lowryder 2 under 540watts t5 hydro

Yeah i am kind of in a bind because all the room i have is a 4 foot long closet that only goes back a foot and a half so i cant use anything too hot as something can definitely go wrong and i cannot afford LED's, therefor i got a Sylverstar T-5 4 Ft 4 Bulb Flourescent in hopes it would do alright untill i can figure something else out. So i basically planned on adding more flourescents to the sides of the walls maybe but i dont know.

snowman you will easily get half ounce. i messed mine all up and will still get an ounce for sure. flouros produce the same yield as hid up to about 400 watts when the heat from hids can be vented and higher wattages can be used. small hps lights are pretty inefficient. for some reason hps has diff efficiencies at diff wattages. but if under 400 watts you could yield the same. i def believe that next grow when i dont screw up the res i will yield nice off flouuros. you should switch the lights after fruiting starts and at the same time you switch to bloom nutes. roughly 10 days after flowering. but not when you first switch to 12/12 but i really dont think all that makes a huge diff. i just cut my tiny runt and got 5 grams. youll get more than half an ounce.

thanks for the information, I appreciate your help, the reptile uvb lights seem worth a try. my lr2s are dwindling in number, will probably try some of my new seeds soon, trying to decide whether i'll use a hydro system or soil for the northern lights#5xhaze, want to do them the right way. i'll probably try hydro again, I've got the new one plant bucket dwc system on the way. hopefully my inline fan will be in this week and i'll set up the 400 watt hid in my growtent. once vented, hopefully I can use mh bulb to veg the plants in the grow tent with the tent closed. The only other thing I'll need is a carbon filter, as I won't be venting it to the outside. the carbon filters I see are expensive. using Ona for now but may upgrade soon, like the idea of better security.

Heres a couple pics...You can see some crystals now... and the new lights in the vegg/clone cab..

I didn't think you were supposed to switch auto flowering plants to 12/12? Also the foxfarm nutrient schedule said to start off with using the big bloom nutrients as well it looked fairly legit although i don't know how different it will be for auto flowering. How many weeks should i leave them under 4 veg bulbs, and how many weeks should it be before they begin to flower?

Very nice looking ladies, Roll420, they are doing very well.

I switched from 378 total watts of CFL's to 400 HPS. There is a big difference. The 400hps puts puts out about 45,000 to 50,000 lumens. The 378w of CFL's puts out about 23,400 lumens. Lumens are very important, that is your light intensity. See the difference. And the useable light travels much further with hid lighting also. You don't have to have them right on top of your plants to work well. And the CFL's put out about the same heat as the 400hps. That is why I switched.

Nice looking buds roll!! Nice and frosty.

hey hashlover...thanks man, well im looking for sea of green style...that's why i didn't top the plants....what do you think?

I'm Kinda trying to work towards that style a bit myself. I think it really depends on the plant really. Sea of green is best done with clones from what I have read. That way all plants should be good with same nutes and all. Much easier to deal with. I will try to do it with maybe 4-6 main colas, So I will top and prune them. If you can get it right I think you can get your best yield per sq foot that way. With the two plants I harvested My yield was 1oz per sq foot for the space they took up. And they could have been much better if I did a better job growing them. But I also remember my mistakes so hopefully don't do them again. Mostly it was over nuting. And of course having enough lighting to get the best yield, that is where HID can really make a difference.

i heard about the whole autoflowering thing wasnt realy autoflowering latley with quite a few folk but if you throw em in 12 12 you can kick start it

yes i agree with you..the lights make lots of diference, well i hope you can start the sea of green ...in that way we can help each other ..... i just don't understand why the plants get so taller like you saw .....

Hey guys i planned on getting a 12"x12" 50 Watt Tri-Band L.E.D Panel. Now i do not know how strong this is vs a sylverstar t5 4 bulb and i was wondering if i should get the l.e.d for my 2nd light or another florescent (this is for new plants) if anyone had any idea on how many i could grow under a single light light that it would be great.

gezzy da snowman said:

Hey guys i planned on getting a 12"x12" 50 Watt Tri-Band L.E.D Panel. Now i do not know how strong this is vs a sylverstar t5 4 bulb and i was wondering if i should get the l.e.d for my 2nd light or another florescent (this is for new plants) if anyone had any idea on how many i could grow under a single light light that it would be great.

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Yey man, I did some research on those LED lights and all said they were not worth it yet. Unless you make your own but I did not look into it so I don't know. But I would not get them. CFL's are also very good for flouro's. I'm using them for veg still but plan to change to HID (MH of course.

rayjunyor said:

yes i agree with you..the lights make lots of diference, well i hope you can start the sea of green ...in that way we can help each other ..... i just don't understand why the plants get so taller like you saw .....

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I'm working on it now ray. Building up my clones and making things to put them in. I don't want to do ebb and flow so I'm making a set up with buckets that recirculate off a central res. So I can do 6 plants with one res and make it easier to keep track of (nute wise and such). And 3 setups to have 18 plants at a time with a staggered harvest. I have 2 big plants I'm waiting to finish (3 1/2 feet tall) so I can rearrange things. Went and got a new light set up today. 600w Lumatec digital ballast, fancy store bought reflector and an Eye Hortilux hps bulb. My last harvest went to market (not all of course) so I had the cash to buy it. So I'm going from 50,000 lumens to 95,000 lumens. My 400 is an old warehouse fixture that I rewired to run the bulb seperate. Just an old magnetic ballast. But it worked and grew me enough stuff to be able to use the cash form that to buy the new one. Three of mine stretched like that too. I think it was just not enough light intensity, They vegged great under CFL's. Nice and bushy but when they went under the HPS is when thsy did it. Maybe just not close enough. And to big of a space for the 400w to cover. But I think I've solved that problem now. My last 2 did real well but spent most of their flower time in a box a little over 2x2 feet with the 400w light. That's a lot of light for that size. We'll see how the 600w does.

And when I was looking for the hydro store and started to look for a street address #, The first one I saw was #420. I think it was a sign from god.

snowman- you can grow any plant under any light. its yield that will be affected. with a high par rated bulb at 3000k up to 10000k the plant uses 3-7000 lumens per square foot. 7000 being the most obviously. as long as you have a par rating over 75 and within that kelvin range 7000 lumens is the most that a plant can absorb. i would not use cfls as they are very inefficient producing great par ratings and excellent colour spectrum but low lumens. if eficiency is the most important thing than t8 flouros are the top producer making the highest par and lumen combination with kelvin temps ranging from whatever you want. t5 regular are the next most efficient with similar values but lower lumen output per watt. then comes t5ho with same specs and even lower lumen output. yes t5hos are less efficient than reguar 1s. its not a typo. lol. then t12 with same specs and lower lumens still. then you finally get to spiral cfls. same specs with less lumens than all of them. there are positives and negatives to each. but t5ho is the densess lighting flouro you can buy=smallest surface area of bulb relative to the lumen output. and the lumen output is only slightly less than the 2 kinds above it. the 4 bulb fixture you have will easily handle 7 small plants perfectly. my lowryders were grown under t5ho and have now turned around and are yielding quite well. but after 400 watts flouros seem to become warm and cannot be cooled so hps might be the way to go. but they will both yield the same under their ideal growing conditions.
if you take a 4x4 area and place 400 watts of t5ho over it and the penetrating power of the light is recommended at 1 foot(made up #) and you fill the area with plants no more than that tall you will yield however much. if you place a 400 watt hps over the same area with the same sized plants you will yield nearly exactly the same. the higher par rating on the flouros makes up for the slightly less lumen output compared to the hps. ut the prob with flouros is that the penetration is limited to small plants and therefore shorter grows to keep them small. the grows i just mentioned would be the same timeframe otherwise its not fair to compare. the reason why hps can outyield flouros much of the time is because most people dont grow 1 foot plants and therefore are not using the lighting properly. so if you are willing to do a longer grow with slightly larger plants the hps will win because the flouros cant compete with the height of the plants. i have that 1 pick still of a guy yielding 2 pounds dry off a 400 and it took 12 months. is that really a 400 watt grow? his power bill would still have been huge. so when talking flouros vs hps they are roughly identical when growing plants in the shorter penetrating lightsoures optimum range(flouros) once you get out of the range of flouros than the penetrating power = more bud. but also longer grow. good luck man

Hash Lover said:

I'm working on it now ray. Building up my clones and making things to put them in. I don't want to do ebb and flow so I'm making a set up with buckets that recirculate off a central res. So I can do 6 plants with one res and make it easier to keep track of (nute wise and such). And 3 setups to have 18 plants at a time with a staggered harvest. I have 2 big plants I'm waiting to finish (3 1/2 feet tall) so I can rearrange things. Went and got a new light set up today. 600w Lumatec digital ballast, fancy store bought reflector and an Eye Hortilux hps bulb. My last harvest went to market (not all of course) so I had the cash to buy it. So I'm going from 50,000 lumens to 95,000 lumens. My 400 is an old warehouse fixture that I rewired to run the bulb seperate. Just an old magnetic ballast. But it worked and grew me enough stuff to be able to use the cash form that to buy the new one. Three of mine stretched like that too. I think it was just not enough light intensity, They vegged great under CFL's. Nice and bushy but when they went under the HPS is when thsy did it. Maybe just not close enough. And to big of a space for the 400w to cover. But I think I've solved that problem now. My last 2 did real well but spent most of their flower time in a box a little over 2x2 feet with the 400w light. That's a lot of light for that size. We'll see how the 600w does.

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Congrats on the new purchase hashlover...What size space are you putting the new 600 in? You will deff see some results!!

Right now i have a 2 1/2 by 2 1/2 space and i cant deciede what to get a 400 or 600... the 600 setup i want is almost the same price as the 400.....

Would a 600 be to much for that space...i mean, if not, i guess i could expand.... i plan to get a cooltube...with a nice exhaust fan... so it should be cool?

What kinda reflector did you get hash?

Hey thanks for the help, i had planned on going out and getting another light to setup another 5 plants on a shelf above the others, what would you reccomend is best and most reliable and wont get too hot for a closet for 200-300 dollars? thanks
(I will be growing lowryders keep in mind)

I am currently using th T5 4 Bulb and was also wondering when i should switch to 3x3000 bulbs and 1x6500 bulb I Put them in the soil on 4-20

geezy- in that price range the Sunlight Supply lighting is the best quality.