DonPaul.p on using CFL lights

donpaul.p;1871282 said:

with the cfls i was using the plants can touch the bulbs without getting burned as their 23watt and 30watt 6400k cfls, they bleach my leaves if their less than 1inch from the bulb, i find the sweet spot for my cfls is about 2 to 4 inches from the plants, any further than that and i get stretched plants,

if i start plants under the dual spectrum hps then they stretch as the light is to far away so seedlings tend to fall over and node spacing is pretty big, so i always use cfls to start my seedlings, node spacing is very close and no stretch what so ever, so all my plants start under cfls then after week 2 they go under the dual spec hps,

ive produced some very nice bud under cfls, i only switched to hps as i was easily running over 400watts with lots of cfl bulbs, had them all over the place, above the plants and down the sides, but i wanted to grow more plants so it was either wack a load of cfls in the room pushing me above 600watts or go with a 65,000 lumin dual spec hps, so clearly the hps was the cheapest option but not very good for starting plants under, maybe if i used a mh bulb then they would be ok but the dual spec seems to make seedlings stretch early on, after week to i dont have any problems, so i just use a small cupboard for my seedlings and clones.

i think its something about the spectrum the cfls produce, plants seem to respond well to them but with the low watt bulbs you need lots of them if your going to grow big plants, a scrog would be ideal under cfls as you would not have problems producing nice buds, i mainly use 23 watt cfls as they give the best watt to lumin ration compared with the higher wattage bulbs, my first grow was with cfls from start to finish, produced very nice buds, i only flipped to hid due to the watts i was using with the cfls.

the other problem with cfls is that some digital timers make the cfls flicker on when their off, i read this on here somewhere and thought nothing of it, then when i was using a 7day digital timer i noticed the cfls would flicker on once or twice during the lights off period, so their must be something going on in the timer that causes the cfls to flash, so i dont use digital timers now for the cfls, not such a problem in veg but if you flowered and had the lights flicker on then it could cause hermie plants, my tropical fish tank coffee table does the same when i run that light on a timer, in the night the flourescent light will flicker on just for a split second then it goes off again, must be some power somewhere thats causing the cfls and fl to flash, its only 1 flash but thats enough to hermie a plant if it does it over a few nights

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