Canopy Penetration with a combination of CFL's and T5's

its all about maximising your lighting. use up the whole horizontal area w/ no gaps wasting light. you get a dense canopy of tops colas that all grow quickly and big cuz they are all get optimum lighting like your top cola would on a non lst'ed plant. so you fill that area full of bud, it will shoot upwards and grow towards the light when you put it into flower, each one of those tops will be a top cola, the best and most desirable bud, and you dont waste any light.

Totally possible if you know/learn how to do it

one of the most misunderstood things on this forum is lights

here is a few pics from one of my local students grows (yes I help in real life as well as here)

He has only 2 23 watt cfl's and 2 24 inch dual T5's

nugs are as big as my forearm, notice the comparrison to the cfl in the pic

The more you learn/understand about light the better your garden will grow

Interesting.
dark could you perhaps suggest some dimensions for a SCRoG cabinet that would run the HPS lighting scenario we discussed earlier.
Presume I am going to ventilate correctly using a cooltube etc.

P.s Yes this is my first hypothetical grow, construction will not begin until I am comfortable that I know enough about grow cab construction.

Regards, Kaeden

riddleme said:

Totally possible if you know/learn how to do it

one of the most misunderstood things on this forum is lights

here is a few pics from one of my local students grows (yes I help in real life as well as here)

He has only 2 23 watt cfl's and 2 24 inch dual T5's

nugs are as big as my forearm, notice the comparrison to the cfl in the pic

The more you learn/understand about light the better your garden will grow

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holy fuck, thats pretty incredible, how would you handle his situation? I think you could help alot more than i can. lol

ps. I was gonna rep you for that post, but it says i gotta pass some around befor I can give you any more. oh well, lol

darkdestruction420 said:

holy fuck, thats pretty incredible, how would you handle his situation? I think you could help alot more than i can. lol

Click to expand...

Yeah I learned to grow back before HID's were invented (I'm an old fu*k) seems like a lost art now a days but back then we used what we had so for me cfl's are hotter than hell (don't mean temp lol) and my next grow I'm gonna break out a 400 watt cmh which a lot of folks are waitin to see

And I would just tell him to check out cruzers grow journal as I think he has one of the best scrog cabs I've seen here

you need more watts of cfl than you do of hps, a 400w hps will totally brutalize 400w of cfls. so that doesnt help prevent *high usage detecion(which i wouldnt worry about, you realize alot of incandesent bulbs are 100-150 watts each? 400w is like running 4 mid sized incans, if you were using like 3000-4000 watts i might be worried, probally not though, as long as u pay the bill its none of their business how you use it. cfls put out heat too, not as much as hps but that doesnt mean its not enough to get noticed if you run a bunch of them

It's good for me ,Thank you for your post

I just look the topic!

Either go with a flat canopy scrog or pump up the side lighting - both will work fairly well. If you have a low space I'de recommend scrog but if you have more vertical room go with the side lighting - yield in my experience is comparable.

I think this was a 700w CFL scrog of mine - not a great strain but they turned out amazing.



Here's my current setup with plenty of flouro side lighting. I stagger every other bulb with 10.0 UV tubes - quite a noticeable difference.

I wouldn't worry about heat giving you away. My space heater pulls 1.2kW, more juice than my tent and produces quite a bit more heat. You need serious lights to draw attention from above.

beautifulrolex said:

you need more watts of cfl than you do of hps, a 400w hps will totally brutalize 400w of cfls. so that doesnt help prevent *high usage detecion(which i wouldnt worry about, you realize alot of incandesent bulbs are 100-150 watts each? 400w is like running 4 mid sized incans, if you were using like 3000-4000 watts i might be worried, probally not though, as long as u pay the bill its none of their business how you use it. cfls put out heat too, not as much as hps but that doesnt mean its not enough to get noticed if you run a bunch of them

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What do yu mean CFL's u need more wattage then HID? The other way around man. My 65watt CFL's -2700k from Lowes are the equal of a 300 watt incandescent lightbulb. I am growing in a 3.3x3.5 area with 8 3ft. t5HO's @2700k on the ceiling and hanging in the middle are the 2, 65watt @ 2700k cfls and 2, 36 watt cfls @ 6500k. I find hanging cfls in the middle is better then putting t5's on walls because either way, only 1 side of the plant gets light at a time but this way you can adjust position a bit and take up less room by it being ok for plants to touch the walls. - Cannaba

I attempted to use 4 100W CFL's for side-lighting in my 4x6 grow room with a 400 MH bulb overhead. With the CFL's on, the room temperature rose 5 degrees higher than just running the MH. Granted, I had a terrible ventilation system at the time, but it did tell me that CFL's are HOT. I also had issues with the bulbs burning leaves if I didn't pay attention to how close the plant were to the bulbs.

So while it seems ventilation is on the back-burner in this thread, making lighting choices should be made considering how much heat can be vented out.