my plants

[cyberquest]

here are some more pics of the HPS ladies.

pic 1-3 top colas on some of the plants
pic4-5 newly disovered purple hair plant!!
pic6 close up of our oldest plant that is very close to harvest


we just now discovered the purple hair plant becuase under the HPS light it does not appear purple at all. this was the first time we brought them out of the closet and into the kitchen for some different lights. looks pretty tasty, wish i knew what strain it was!

 

[Sticky_Budz]

Damn cyber everything is looking sweet there man. love the purple hairs. cant wait to see your harvest man good luck and if u need any help smoking those just holla

 

[Brouli]

how ya doin man those stripers look sweet you should be punish for publishing pornograpfy on this forum
man ** on the side they look sweet and awesome

 

[theyorker]

here are some more pics of the HPS ladies.

pic 1-3 top colas on some of the plants
pic4-5 newly disovered purple hair plant!!
pic6 close up of our oldest plant that is very close to harvest


we just now discovered the purple hair plant becuase under the HPS light it does not appear purple at all. this was the first time we brought them out of the closet and into the kitchen for some different lights. looks pretty tasty, wish i knew what strain it was!

The purple looks awesome man. I'm noticing that there are ALOT of yellow fan leaves. Hmmmm...Hey FP, I wonder if that is happening in his flouro room?:farm: The buds are looking tasty Cyber. Later.

 

[cyberquest]

the yellow leaves are combination nute burn and them just sucking life from themselves to produe the buds. it was the fish fert i gave them that burnt them, i only gave them a half dose, i never corrected the problem by flushing them or anything. i havent seen signs of the shultz 10-15-10 burning them at all and we are almost up to a full dose.

 

[offgrid]

wheee! i'm really curious as to how well your plants do under the CFLs. when i get back to the states, i want to pursue this hobby a little more diligently; however, it will most likely have to be a stealth operation. if your results show that CFLs are at least as good as HPS with less space requirements, well then you've made a believer out of me.

i'm currently rocking the CFLs-of-luv right now, but i always look with envy at the MASSIVE buds under HPS. true, i have 4 bulbs (two cool and two warm) within an inch of the plant, as well as a round ceiling fluoro, but it doesn't seem to be as effective. i'm pressed for time as well, so i can't appease the god of chronos. at any rate, i'll construct a proper box when i get back to the states, and your experiment is appreciated!

(check out the ghetto-fabulous low-tech hydroponic watering system i got!)

 

[cyberquest]

yes i am saying that so far the CFL's in my book are hanging with the HPS pretty well, expecially given how much lower the lumens are in that room. the cfl room is lacking by 30,000 lumens of lights easy, and they are still producing nice buds just like the hps light. now this time around i dont expect to see the CFL buds be as big as the HPS ones, but the next batch we are going to up the lumens in the CFL room to be compairable to the HPS and then we will see the real effects.

i am glad my post is given others hope for their low buget grows. the one thing about cfls is that you can keep adding to your setup, if alot of you are like me i live paycheck to paycheck pretty much. so buying a couple bulbs a week was about all i could manage, then i decided to sell one of my cars and i bought the HPS light and made the CFL room.

this is how my grow started man, nothing fancy just stuff i could by at the time, the smaller the space the less light is needed. but the small space will only work so long.

 

[KADE]

At the end of the day lumens is all that matters... hps light has a better canopy penetration value.

It is also cheaper to run HPS then CFLs, flouros, or MH.

 

[Fretless]

I am not a CFL. I am the Walrus.

 

[Fretless]

Ok but seriously: after a long hiatus in botany merit badge earning, I have returned. Germinated a bunch of Tibetan Tomato seeds, and a few weeks later, oh ****, here we go again. In short-term desperation, I said, aha! 42 watt CFL's that crank out 2600 lumies ~ basically a 4 foot tube crammed into the size of a light bulb. They have worked amazingly well, but only for a few plants. I estimate it would take 20 to 30 of these little wonder bulbs to light all of my tomatoes, at which point the cost would be right up there in HID-land. There would be, I am sure far better coverage with so many points of light, but let us not teeter on the edge of quoting CIA chiefs-turned-Presidents. Alas, I have made sacriledge, and only on my 3rd post.
So, I dunno, if you have only 2 or 3 small females, you could use 6-10 42 watt CFL's and probably do ok. Much less efficient from an energy standpoint compared to HPS, but much less money up front, especially when you figure in cooling. Without cooling, CFL might be better. As old Owen used to say, the proof is in the pudding.
What is important here, is that you grow. I don't know what you people are growing, but I likes Tomatoes, Tibetan Tomatoes. I puts them in me salad.

 

[offgrid]

i like bearfootbob...he has a great writing style ^_^

but i'm going to have to agree with him. so far on my one little female, barely 6" tall, i have 4 CFLs and a big round tube thingie, and i swear...this is almost too inefficient for ONE plant, let alone the six you can do with one 400 watt HPS. it just seems silly, and the only reason why i'm doing it is because i'm not in this country long enough to justify buying a proper lighting system.

cyberquest:
yeah, nice humble beginnings...it's like the great american story, only with plants ^_^ it's actually pretty ingenious that you were able to set up such a light efficient system. unfortunately, the bigger the plant gets, the less efficient the system becomes. ultimately it seems as if you're going to outstrip the ability of CFLs to illuminate and penetrate the whole plant the way HPS can do. i'm still terribly jealous because you have kickass plants compared to my pansy barely-developed japanese woman, but that's ok...you're sharing the knowledge, and information wants to be free. besides, envy is the truest form of compliment

peace
offgrid

 

[frankpeterson]

Hey cyberquest damn those little purple hairs look real good. Yorker big yellow fan leaves cause the hps is taking all the juice and its going into those fat purple buds. LOL. But seriously cyberquest they look outstanding and at one point just for a second we wanted to flying axe kick out hps. After a bowl or so everything returned to normal. This makes up want to compare a cfl setup like that to an MH in vedge. Good job cyberquest.

HID 4 LIFE

 

[Dada]

I don't know what the problem is if you have only one plant and decent CFLs. The pics below are of my three girls and they were completely vegged under CFLs except for the last week I added my 400w HPS. I did this because I am going to flower using the HPS. The addition of the HPS did not change much -- the plants were already this lush and healthy while on the CFLs. They are one day older than five weeks. All have alternating nodes and all have shown their sex. They are so thick and lush that you have to really work to get in to take a look at the stems, which are also very thick and strong. My point is that if you are not seeing good results in veg, maybe you are using the wrong spectrum of CFLs or there is another problem like a nute or pH issue.

 

[frankpeterson]

Your guys CFL's did better than hour hps during the vedge state, hands down.

 

[Dada]

I think one of the reasons they veg so well under CFLs is because you can get the lights like 1 1/2" to 2" away so there is almost no stretch. When my plants were young, new nodes were coming just 3/16" above the previous node. So it was just node after node after node. And it isn't just the strain of the plants. The one in the rear left is a Northern Light #5 X Big Bud. The other two (one is just to the right of the NLxBB, though you can barely see the separation between the two plants) are White Widow. The WW are shorter than the NLxBB, and that is because of the different strains. All in all, I can't imagine vegging without CFLs. These plants go into flower today, BTW.

 

[cyberquest]

dada thats the way mine are, the nodes were so close together there almost wasnt even spaces of branch between them. it wasnt till they were switched to flower that they showed any signs of stretching. and even then it wasnt bad at all.

i dont think the cfls will be to far off the production levels of the HPS, given we up lumens some more. BUT right now the TOTAL WATTS is 312W in the cfl room, thats only 88W away from the power the HPS uses. now adding about 4 more bulbs will make the WATTAGE equal, but the lumens will be way short.

it would take 33 26w 1600 lumens bulbs to produce the same amount of light, thats a whopping 858W of power to run them too. this is where the HPS bulbs "claim" they are more efficent, to produce the same amount of lumens it would cost more to do it with cfls. BUT if anyone has read my "cfl lighting 101" topic lumens are a measurement of light for our eyes set by the lighting industry.

and remember that hps is loosing half its efficency cause its over 12in away from the plants. so lets say they only really see 26,500 of that, now can i make the cfl room produce 26,500 lumens at around the same cost? YOU BET, by adding only 6 more lights to my setup, which would only be the addition of one more light bar.

i want to try some "scrogging" i think its called, where you let the plants grow up into chicken wire or something similar. i think this would work awsome for the way my light bars are setup and would let all the buds be right up beside the light. i think i would see some great affects.



858 52,800 33

 

[cyberquest]

this is one of the buds in the CFL room, the ones up there have a ton more crystals on them. we just moved one of the plants down to the HPS room from the CFL room, its the best looking plant up there and is starting to brown hair already, we wanted to give it a little time under the HPS cause it looks soooooo good, screw the exeriment with this one plant i want the buds to get bigger before harvest.

 

[theyorker]

dada thats the way mine are, the nodes were so close together there almost wasnt even spaces of branch between them. it wasnt till they were switched to flower that they showed any signs of stretching. and even then it wasnt bad at all.

i dont think the cfls will be to far off the production levels of the HPS, given we up lumens some more. BUT right now the TOTAL WATTS is 312W in the cfl room, thats only 88W away from the power the HPS uses. now adding about 4 more bulbs will make the WATTAGE equal, but the lumens will be way short.

it would take 33 26w 1600 lumens bulbs to produce the same amount of light, thats a whopping 858W of power to run them too. this is where the HPS bulbs "claim" they are more efficent, to produce the same amount of lumens it would cost more to do it with cfls. BUT if anyone has read my "cfl lighting 101" topic lumens are a measurement of light for our eyes set by the lighting industry.

and remember that hps is loosing half its efficency cause its over 12in away from the plants. so lets say they only really see 26,500 of that, now can i make the cfl room produce 26,500 lumens at around the same cost? YOU BET, by adding only 6 more lights to my setup, which would only be the addition of one more light bar.

i want to try some "scrogging" i think its called, where you let the plants grow up into chicken wire or something similar. i think this would work awsome for the way my light bars are setup and would let all the buds be right up beside the light. i think i would see some great affects.

Dang Cyber the bud looks tasty! Why are you moving it to the HPS when it is doing so well under the CFL?

Gentlemen, I think you are missing one of the true benefits of going with flourescent. Side lighting. My flower chamber has 640 watts of T12 tubes. Instead of "points of light" there are 32 24 inch "bars of light" and they are mounted vertically on my cabinet walls and horizontally over the canopy. By putting mylar film behind the bulbs, it disperses the light really well and there is the same amount of light hitting the bottom of the plant as there is hitting the canopy. With HID not only is your light 12 - 16 inches away from the plant, it is only one point of light, granted on heck of a bright point. My thinking is the more you can spread the light out the more shade spots can be eliminated.

Cyber I'm doing a White Widow LST journal and I will be doing a screen of green when I flower the plants in 12 - 14 weeks. I hope you check it out. Later.

 

[Fretless]

Now, are you talking air-cooled or open 400 watt HPS? I'm not even thinking of using an HPS without its own exhaust.

 

[cyberquest]

my hps is just an open one.