It would be great if everyone had a PAR meter. MARS hydro is not a cannabis company and often their suggestions are not the greatest. I assume they are telling you to increase CO2 at higher PPFD to keep the plant metabolism going in line with adding light. When your vegging 600 ppfd is great but the other issue you have is if you're following their charts they usually exaggerate their PPFD numbers. having a PAR meter actually helps to know how much photons are actually available. What is the rated efficiency and PPF of the light. If it's DLC listed go to the DLC website and get that info.
If your vegging have it at about 100% 12" from the top of the canopy. You should be good. Make sure you are constantly checking on them to see if they are uptaking the light and adjust your feed and water schedules to compensate. I usually never have the light closer than 12" how many plants you growing under this light?
If you look at the DLC specs he posted there, it is just under 800 PPF available from the light source. Depending on the coverage area from the light source and these numbers you usually would generally get about 580 PPFD at 12" and probably 320 PPFD at around 2 feet. At the beginning of vegging a good ratio for cannabis is about 500-600 PPFD at top of canopy. Now all lighting specs are put together differently and different fixtures have different methodologies of delivery so sometimes using numbers is not the best way to assess. PAR meters give you the real availability of photons on your plants. On a light with this output you might get a little me more coverage area at 18" but its only 4 plants so I'd suggest keeping it at 12" and playing around with dimming as adjustments. I don't know what the dimensions are for this light so don't know coverage area.
I bought a cheap led light meter to go by. with that you can gauge the lux #s I can then use those #'s to turn up or down my light...its working so far...in veg they can handle 25,000 lux but I cooked a my leaves in flower with it too high 55,000 and being under nourished. I'm now flowering at 35,000 1 week into flower with my SE3000 I'll bump it up as I go but I'll also increase the feed a bit as I do....GL...Canadian price here for mine
Have you been at this same number for a few days? how are your leaves looking...any fading or color change, burnt tips, curling leaves foxtails from being to close to the light?...they can handle far more but your environment and food needs to be on par with your numbers....I'm an amateur with the leds but your plants will tell you if they're happy or sad.....My plants finished great even under the higher power with fried leaves...if your leaves look good carry on as you are if not dial back... pics are a must if you want more help...
Hey guys, in the past we used lux or lumen meters to try and gauge how effective our lighting could be. But for cultivation its really not about lux/lumens, the measurement we really care about it photosynthetically active radiation(PAR). Its the amount of energy available to drive photosynthesis in a plant. All lux/lumens tell us is how bright a light source can be not how much energy we have. So when you guys are using these lumen app or meters they don't tell u much about the real driver behind the light you need. If you don't have a PAR meter to measure that, then using your manufacturers recommendations is your best bet. The one major issue in the market that we've observed is that manufactures often exaggerated their values by a lot in their marketing material. For example, your SE3000, states that at about 10" you can achieve a photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) of about 1100 umols/m2/s however if you go to their DLC listings( Design lights consortium - industry 3rd party certification) the PPF (photosynthetic photon flux) is only at about 800 so there is no way it could get that high if the source is lower than that. So you have to do your research if you don't have a PAR meter. I'm gonna try and post some articles on some lighting information in the learning section but you can check out some info on our Instagram and website Green Amber Canada
Sometimes its not the light itself that causes the issue. When we first started testing our lights 2 years ago we noticed VPD issues. There sometimes is a learning curve with new equipment.
Hey, just looking at your 1 sentence paragraph. I won't read that stuff. You need to put in some breaks. Space it out a bit to allow for easier reading.........1 sentence stuff with no breaks gets ignored by me......I'm old and I have a hard time reading endless text......just saying.....
