Well....It all started with a plan. The end of the plan was to be able to afford to run 1000watt lights. The Michigan Medical Marijuana Bill has that (12) 'maturing plant' limit thing/ patient, 5 patient limit/ caregiver, and you are allowed to re-coup your costs. I read Al B's journal, he said he had 4' by 4' tables, he and I had some pm's about lighting. I noticed his 'special batwing reflector' and read the post about making your own reflector. The way it stood he was covering 4' by 8' with each 1000watt light and harvesting about 2# a month. This did not make sense to me, I did believe he knew what he was doing, he would have to in order to cover that large of an area with one light and get that kind of production, and not having some of the experience I have now, I thought that reflector must really be something, turns out it is by the way. So I built 4' long tables that were just 32" wide, all I could afford to buy 3 of was the 400watt hps and I planned to upgrade as I could afford to. If I had realized the right size was closer to 3' square, I would have done the upgrade to (2) 1000 watt lights and I would have built the tables that size instead of the 32" by 48" that I had to build because no one makes that size. Al recently installed cool tubes for his lights, he pushes the air thru a closed 4" system, checked inflow and outflow temps, the fan he is using is like around 200 cfm and I think its just an axial fan, not real expensive. I am sure he has it installed with as free of an airflow as he can have in his space, and he already had most things 'dialed in', he has the two of them 'chained' in just the one system. All of that would fit my flowering space much better than what I have now. And all I have to do is built (4) 3' by 3' tables, hang (2) 1000 watt air-cooled lights with special 'batwing reflectors', piece of cake. and it would give me room to put in a sink with a drain, I would really like that. The difference in power consumption is about 400 watts total from what I have now, not a big number, and depending on flowering time and yeild may be cheaper??
Another discussion I am having is about nutes. Earl makes a point that instead of trying to feed your plants the mamximum they will tolerate you should try to give them the least amount they need. His reasoning is that of the NPK, nitrogen is readily available, I think its over 80% of the air we breath, so if your plants are only getting the mnimum they need they will use the nitrogen from the air. I am getting close to the same results from all of the additives as I was without them, some improvement which I attribute to the air-conditioner and dehumidifier I added this summer. The strains I have now seem to be less nute tolerant than the widow was so I am going to drop back some on nutes to maybe 1200ppm and see what happens with them. Your thoughts? Stop laughing. lol VV
VV
