Lighting & Lumens

nongreenthumb said:

And how many plants will these envirolites do, please bare in mind that im going to be using 6 x 600w hps systems to flower

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I didn't realise your initial point was 'how many plants can I flower with 2 x 200w Envirolites' I thought it was about a 600w HPS being cheaper to buy.

How many plants are you flowering that needs 6 x 600 hps systems?

how many plants could u do with 1 200w envirolite?

It does make sense, but enviros are not always the answer. You don't get the TIGHT, DENSE, RESINY, POP CAN SIZE BUDS from enviros like you would get from a HPS. Another thing.. my dealers dealer is running 22 1000w HPS lights, i'm not sure how many plants exactly.. But i know it's like a jungle anyway. How many enviros do you think he would need if he wanted to replace those HPS lights with enviros? How much work would it be to adjust all those enviros daily so they are within inches? I wonder how this would effect the yeild and quality? I have seen and smoked alot of bud in my time and when it comes down to it... HPS buds shit all over enviro buds. Fact.

major ur using cfls so y knock them? U have a nice plant under cfls, u smoked any of it yet?

babygro said:

600w HPS pulls 3.0 amps on a 240v system using a magnetic coil ballast. 3.0 x 240 = 720 watts and hour.

A 200w Envirolite uses 123w of electricity.

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Sorry for snipping your quote, Man, but for ease....

Why not compare apples to apples? A 600w is 3 amps? Not hardly. My 600w, admittedly with old-style ballast, pulls almost 6 amps.

And if a "200w" Envirolight pulls only 123w, then it's a '123 watt' Envirolight. So you'd need at least 4 of them.

And you haven't answered my original question.

Thanks

potroast said:

Why not compare apples to apples? A 600w is 3 amps? Not hardly. My 600w, admittedly with old-style ballast, pulls almost 6 amps.

And if a "200w" Envirolight pulls only 123w, then it's a '123 watt' Envirolight. So you'd need at least 4 of them.

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Pot, no worries about snipping, I only get annoyed when people do that and take things out of context! A 600w does pull 3 amps on the 240v system I clearly stated in my post. Yes, unfortunately, there is life outside the west and east coast of the good old USA Your 600w ballast is clearly being used on a 120v system, when it would pull 6 amps. (240/120=2, 3amps x 2=6amps, Ohms law)

There's some confusion that surrounds CFL's and their rated wattages. On the smaller ones, they tend to be specified at their input wattage and given an equivalent incandescent light output wattage. Eg 20w CFL, outputs the same amount of light as a 100w Incandescent. On the larger more specialist CFL's as produced by Envirolite, nlite and ecolite, their wattages tend to be specified the other way round. Envirolites, nlites and ecolites are all based (as far as I'm aware) around T5 fluorescent tube technology, with the 200w Enviro, basically having 6 x T5 2 foot (or thereabouts) T5's bent in a U shape and powered by an electronic ballast. Their luminous flux, efficacy, power consumption, spectral curve and PAR watts are therefore very closely aligned to T5 fluorescents.

Regarding your question, that hasn't yet been answered - I shall do so as soon as I've found the information I require

If I have a 400 W HPS in a 3'x3' area, in your opinion (anyone who is familiar and might have experience with these lights), should I switch to one 200 W enirolite or two? I have read mixed reviews on the lumen output that these lights actually put out (understanding that the output is 100% PAR) .
I am seriousely considering doing this and adding the 400 W HPS to the flower room.

splifman said:

If I have a 400 W HPS in a 3'x3' area, in your opinion (anyone who is familiar and might have experience with these lights), should I switch to one 200 W enirolite or two? I have read mixed reviews on the lumen output that these lights actually put out (understanding that the output is 100% PAR). I am seriousely considering doing this and adding the 400 W HPS to the flower room.

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Firstly, no light outputs 100% PAR. This does depend somewhat on how you actually define what PAR actually is. As far as I'm concerned, PAR is the light spectrum output the plants actually USE, rather than what consists within the 'visible' spectrum which many people define as being the PAR spectrum. The visible spectrum runs from about 400nm to 700nm, plants certainly use the 400-500nm spectrum and they certainly use the 600-700nm spectrum, what they don't use is between 500-600nm spectrum which is made up of predominantly green and yellow light. This just happens to be the kind of light that the human eye is most sensitive to, hence the huge lumen output figures for HPS systems which all output a large amount of their lumens within this part of the visible spectrum. Lumens is a measurement of how much light the human eye can see - not how much of the visible spectrum plants see and use, hence the term PAR, and hence the reason the high lumen figures for HPS systems are very misleading in terms of PAR.

Anyway, back to your question - if you're talking about vegetative growth, I would say the 200w blue Envirolite or 2 x 125w blue Envirolites would do a far better job of vegging your plants in a 3 x 3 area than a 400w HPS would do, for the simple reason they output a lot more of their spectrum in the 400-500nm blue region than the HPS does. Plants simply do not need, the huge lumen outputs of HPS systems in vegetative growth, particularly when the vast majority of those lumens are in the wrong spectrum anyway.

All the results I've seen of people vegging under blue Enviro's have had very tight internode spacing and have been nice compact plants. They may not grow as fast under an Envirolite as under a HPS, but they certainly make up for than in the quality of their growth. I'd much rather have a shorter more compact plant with good bushy growth, than the tall, leggy, spindly things I see people producing under HPS, who then have major problems lighting them in flowering and the lower 50% of the plant hardly gets any light at all.

So the conclusion is then that if your wanting to grow some weed for personal use and try to do it for as cheap as poss then enviro is the way to go.

Start adding more plants into the maths and your going to be better off with mh and hps lights.

If you are using 16 26wt cfls that are suppose to put out 100wts each light bulb 1000 lums per light bulb 2700k total 1600 wts. but you are only using paying for 416wt. which would be better a 400 wt hps or the 16 bulbs. I am sure this was answered but to make it simple for a country boy.

hps by a long shot

That is because of the different spectrum or what

Because it would seem that you are getting 1600 wts compared to 400 but I know thats not all their is to it.

lumens diminsh exponentially, so if you have lamps that are 1000 lumens in order for the plants to recieve enough they have to be close and lots of them, so to flower 1 plant with 26 w cfls your going to need around 5 at least to have a decent effort. then another 5 for your next plant. A 400w hps puts out 52000 lumens so you can have it further away and it will cover more plants. Light spectrum is not an issue

thanks so a 400wt hps is equivlent to approximatly 52 1000 lumens lamps so it is then also less expensive to run the 400hps

right now I am using a 1000wt hps and 30 of the 26wt in a 4x7 area i also have a 400wt mh that Iam not using at the moment I thought I might replace the 26 wt with it although it is mh and I am 3 weeks into flowering. Would that be any good or no because of the blue spectrum.

save your mh for vegin then u can keep an 8 week cycle

sounds good THANKS for all your help

babygro said:

.....Anyway, back to your question - if you're talking about vegetative growth, I would say the 200w blue Envirolite or 2 x 125w blue Envirolites would do a far better job of vegging your plants in a 3 x 3 area than a 400w HPS would do, for the simple reason they output a lot more of their spectrum in the 400-500nm blue region than the HPS does........ I'd much rather have a shorter more compact plant with good bushy growth, than the tall, leggy, spindly things I see people producing under HPS, who then have major problems lighting them in flowering and the lower 50% of the plant hardly gets any light at all.

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Thanks for the in depth answer. That explains a lot. I think I will definitely switch my veg light and move that 400 watter to the flower room. That's a really good point about not getting nearly enough light to bottom of the stretched plant. A lot of people don't realize little things like that.

About the PAR lumens, I think of it as the frequency of light that can be used by a plant for photosynthesis; which is what it means I think (Photosynthetically active radiation). On the environlite site they claim that the light gives 100% PAR in the correct spectrum for growing. I browsed through the site for a while, but maybe I overlooked what they were saying or took something out of context. I dunno.

Thanks again.

I plan on incorporating a couple Envirolite lites in my grow room. I thought I would add them to the sidewalls (mounted vertically) to add to my overall light output.

Celticman

PS I would never leave my HPS though, not yet anyway. Maybe I will set-up a 2nd flowering room sometime this summer and use strictly HPS in one and strictly Enviro;ites in the other and compare the results.