120w for 1 plant

Regardless of light used, whether it's HPS, MH, CFL, or LED, or whatever else is out there, is this enough to get a substantial amount of bud in a micro grow for 1 plant?

Would like to see what you all have to say.

-crunk

Depends on what light are you using.
Atm i know that CFL will produce airy buds, on the other hand a hps will produce buds that are dense.
MH is way better for vegetation. Depends all up really.
CFL = PUFFY
HPS = DENSE/CLUMP OF SHIT

So just so we're on the same page..you're saying 120w for 1 plant is enough? Granted it may be airy or fluffy buds and not the rock hard nugs you get with HPS. Do I have that about right?

i`d say go with a 150w hps for one plant, and you`ll do just fine

what kind of room do u have too? HPS if u have the room/can deal with the heat, CFL if its a closet grow kinda deal

I have a dresser lol, pretty much going to be a micro grow. Going to do another scrog since I find them to be very efficient. Dimensions are 14"W x 29" L x 37" H. Lookin at like almost 3 square feet of scrog surface. Like I said, only 1 plant. Not entirely sure what I want to do right now. Gotta wait for my current grow to finish up before startin this new one

that will be plenty of light for one light. Just remember the more the better.

Well see I was thinking about doing a lot of smaller plants but I did run into a little bit of a snag. The strain I'm going to be using is DNA's Chocolope. It's a 95% sativa, so it's going to take up lots and lots of room just by itself. My thought process is, if I can train her into the screen I shouldn't have to worry about her overgrowing. I was also thinking(since sativa's grow tons in flower) that I would do 1-2 weeks of 24/7 and then start flowering. Try to keep her short and compact and whatnot, so the screen will handle her. I want to do this grow mostly to see how much I can yield off one plant. In my area, I have like 8.7 cubic feet in total so I really won't have much room to add additional plants in there. I will also add that I'm looking at just about 3 feet for my vertical height, so she will definitely need to be LST or topped or something. That's why I want to do a scrog with this next grow, they are rather efficient and it controls the height of the plant.

Thanks!
-crunk

yo wats up , plzzzz help

Smallsn said:

Depends on what light are you using.
Atm i know that CFL will produce airy buds, on the other hand a hps will produce buds that are dense.
MH is way better for vegetation. Depends all up really.
CFL = PUFFY
HPS = DENSE/CLUMP OF SHIT

Click to expand...

I just couldn't let this one go as saying that cfls will produce airy buds is flat out wrong. If you use cfls to flower that are in the correct color spectrum for flowering (2700k-3000k) and you keep them close enough they are capable of producing buds that are every bit as rock hard as buds grown under a hps. The actual difference between using them or a hps is that the cfls will not produce the lumin that the hps will and therefore you will grow larger buds and get more yield with a hps.

While an hps may ultimately be the best choice, they put out much more heat. If your dresser grow area will be enclosed you will need to provide excellent ventilation to control the heat issue. You will still have to control the heat even if you go with cfls, especially if you use any number of them, but to say flat out that you will grow fluffy buds is wrong and should not be a factor that determines your choice.-P

That makes a lot of sense TalonToker, my first grow was with CFLs and I can tell you for a fact, my buds weren't all fluffy and whatnot. But you know how some of those hps users are, swear by them and won't listen to a word edgewise Not saying all of them but I've found lots of them are this way. To be perfectly honest, I think I will be making an LED panel along with the 4 panels I have now. I was merely curious if it was possible to get nice fat buds from 120w on one plant.

After reading up a little bit with micro CFL grows under 200w I think it's perfectly possible to flower 1 plant under 120w, regardless of light source. Most people are gonna dog on me right away for choosing LED, but they don't know that I'm going to be using very narrow lenses to make the beam more intense. I will have side lighting so the light isn't completely focused in one main area. After all, isn't that why hps users love the HID lighting? More intense light means more rock hard buds, no matter the light source. But that's just the way I see it.

Amen. I've been smoking for nearly 30 years and I grow buds with cfls that are as hard as anything I've ever smoked/seen/found/heard about. If you can afford it I think an LED would be a great choice for your situation. The side lighting will help get you to the promised land.-P

you keep emphasising watts, lol, thats not what matters. Its the lumens. a 120w hps puts out more lumens than 120w of cfl(which also puts out more lumens than the 120w halogen/incandesent too) and (not saying you should use them, you shouldnt) 120w of incandesent/halogen lighting. The light system really does matter.....

Lumens are the measurement of how humans see light. Plants don't see lumens the same way people do since they don't absorb as much green light as our eyes see. So watts is a perfectly reasonable measurement in my eyes. 1000w of LED won't even compare to 600w of HPS in terms of lumens, because LEDs don't use the spectrums people see the best. Which is how HPS are rated. Watts is a measure of how much energy you're turning into light. That's why I decided to ask 120w for 1 plant instead of..

Will 10000 lumens be enough for 1 plant? There are many more factors that come into play. Such as side lighting, total surface area, etc etc. So I stand justified in my choice to measure in watts and not lumens.

Don't mean to come off as an asshat, just trying to explain how I see it

*edit* Did a little more digging to show what I mean. In the attached pictures, you can see that the human eye picks up most of 550nm wavelength. This color happens to be green, the color which plants don't absorb as much of. It's a common misconception that they absorb no green light. But they do actually, in very minute amounts. You can also see in the human sensitivity graph, once you get lower than 400nm and above 600nm it drops off substantially. So what exactly does this mean? It means that once you get closer to IR(far red, how snakes are able to sense heat in prey) and UV(deep purple) spectrums, the human eye doesn't pic up most of those colors. Now if you look at the plant sensitivity graph, you can see that at 600-650nm and 400-450nm are most effective. You can google absorption spectrums for chlorophyll A and B and find out that these numbers are relavitely close.

So how do lumens count in there? Well like I said before, lumens are a measure of light the way HUMANS perceive it. So theoretically, anything that emits green light will be considerably brighter than something that is blue or red. If you look at the HPS graph, you can see the most noticeable spike is near 550nm. That's why HPS lumens are sky high. Because they appear really bright to the human eye. Granted HPS will always be intense for plants too. But if you look at that graph you'll see only a small portion of the spectrum given off by HPS is between 600-650 nm. That's the part that the plant is absorbing the MOST. Doesn't mean the other wavelengths aren't used, it's just that they aren't as important.

This is why I prefer LED over HPS. It's more efficient in terms of usable wavelengths. And HPS create wayy too much heat for me to properly vent. CFLs have the advantage of giving off minor heat and the proper spectrums for veg/flowering. I hope this helps you to understand my reasoning for using watts over lumens.

lumens are based on foot candles, which is the intensity of light a single candle would put out in a 1 sq foot area actually. If the intensity didnt matter we would all be using halogens or cfls(which do work, but i mean like everyone, the hps users wouldnt even bother with hps anymore, lol.). you are correct when you say that lumens are a measurement of light we can see, but that doesnt matter, its still the closest one behind par on measuring how a bulbs worth for growing.
I also mean no disrespect of course.

Now we can look into the laws of light a little bit more haha. I do agree with the statement about foot candles, that is the technical definition of lumen. Say I've got a 50w LED(1 diode), a 50w HPS and a 50w CFL. The CFL and HPS emit light in a 360 degree pattern. Because of this, nearly half of the light emitted is going to need to be reflected so the plants get the light. This reduces the intensity considerably, thanks square inverse law. So now you're looking at about 75% light coming out is light being used, if there's 1 foot between plants and light bulb. Put a cooltube on your HPS and you lose another 10%. Now add in the fact that roughly 50%(rough figure according to graph) is going to be readily absorbed by the plant and not reflected. Are HPS really that efficient?

Now say the LED has a 25 degree light angle(with lens). Not only do you not need a reflector, the beam emitted is going to be considerably more bright because it's in a much narrow pattern. This is why I believe LEDs will work for me. I am able to focus the light on them so it's really intense. And so I have a nice balance of light, I will be having 4 14 watt LED panels mounted on the side. And to top it all off, they don't create nearly as much heat. So they have the most readily absorbable wavelengths that the plants need, they don't create as much heat, they can be focused for very intense lighting, and I won't have to pay an arm and a leg for inline fans(PC fans should do the trick just fine). For a micro grow, I think this is essential. I've seen HPS grows and you know what ALL of them need? SPACE!! Lots of it. If I was growing more than 6 plants I would totally be game for using HPS, since it's not as difficult to vent in a larger area. But in such a small space, I think 110w of LED will be sufficient for rock hard nugs(granted not as much as 6 plants under a 600w HPS, but that's apples and oranges).

I wonder if they'll ever advance in plasma lighting, from the looks of it; will blow hps away.

I'm glad we can have a civilized discussion about this and it's not a flame war

While lumens are not a good way to measure light for plants people still use it as a rule of thumb. This is due to the fact that with a ? Like this 120W might be good for one plant in a 1.5x1.5 space but not enuff for one in a 3x3. Also while lumens are a measure for the human eye in almost all cases the more lumens a light has the more the more useable light there will be for the plant. Its not always true but is most of the time.

You want to run around 4000-6000 lumens per square foot but it will also make a difference what kind of light it is and how many are used. 1 hps would cover that area well but with cfls you'd want to use multiple lights.
10000 lumens should be plenty for that space but do some reading and research on scrog growing you will probably need more than 2 weeks of veg time to fill the screen.
Also a side note on leds and lumens leds are in a whole other ballpark due to there fine tuned spectrum. With leds its best just to find out how much square footage they can cover until grow lights start getting measured in par instead of lumens.

You may wanna check out my CFL/LED grow man, I know all about scrog. It's AWESOME

I agree, lumens is pretty much a staple right now in the industry, and it's kind of sad because most people don't know better.

Idk though, scrogging a sativa is rather difficult once they start growing. The one I got right now is a 1 cola type plant. She doesn't respond well to LST/topping/scrog lol

I think a lot depends on genetics when it comes to that. Well I'm only trying to cover 3 square feet. Don't you think 110w of LED should cover that much?

Might like to add, I'm looking at 14" of width and 29" for length, so it's like a 1' x 2.5' space.

I say 120W would be enough for one plant. Hw about use 120W CFL n 110LED together? Never seen a LED grow b4.
Will it make a difference if u use all type of light? EG. LED + CFL + MH

I'm sure it would be better with all the types of lighting. Then you wouldn't miss any of the spectrum except maybe UV-B, but that's not really needed.

See, I would use more lighting but I'm looking at only a 3 ft tall micro cab. I wouldn't be able to handle the issues with heat if I added a whole bunch of CFLs or MH or HPS, not to mention I just don't have the room for them. That's why I want to stick with LEDs, they are really small and I can fit a bunch in there without sacrificing any room for my plant.