gogetta said:
can u guys tell me if im most likely to get more yield outta having 3000w over 36sq. ft. at 83.33w per sq. ft.....or 3000w over 52sq. ft. at 57.69w per sq. ft?
Um. There are alot of variables here besides wattage and square footage.
How far away from the canopy are your lights going to be?
How many plants are you planning on growing?
Lots of small plants or a few big plants?
How are you going to orient your lights? Vertically or horizontally?
KidTwist said:
light also dose not reflect off of leaves. naturla sunlight from what i have read is roughly 100 watts a sq foot on most of the plantet if not all of it.
Sunlight weighs in at a bit under
1400 watts/square meter at the upper regions of the stratosphere, so after it travels through the atmosphere, you are left with a bit more than 100watts/square foot.
This is reasonable, but a lowball estimate to be sure, particularly when PAR ratings are calculated in.
gogetta said:
is that good enough lumens for the 52 sq ft. area...whats a good number per sq. ft for lumens? thx. GoG
Lumens for humans, PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) for plants.
Lumens, as a rating, is directly tied to the spectral response of the human eye - not the photosynthetic response of plants.
For example, LED lamps produce just a few thousand lumens (3000 - 5000 lumens for the biggest panels) - but PAR ratings on -ahem- par with 600 and 1000w HPS bulbs.
To that end -
ugmjfarmer said:
You will get more yield by spacing the lights out over a larger area, but I advise to keep your 50w/sqft as the baseline. Anything over that is hard to utillize.
Hard to ultilize? Absolutely not.
Since we already covered that the sun kicks out more than 100watts/square foot with massive PAR ratings, the idea that artificial lighting, subject to the devestating impact of the inverse square law, (which, the sun, at 93 million miles away, is not subject to) would be somehow maxed out at an anemic 50w/sq ft, is really not accurate.
Cannabis will make use of light well upwards of 150w/square foot depending on other environmental factors.
ugmjfarmer said:
DoubleD's is still at 50w/sqft, he just grows big wide cylinders with lights on four sizes of a circle, and they are 3ft wide x 6ft tall plants x 3.14 = area of his grow per 4 lights. Three dimensions.
I'm not going to dig out DD's schematics, but methinks he's probably at something like 2.5 times that - like >100w/sq foot.
Anyway, DD's system is *alot* more than lamps.
Bottom line gogetta:
Any arrangement using 6x600w bulbs in that space would produce good results, but optimization here requirs alot more info than you've provided.
More information for a proper analysis here:
How are you orienting your lights and what are the dimensions of your grow room?
How many plants and what size plants?
If you are using reflectors, how big are they?
