage/bulb/ballast in addition instead of just lumens/par/spectrum/ppfd. I have the same philosophy towards organic/synthetic, why use just one? when you can use both? why limit yourself?

 

[ttystikk]

ive read that 3000k puts out the best par. how come we all dont use it?!? that 400 in my avatar was a conversion mh bulb that was 3000k and i believe it worked wonders.
what do u think ttystick if i was to use "alot" of watts during veg and reduce during flowering idea?!

The reasons include the fact that plants like different spectra at different points in their life cycle, and that of course different plants also like different spectra. Our favorite even shows quite a bit of variety in its preferences from one strain to another.

A 3000 kelvin bulb is a good one, but it's far from the only one you'll ever need. Even the LEP plasma bulbs aren't recommended as the only indoor light source, and their spectrum is very wide! Some growers get a lil ridiculous with this, using up to 4 different types of bulbs to match the light spectra to their plants... I think two are fine; a good MH like you have, and a good HPS for the majority of flower. I'm currently in the midst of trying something a bit different; I'm combining LED with HPS in my veg zone. I'm thinking this will give the power and spectral breadth of HPS, along with the specific wavelengths that LEDs provide. Again, we'll see how well this approach works.

I guess this discussion boils down to what 'a lot' of watts is? There is a point with any plant beyond which additional light won't stimulate it to grow faster, and that's in ideal conditions. This point is called 'light saturation.' If any part of the plant's needs is underfed, that light saturation point drops, much like the weakest link in a chain. I'm pretty sure that 100w/sq ft is going to be too much, 70 is probably a better working maximum.

At this point, I would suggest that if you want to go forward with an experiment with lower light quantity, try doing it with shorter day cycles as discussed above rather than lower intensity. Most farmers report loose, fluffy flowers and larfy growth when the plants get insufficient light.

More reading on grams per watt: how 2 get gram per watt

 

[squiggly]

A basic one can be had for $20.

^That

I suggest that you guys are really making a mountain out of a mole hill when it comes to the difficulty of using these measurements rather than wattage. To my mind this is just making it harder on yourself (to use wattages) if you actually give a crap about getting the right answer.

If you think about it getting the right answer in this case is probably a helluva lot more profitable than avoiding a $20 expenditure and maybe 15-30 minutes of reading to see how to measure light effectively for botany.

Again the point I'm making is that the community has convinced itself that doing proper science is too hard or expensive when that really couldn't be further from the truth when it comes to botany.

Most of the quantities you need to measure you can measure with equipment which costs under $150 for all of it (and that's for even some of the more obscure measurements).

The only real expensive thing in this science is all of the tissue culture stuff--which of course I don't expect us as a community to get into.

These other things though mostly boil down to laziness and/or resistance to change.

Change is good, especially when it's better. You've all already agreed that from a scientific standpoint I make good sense. Now if we want to get into a value judgment about that fact over $20 I suppose that's valid depending on your various financial situations--but it doesn't seem like a huge stretch given the general cost of this hobby of ours.

 

[LexLuthor]

When you look at a bulb to purchase the box gives you all the info you need: watts, lumens, spectrum. I believe the people that made these grow products (bulbs for example) already took into account everything you are talking about. So I don't necesarily have to go by photons or light intensity. They are already made for optimum use as grow lights the only major diference is watts, so I stand by what I said before the more watts a bulb has the more intense the light is and if thats not true then tell me why somebody can get 15 oz. dry weight with a 600w HPS and the same person under similar conditions gets 24 oz. with a 1000w.

 

[squiggly]

It's true but as a said, the increase/decrease is not a constant value for every fixture and bulb. Furthermore you're talking about running less watts through a bulb which is normally intended to support higher wattage correct? This further confounds the measurement as every system may not respond to this in the same way.

If the value is not a constant--it must be corrected for. Period. That is scientific analysis 101.

As I've said yes, your arguments will fall in line with the increase/decrease you expect from higher/lower wattage--but that is only because this behavior follows a trend--a trend does not fully describe a system, it only discusses what the system tends to.

So yes, your results will match up with what you expect--but you are not getting a finite measurement and, perhaps most importantly, your results won't tell us anything definitive. That doesn't mean it'd be a bad experiment--I want to emphasize that.

I'm not trying to attack the practicality of this, and I do believe that doing it can be helpful for you personally, or a few other guys who do their own experimentation. However, if you do it in a meticulous (and not all that difficult or expensive) way, you can essentially write a guide for every cultivator from now to infinity. That's the reward for really nailing something down, you get a general case--something that applies to everything.

You get E=mc^2 rather than umm if we blow up some mass from a nucleus it makes energy. Yes that describes the trend--but it doesn't allow us to make meaningful and accurate predictions. My only point is to suggest that such accurate predictions are within our grasp here.

 

[Crysmatic]

Relying on bulb spectrum, wattage, initial lumens vs mean lumens, ballast type, lamp distance, age of the bulb, hood etc is *complicated*. When you measure the real thing, light flux, all those seeming "variables" disappear. You just pop the light meter under your light, and you instantly have ONE metric that can be compared apples to apples. Patterns become visible in the observations when you look for, and measure, the proper factor. It's like everyone with different nute pens just throwing out ppm numbers. Ignoring any accuracy issues, you have to deal with the correction factors from various makers. Using EC protects us from any miscommunication. Simple. Effective. It's better than saying ymmv, or all grow rooms are different :rolleyes:

I agree that scientific method is not an option. I believe that people who are not equipped or skilled to run a proper test, shouldn't. There's no reason to waste anyone's time with bad or useless information. Janis allegedly had a PhD consult on his grow. I've read about greenhouse operators for legal crops who consult for pot grows. It seems that cannabis is, in fact, a plant. It has specific needs (and not that different, really), and if you know how to measure and control the proper factors, you will optimise your grow. There's no new information here. Why are we even discussing "experiments"? What is a lay man going to discover with a poor experiment, that researchers already haven't? If a grower can't discern what is good info, or refuses to believe it, that's another matter. Believe the pros.

Just thinking about it, if light is the fuel for manufacturing plant mass, then more light will yield more. It's not like you can create some kind of momentum by giving vegging plants lots of light, then you can just take it away and still have them produce. Less light in veg, and more light during the flower stage makes more sense to me - all other variables being constant. I'm a firm believer in maximum light, at all stages of growth.

Say you have a great grow with the 150 w and yield 150 g (1 gpw), vs a decent grow yielding 175 g with a 250 w (0.7 gpw). Why would you give up yield to gain a little gpw? We don't grow for a silly metric, we grow for grams of pot. however, we can use gpw as an indicator that we don't have our environment optimised, and that we can potentially yield more.

my .02