Not surprising. Shane is an electrical engineer but his videos indicate that wasn't up to speed on the actual research about using his lights. I'm not knocking him, in the least, but he didn't do his homework in that area.
Just placed 4 little ladies in a 3x3 gorilla flower tent under mars hydro fc 4800 evo and they be luvin it. Have them at about 35,000 lux (approx. 35% power) at the canopy level (25" from light) - day 3. Am upping it each day until I hit about 58K lux or so (don't have a par meter-using a .016 conversion factor to determine par.
![20240827_105558[1].jpg](https://www.420magazine.com/community/attachments/20240827_105558-1-jpg.3647171/ "20240827_105558[1].jpg")
why we can not post?Just placed 4 little ladies in a 3x3 gorilla flower tent under mars hydro fc 4800 evo and they be luvin it. Have them at about 35,000 lux (approx. 35% power) at the canopy level (25" from light) - day 3. Am upping it each day until I hit about 58K lux or so (don't have a par meter-using a .016 conversion factor to determine par.
the strain is a cross between Sannie's Sugar Punch and Sannie's Madberry that was created approx. 7 years ago and has been surviving as mothers and clones. We call it "Mad Purple Punch". I grow in Hempy buckets using 3 parts perlite and 1 part vermiculite and use gh 3 part formula for nutes. the bud in my profile pic is from this strain. Here is some in the flower tent:
thanks for your thoughts. I have to take a bit to study this. Turned up the lights and dropped the distance to 45k lux todayNot surprising. Shane is an electrical engineer but his videos indicate that wasn't up to speed on the actual research about using his lights. I'm not knocking him, in the least, but he didn't do his homework in that area.
If you look at Shane's products, you'll see that the drivers don't have the wattage of drivers in the competition. Check his lights against Mars or Viper or Spider and the drivers are quite a bit lower wattage. For a couple of years, I thought it was a smart business move - sell a light with a smaller driver (cheaper) and growers won't know the difference.
And most growers don't.
About a year ago, Shane did an interview with Bruce Bugbee. One of the questions was about how much light cannabis will use and Bugbee laid it out - about 1kµmol and higher if you're running CO2.
You can see the wheels spinning in Shane's head. He just stops for a couple of seconds because he realizes that his lights are nowhere near the output of what Bugbee is talking about. Vipar, Mars, and Spider all create lights that can to the ton but the Migro Arrays, no can do.
Anyway, he asks the same question but puts it differently and Bugbee comes back with the same info.
I laughed because I realized that Shane did not know what Bugbee going to say and he was deer in the headlights when he heard the response.
In any case, there's scads of research that shows the crop yield increases as light levels increase. There's simply do getting around it and we understand the reason why.
Most of the cannabis sites stick to modest light levels. My hunch is that is because it's conventional wisdom. The folks at growlightmeter.com, who sell Photone, recommend a pretty funky schedule. When I tested "Korona", as Photone was named back then, I asked the programmer is they had any research to justify it. He replied that if there was, it would be in the footnotes of the page. Last I checked, there are none but I'd be fascinated to read it because I've spent at least hundreds of hours learning about this and there's no research that doesn't support giving your plants a lot of light.
The underlying reason is that plants need photons + CO2 to create glucose - that's their only source of food. If you don't give you plants a lot of light, they can not generate much food. As Mitch Westmoreland describes it, it's all about 'fixing carbon".
There are all sorts of ideas about manipulating schedules to improve outcomes but simply no data to back it up and, second, there's no rationale to do so from the perspective of plant biology.
"IDK if you can just go from 35000 to 60000 in 1 swoop with no ill effects (light stress)."
I'd do it in three steps. 35k is only 560 - that's nothing. 60k is 960 so go to 750 one day and 900 the next. Each time you increase, check your plants. If they can't handle the light, they'll let you know - they'll turn away from the light. It's no big deal.
Light data from a grow a year and a half ago. It's typical.
In terms of ramping up, my theory is that growers are reluctant to increase light levels because they don't understand how plants function so they fill in the blanks which is what they do see in human beings.
I suspect that a lot of growers think that you have to turn it up slowly to give the plants time to adapt because that's what growers (who are overwhelmingly male) have been exposed to in the world of athletics. No, I'm not under any impression that we're a bunch of former jocks but I do see the similarity in how athletes gradually increase training load and how growers let plants "adapt" to higher light levels.
(I run half marathons and I run using a training schedule structured workouts and monitorresting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep score, etc. every day so I understand the need to increase gradually. )
They're completely different. Getting more fit is a process of overload and recovery. Increasing light levels for a plant is, roughly speaking, like stepping on the accelerator in your car. That's not a perfect analogy because I wouldn't jump from 560 to 900 but there's simply no mechanism for adaptation for photosynthesis the way there is when increasing training load. They're entirely different mechanisms.
Bugbee was asked about how to increase light levels - I think it was the interview where he blew Shane's mind about using high light. The number that was bandied about was 600µmol and Bugbee said to jump in two days.
Another issue that was addressed was the idea of gradually turning up the light to mimic sunrise. Again, no need. Per Bugbee, "they're [plants] ready to go to work as soon as they get up in the morning."
Simple approach - jump to 700-750 and see how they do. If you don't see any reaction, leave them at 700 for the rest of the day and bump them to 800 or so the next day. If everything's good, get to 900 the day after.
The table below is from the Mars Hydro website. I found it the other day and need to incorporate it into the document I wrote (attached) about converting lux to PPFD. The FC-E lights have more red in the spectrum and, because red is more electrically efficient, that light generates slightly more PAR than the FC 4000. The factor for the FC 4800 is 0.0156 vs 0.0167 for the FC-E.
A good start!
the bud in my profile pic is from this strain. Here is some in the flower tent:
![20240827_220128[1].jpg](https://www.420magazine.com/community/attachments/20240827_220128-1-jpg.3647646/ "20240827_220128[1].jpg")
![20240827_220138[1].jpg](https://www.420magazine.com/community/attachments/20240827_220138-1-jpg.3647647/ "20240827_220138[1].jpg")
very interesting - as I'm looking at your daily excel sheet. I finally got a chance to look at it. bumping up!Not surprising. Shane is an electrical engineer but his videos indicate that wasn't up to speed on the actual research about using his lights. I'm not knocking him, in the least, but he didn't do his homework in that area.
If you look at Shane's products, you'll see that the drivers don't have the wattage of drivers in the competition. Check his lights against Mars or Viper or Spider and the drivers are quite a bit lower wattage. For a couple of years, I thought it was a smart business move - sell a light with a smaller driver (cheaper) and growers won't know the difference.
And most growers don't.
About a year ago, Shane did an interview with Bruce Bugbee. One of the questions was about how much light cannabis will use and Bugbee laid it out - about 1kµmol and higher if you're running CO2.
You can see the wheels spinning in Shane's head. He just stops for a couple of seconds because he realizes that his lights are nowhere near the output of what Bugbee is talking about. Vipar, Mars, and Spider all create lights that can to the ton but the Migro Arrays, no can do.
Anyway, he asks the same question but puts it differently and Bugbee comes back with the same info.
I laughed because I realized that Shane did not know what Bugbee going to say and he was deer in the headlights when he heard the response.
In any case, there's scads of research that shows the crop yield increases as light levels increase. There's simply do getting around it and we understand the reason why.
Most of the cannabis sites stick to modest light levels. My hunch is that is because it's conventional wisdom. The folks at growlightmeter.com, who sell Photone, recommend a pretty funky schedule. When I tested "Korona", as Photone was named back then, I asked the programmer is they had any research to justify it. He replied that if there was, it would be in the footnotes of the page. Last I checked, there are none but I'd be fascinated to read it because I've spent at least hundreds of hours learning about this and there's no research that doesn't support giving your plants a lot of light.
The underlying reason is that plants need photons + CO2 to create glucose - that's their only source of food. If you don't give you plants a lot of light, they can not generate much food. As Mitch Westmoreland describes it, it's all about 'fixing carbon".
There are all sorts of ideas about manipulating schedules to improve outcomes but simply no data to back it up and, second, there's no rationale to do so from the perspective of plant biology.
"IDK if you can just go from 35000 to 60000 in 1 swoop with no ill effects (light stress)."
I'd do it in three steps. 35k is only 560 - that's nothing. 60k is 960 so go to 750 one day and 900 the next. Each time you increase, check your plants. If they can't handle the light, they'll let you know - they'll turn away from the light. It's no big deal.
Light data from a grow a year and a half ago. It's typical.
In terms of ramping up, my theory is that growers are reluctant to increase light levels because they don't understand how plants function so they fill in the blanks which is what they do see in human beings.
I suspect that a lot of growers think that you have to turn it up slowly to give the plants time to adapt because that's what growers (who are overwhelmingly male) have been exposed to in the world of athletics. No, I'm not under any impression that we're a bunch of former jocks but I do see the similarity in how athletes gradually increase training load and how growers let plants "adapt" to higher light levels.
(I run half marathons and I run using a training schedule structured workouts and monitorresting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep score, etc. every day so I understand the need to increase gradually. )
They're completely different. Getting more fit is a process of overload and recovery. Increasing light levels for a plant is, roughly speaking, like stepping on the accelerator in your car. That's not a perfect analogy because I wouldn't jump from 560 to 900 but there's simply no mechanism for adaptation for photosynthesis the way there is when increasing training load. They're entirely different mechanisms.
Bugbee was asked about how to increase light levels - I think it was the interview where he blew Shane's mind about using high light. The number that was bandied about was 600µmol and Bugbee said to jump in two days.
Another issue that was addressed was the idea of gradually turning up the light to mimic sunrise. Again, no need. Per Bugbee, "they're [plants] ready to go to work as soon as they get up in the morning."
Simple approach - jump to 700-750 and see how they do. If you don't see any reaction, leave them at 700 for the rest of the day and bump them to 800 or so the next day. If everything's good, get to 900 the day after.
The table below is from the Mars Hydro website. I found it the other day and need to incorporate it into the document I wrote (attached) about converting lux to PPFD. The FC-E lights have more red in the spectrum and, because red is more electrically efficient, that light generates slightly more PAR than the FC 4000. The factor for the FC 4800 is 0.0156 vs 0.0167 for the FC-E.
