vegging with 5500K CFLs

does anyone have any experience vegging with 5500k lighting ? what was your experience with it compared to conventional 6400k systems ? I am a bit of an experimentalist and entertaining thoughts of vegging with 55's with some 30's thrown in. What can I expect ?

Just finishing up a current lot before the next generation tho, my grow space is limited so i have to do things in batches. But here's what I intend for veg in the next gen:

Total watts : 306W (210W 'Blue-ish' 5.5k K + 96W 3.0k K Red)*
Total Lumens : 20310 Lumens (14070 Lumens from 5.5k K + 6240 Lumens from 3.0k K)

Lumens per square ft : 6346 Lumens/sq ft

Watts per square ft : 96 W / sq ft

its a small area, stealth grow, usin what I got, see how we go.*

Any comments, welcome.

5500K will work, I can't do a fair comparison since I have switched from large bulbs to small and all my 5500s were 105 watt. I would advise from my own experience to skip the 3k range, for some reason I picked up a 55 watt 3200k along the way and even on a single plant I could not tell it was doing anything. Plants didn't reach for it even with a smaller bulb near by and I could not document any discernible growth. Again, simply my experience. 6500K is a little better all around, but 5000-5500k "daylight" will work, I would not stress it if 55k is all ya got, go ahead and pop the beans and maybe pick up a 65K when you get a chance or on a sale. 5500 and 2700 are easy to get at any hardware store/home depot and even wally world.

My first crop did just fine on just 5500K alone in veg. I'm using a CFL/LED combo now and I'm running 4 65k 26w, 3 5500k 26w, 4x 2700k 26w , and 1x 32 2700k with 2x Kessil H150Ps. So far so good, they vegged 2 weeks with just the CFLs (roughly 200 watts, I've added since then) and I really didn't see a huge difference in the early veg. May very well have been my amount of light and not necessarily the kelvins. I can say for sure now that they are a lil older and just going into pre flower, the girls reach for LED or the 6500ks and don't seem to try hard for the 55ks. Doesn't mean they won't work though.

5500 will work. 6500 even better.

But really since I got metal halide for veg there is no comparison. I even got one cheaper than a lot of fluoro setups. You only need about 20w/ft2 with those. 175w metal halide for less than $100.
If that's not an option you should be ok, but I did one run with fluoro and then switched to MH and I'll never go back.

Your usual MH bulbs are GARBAGE. All those lumens for wasted spectrum. Get a philips retro white CMH and never look back. With that being said I've had better results with mostly 6500k (instead of 5000k) and some 2700k with cfls. Best of both worlds without any wasted light. Don't see too many 5500k cfls but they'll work.

I thought this is the cfl section, why punt MH bulb you cant compare them simply because the whole idea of fluros are that they run cooler! I know they are "better" but only if you have a big room to allow dispersing of the heat. how would I use a MH in my cab, my plants would fry! 5500k for veg is fine. I used 5000 k for veg and 3000k for flower in my setup and got outstanding results.

TheDude0007 said:

I thought this is the cfl section, why punt MH bulb you cant compare them simply because the whole idea of fluros are that they run cooler! I know they are "better" but only if you have a big room to allow dispersing of the heat. how would I use a MH in my cab, my plants would fry! 5500k for veg is fine. I used 5000 k for veg and 3000k for flower in my setup and got outstanding results.

Click to expand...

Someone before me brought up the whole MH and no comparison thing. That is completely false. You'd a got better results with 6500k/2700k. To OP that will work...use what ya got and have fun experimenting.

Thanks everyone for your responses, I enjoyed reading each of them. Yes, in general, I know 64-6500 are percieved as better, however I came upon this chart from somewhere:
View attachment 2821463

quite interesting.

I know there are other systems out there (MH, HPS) but i would like to restrict the conversation within the scope of CFL's only, this is posted in the CFL section after all, i.e. "Have you vegged predominantly with 5500K and can make an educated comparison on this performance to your previous 64-6500K vegging experience"

Anyways, I think for my next veg cycle I will modify my previous temperature spectrums to include some 64's, 27's, along with the intermediate temps of 55's and 30's


..so a broad spectrum,

the Lumens per watt for all these CFL's are 64-66 L/watt across all temps, so the watt fracs are translatable directly (practically the same as Lumen frac)

for those who want to work out the Lumens/sq ft, my area is 3.2 sq ft, quite small

See how I go with these figures, will report back over the weeks, but in saying that, still flowering my last lot in the same grow space (im limited in batch production due to space restraint) lol

might tweak the overal blue to red frac 1/3 - 2/3 , when i actually veg next, but even here is a topic worthy of discussion,.. Has anyone discovered a sweet-spot of blue to red ratio in vegging (even in flowering, if you have found it)

CK

im using 2700 5000k and 6400k and ive got 1 3500 ( 64 watt) 2 2700k ) ( 23 watt) 5 5000k 8 6500k 3 2700k )
on an auto critical jack dinafem and blueberry auto DP

I'm curious to see what 6500k, 5500k, and 2700k (in that ratio) will do for veg.

Yeah sorry guys realized it was CFL section.

ive never use mixed, i use 6500k veg 2700k flower. and i freak out with lights, i got like 18 up atm.