Good question, I can't speak for the owner of those beauties but
I scrog my cfl setup. I only have 1 res, scrog screen is setup to stand on the lid (so I can remove/clean). Seems to be the best use of my small cab. The only problem that I have that my1952 doesn't have is his lights are being more fully utilized because his plants are getting hit from all angles. In the scrog anything below the canopy is starved for light, as well as half the light from the bulb will be shooting to the top of the room. thus wasted.

He may change his setup to a Scrog, but then again I may be 86ing my scrog next go around.

Floger got here ten months before I did and in that time he told me of many of those he was corresponding with. He spoke highly of those that offer advice and known facts to newbies. Then he outed me and I spoke up. Wouldn’t ya know I’d pick an Old Hand friend of Floger’s to have a debate with, and me, just a Stranger. Then someone covered his back… and yes, Sir. Ganga did strike a nerve. Statements such as “Now this is a mock, I have forgot more than you know and that’s why you don’t understand. Not really because its true.” make the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I responded, with some very cocky remarks tossed in. For this I apologize. Sir, you know nothing about me, what knowledge I have amassed, where I live, nothing. I compared the climate conditions in your country to the climate conditions where I live and the assumed difference in ancillary equipment costs required for total operation for you would be less (everything else being equal). I should not have assumed it was cooler where you are than where I am. For this, I apologize.

This grow has been a useful experiment for me and has proven fairly productive. I will keep it going for now but I am cutting back from the three strains to one. I have a green house under construction along with solar panels (hot air) for extra heat during the winter. I may try aquaculture in this house to grow veggies and fish. Maybe Floger will post some updated photos of everything for those interested if I can find him. But for now…

I’m back. I’ve taken some time off to cool my heels and do more reading/research, and not just on pot, but how to build a soda/beer can solar panel (made/drank all the parts, just needs to be assembled) and a geodesic dome greenhouse (assembled, working on the cover). I’ve had the Marijuana Horticulture The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible (2006) for some time now and it is my go to for most info. Floger loaned me Ed Rosenthal’s Marijuana Grower’s Handbook (2010) and last night a friend gave me High Times Cultivation Tips (1997). None of these are very up to date as far as CFLs go much less LEDs, and the High Times only discusses florescent tubes (LOL). I need to go to the bookstore. We’ve come a long way in fifteen years!

I’m glad that there is still interest in my little 2’ X 6’ closet.

To those that think I should go SOG, I can’t for two reasons.

First, as stated earlier, I take two plants out every two weeks and add two veggies to flower every two weeks. The plant pairs are all at different heights and I adjust my CFLs accordingly. I also make use of the whole plant, obtaining buds from top to bottom, maybe not the biggest top colas that I could get, but good-sized top, middle and bottom buds. (Twelve points of light help out here.)

Second, my spouse and friends would go through a SOG harvest before another is ready. Pace yourselves people I’m just experimenting here, one plant a week, every week.

840 stated, “In getting things together (still) and on a very limited budget (one income and 4 kids) and knowing that due to (1) Space limitations, (2) Cost of power consumption (3) General paranoia, I know I’ll be growing with CFLs (as I’ve already obtained them) as soon as I get all pieces/parts acquired and assembled and will post my build when that day comes. However, giving space and cost flexibility I would use HIDs hands down, but to each their own.”

I believe this is exactly what I have said except for the “four-kid” part. If I had the space, I would use over lapping six hundred watt HPS as they seem the most efficient and I said so several times. I, like 840, had a limited budget (none) and set this up cheap.

As far as mounting the CFLs, I read that base down/bulb up is best, Base up/bulb down is okay and horizontal is the least desirable, and of course, mine are base up/bulb down at forty-five degrees.

Note: I cannot find these sixty-five watt CFLs at Lowe’s or Home Depot anymore, don’t know why. (I have twelve bulbs covering twelve sq. ft.) I guess it’s off to 1000bulbs.com for this equivalent bulb (65 watt, 3000K, 3400 initial lumens, 52L/W, 65W/sq.ft.[in my space]) http://www.1000bulbs.com/product/6053/FC65-S30.html or maybe up the ante a little to this (105 watt, 2700K, 6200 initial lumens, 59L/W, 105W/sq.ft.[in my space]) http://www.1000bulbs.com/product/1555/FC105-FEIIIB27K.html, and if you have mogul based fixtures, you can go up to (200 watt, 2700K, 12,000 initial lumens, 60L/W, 200W/sq.ft.[in my space]) http://www.1000bulbs.com/product/8376/FC200-35872.html.

What I really need is a clamp on reflector for these bulbs…

Interesting thread, don't know how I missed it before. I want to add a few things to it if I can.

Anyway, not to quote particular parts of this thread, but here are a few things I want to address.

First, the whole lumen vs incandescent equivalent, vs etc vs etc thing. Lumens, or "equivalent brightness to the human eye" is not an accurate indicator of how a cannabis plant is going to respond to the light. Virtually no normal way of measuring light that I'm aware of is. You could have 2 very similar bulbs next to each other, both hps, or both MH, or whatever, of the same wattage, and one bulb can outperform the other one significantly. You want proof of this, go buy a cheap bulb, like a "growbright" 600w MH bulb from HTG supply on ebay, and then a 600w sun pulse MH, at the end of the grow, you'll be like, "what the fuck, how is this possible?" Then, when you get into comparing completely different types of bulbs, like a CFL vs a MH, you can bet you'll see even more of a difference there.

What matters here is wattage vs what you can get the plant do with that wattage. According to everything I've found and my own experience, CFLs come up short on this badly..and so do LEDs, due to the lack of UV. The only thing you can really do though is experiment in the real world with different types of lights and setups. I've rebuilt my whole setup 4 times in the last few years, I've probably wasted just as much money as I've spent, doing shit back over again trying to optimize it that much more.

Next, the whole inverse square law thing. Taken from wikipedia, "The intensity (or illuminance or irradiance) of light or other linear waves radiating from a point source (energy per unit of area perpendicular to the source) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source; so an object (of the same size) twice as far away, receives only one-quarter the energy (in the same time period)."

This is pretty easy to picture and understand in my opinion, but it is also just as easy for me to look around this "law" and see that it is not always applicable. For example, "calculate the intensity of light at x feet with this bmw's hid projector headlight"..see what I mean? The inverse square law only applies to bare bulbs, with no reflectors, so if you tried to calculate the intensity of a projector headlight at a certain distance using that law, you'd be way off. With my old setup, I had horizontally mounted 600w 3k sun pulse halides in open batwing style reflectors, (no glass to block the UV from the trichomes) shining down into a flat white painted reflector wall assembly that surrounded the plants on the sides. Quite a contrast to the single point source of light the inverse square law mathematically describes.

Another thing. The grow bible's cloning, lighting and hydro sections are outdated, contradictory, and contain incorrect info. Take what you read in there with a grain of salt, or whatever that expression is.

The gram vs watt thing, this was mentioned briefly in this thread, what matters is gram per KW/Hr, not gram per watt. Gram per watt completely omits the energy used during the veg phase. If I tell you how much I got per watt, that'll be straight up, because I only run my flowering lights at 12/12. I grow my clones vegetatively under a separate light, and then swap them into the flowering system for the next 62 days or so. However, I know a lot of people do not do this, they flower under the same lights they just grew vegetatively under for the last month, and then write that off completely when they mention their yield! So whenever I hear someone talking gram per watt, first thing I say is "how long did you veg for, and under what lights?" ..and then if they were bragging, they stop. Lol. Once again, nowhere is this mentioned in jorge cervantes' grow bible, while the "magical" 1g/w bullshit is.

Another thing, the 600w bulb is not necessarily the most efficient either.

600w was formerly only available as an HPS bulb size, in other words, there were no 600w MH bulbs available, except as 600w conversion bulbs for magnetic hps ballasts.

Then along came the high frequency ballast and all the associated marketing hype and bullshit, almost all of which is completely untrue, except for the higher power factor and reduced noise. Then people started trying to use whatever bulbs they had in these ballasts, including in the 600w size, of course. But almost all HPS bulbs are incompatible with high frequency ballasts, they don't tell you that, do they! Only one major bulb manufacturer that I know of had the balls to come out and admit that their bulbs were not suitable for that. Most didn't say shit, probably hoping that the ballast manufacturers would revise their products to address this. I destroyed multiple hps bulbs in with my lumateks before I realized they are just flat out incompatible, you can see with the naked eye the damage the ballasts do to the arc tubes, they fill them with little holes. I even posted a few pics of that on here, including a bulb that had shattered glass due to the high frequency vibration imparted into the bulb from the ballast. You could actually hear the bulb "ring" before it broke.

A few companies like sun pulse came out with bulbs that are "certified" for use with HF ballasts like the lumateks, and that's where I'm at now. Despite the annoying learning curve, I love the lumatek/sun pulse halide combo I have now. I'm not affiliated with lumatek or sun pulse, or any company that has anything to do with cannabis at all, but these bulbs are good. I always hated the yellow light of hps bulbs, the very slow growth and non comparable trichome development of CFLs, and the reduced yield of MH bulbs, but this combo beats all of them. The sun pulse halides yield like the best hps bulbs but with better quality and trichome development of MHs. I don't think there's anything on the market that can beat it as far as yield and quality vs watt used, but if there is and I find out about it, I'm buying it!

Still not sold on induction lighting (those flourescents with no metal connections inside the tubes) or LEDs just yet, although LEDs are advancing like computer technology, so it'll probably be only a little longer before they are $ competitive. I had an idea for an LED that put out UVB too, I know that is possible, I've done the research and they already exist, just not as grow lights. Anyone who brings that to the market will be gettin payyyed..provided they have a clue how to run a business.

Philips came out with this bulb called a ceramic metal halide, it is good for growing, a few people on here have used it and posted up pics, but that is a conversion bulb meant for magnetic hps ballasts, no HF. That is either good or bad, depending on how you want to look at it. The major selling point is reduced cost, but I just saw an article on yahoo the other day saying the city of chicago is retrofitting their streetlights with these, at a cost of $66,000 per city block. Holy Fuck. You can buy a case of those on ebay for like $100, the whole purpose of them is a cheap modern conversion. Leave it only to government to be such a shining example of parasitic, crippling inefficiency..

"mylar emergency blanket" at WM is very versitile. As creative as you obviously are it may be useful, if I have "heard" you correctly. It made a significant difference to my limited experience and I plan to utilize it again. I made individual, easy to adjust and modify "mini reflectors" by covering cardboard or splining it into small screen frames.

Would supercropping help with bud support?

Welcome Harvey, and of course, feel free to add any thing relevant.

While I was “cooling my heals”, I learned that you are right about the lumen vs. incandescent thing. On most bulb packaging, however, the only information that we get is wattage, color temperature, incandescent equivalent, lumens, etc. so I try to deal with these givens. I suppose we could come up with a PGA (Pot Growing Ability) rating system and try to get the manufactures to test and list on bulb packages… I’ll help with the testing.

As far as that inverse square law thingy, while I’m glad you seem to understand it, I believe it does apply, as my point was minimizing the distance between source (bulb) and receiver (chlorophyll). Two points I would like to make. First, while this law is based on a single point source, you had three sources and I have twelve and calculations must be made on each source and are not accumulative (not to mention the sea of light created by twelve sources gives good coverage and penetration). Secondly, a lumen rating is useless without distance. A lumen is defined in terms of distance. I wish companies would state their ratings in the same way, and actually give the ‘base’ distances at which their lumen ratings were taken. Then we could calculate the amount of lumens our plants receive.

What ever the base distance, the farther the receiver is away from the source that is greater than this base distance, the greater the loss and, this is the loophole in the law, the closer to the receiver the source is, that is less than the base distance, the greater the amount of lumens received by the receiver. In other words, when source to receiver distance is less than base rating distance, you get the inverse of the inverse square law. For example, a bulb rated one thousand lumens taken one foot from the bulb would appear to a receiver two feet from the bulb as two hundred fifty lumens and would appear to a receiver six inches from the bulb as four thousand lumens. In my grow, these CFLs are kept very close to the plants, some being between the plants (for these, no reflectors are required).

As far as my reference books, like I said “I need to go to the bookstore. We’ve come a long way in fifteen years!” But there is an awful lot of information on the Internet.

The proof is in the pudding so to speak. In this setup, my first plant produced a main cola nine inches in circumference and twelve inches tall. The average top and mid buds run four to six inches with the bottom buds at two to three inches. No popcorn, tight, good diameter buds with lots of trichomes and very satisfying smoke.

Thanks for the information on the different lighting methods and, with the advances being made in all of the different lighting technologies, I have no idea what the most efficient lighting system is today but will continue to follow these different technologies. IMO I think someone will dope up a high power led with the spectrum for marijuana including UVB.

Welcome THC+me.

I’ll have to get one of those aluminum bubble folding windshield sun visors. I think I could do something with that. I get (almost) three hundred sixty degrees out of some of the bulbs. I just want to redirect the lights on top. As this is a perpetual grow, different plants have different lighting and support requirements at any given time. When I have the reflectors worked out, I’ll go back to adding more lights… maybe a UVB florescent.

For those coming in late;

This is a two plant every two weeks hydro grow in a two feet by six feet closet in a city. The startup cost were low and everything came from my local Lowe’s/Home Depot. Power goes to one pump (top feed on four of five totes, fifth tote is water only), twelve sixty-five watt CFLs, and one exhaust fan. Note this is for flower only.

Vegetation is done in four five-gallon totes holding two five-inch net pots each. There is a small pump in each tote for top feed. Two height adjustable, five-thousand K, twenty-three watt CFLs mounted in brooder reflectors provide lighting for each tote (one light per plant).

Clones are rooted in an Aero Garden and are obtained from vegetation cuttings without the use of mother plants. (I do keep separate totes with mother plants of different strains for back up)

holy shit, i think maybe i should introduce some CFL side lighting on my next cycle, im running a 400w hps right now, and u r correct, the cost of teh exhaust fan/cooling fans and all that jazz was almost as much as the light itself. and my electrical bill shot up 60 a month so yeah i see where u are coming from. good grow though man, props.

Fera you better do a little more research on the subject. I understand that it is easy to think that adding cfl's or any other lighting will better your outcome, but thats a double edged sword and would not benifet in your set up.

You mention the cost of additional equipment caused by the BIG light. This equipment that has doubled your costs allow that 400 to work efficiently in your enviorment. All this equipment will allow you the MAX. yeild per square foot. Your box for example, A 400 watt hps has more than enough light to produce maxium yeild per square foot, by adding lights essentially all you are doing is adding another heat source and higher electrical costs.

If you compare watt for watt, the path you are on is the best choice. Until you decide to expand, that 400 in your box is more than enough light to become an expert grower.

What you should get out of this is maybe you need to set up a veg. box using cfl's. Take the money you were going to spend on additional lighting and set up a perpetul cycle with another box. This way the additional expense will pay off in the end by speeding up your cycles and cropping off an extra crop or two.

A much wiser decision IMO