I feel like there should be specific support for those running low light intensities. Frankly I get kind of annoyed when people spoiled with their kilowatt+ gardens just run around telling newbies, "More light!" like it is the only answer, and without regard to whether they even can run more light. Plus, it seems to really skew the advice and experience people can give and receive. For example, i keep hearing about 1 gram per watt. Does anyone running less than 1000 watt HIDs ever get 1 gram per watt? Does anyone running 400 watts or less get that? If so, in what size footprint, etc. See I want this thread to be geared specifically towards people who actually grow with low light, with real experience, not just trying to extrapolate
guidelines that were based on 1 KW HIDs. Does 1 gram per watt translate from a 1000 W HID down to a 250 W CFL? I highly doubt it. Is 50 watts a sq/ft really the bare minimum needed to grow anything worth while, or do people get good crops with less (ask SweetSue and her 20 w/sq-ft grow )? The thing is I'm asking these questions rhetorically, because I've seen people grow good crops with less than 50 w/sq-ft, and I know a 250 W CFL isn't going to get 250 grams. But it's that kind of number extrapolation and misguided-scaling of numbers that I think is the problem. People shouldn't be applying what works with a 1000 W grow to a 400 W grow, and sharing experiences and wisdom about 1000 watt grows just doesn't really serve those with lower lighting that well when the experiences are vastly different.
It's my hope that people can ask questions in this thread, and NEVER get the answer of "more light". This is about how to make it work with less light. Not that I'm advocating people should use less when they can use more, but there are all sorts of limitations that might prevent someone from running an adequate light, and so I think there needs to be a thread to address that situation. Beyond that, I think there's probably a lot of merit in pot growers trying to limit their energy usage, rather than making a trend out of kilowatt level gardens. It would be better for everyone if people can figure out how to make due with less, so hopefully this will appeal to any of the environmentally concerned out there as well.
Anyway to start off, I'd hope that the answers to this question can be restricted to people with actual experience with this, and that others can resist their urge to try to extrapolate an answer based on
guidelines developed around hugely intense light levels... In other words, if you run a 600W or above, hold your comments please. If you just can't bite your tongue, whatever, it's a free country
Now, those who run 400 W or less, how do you find the footprint of your grow area has affected your yield? Footprint is pretty much the only variable we can increase light-intensity with if we're limited to a low-energy light. For example, most 400W lighting options are recommended to run in a 3x3 tent (based on footprints found to work best with high-output lights though), but a 4x4 tent is a much more popular option, but you're talking about 44 w/sq-ft intensity versus 25 w/sq-ft. If someone with a 300-400 W light switched to a 3x3 tent, how much more yield per plant could they expect with that greater light intensity? Again, people with no actual experience running a 300-400 W light and switching to a smaller footprint, please resist commenting based on extrapolations and scaled figures on what you would expect from a 1000w light, because that's the point: I'd like to see if these figures can really be scaled along light intensities in a linear way. If they can, great, but if they can't, then people shouldn't be telling 400 W light owners to drop down to a 3x3 tent if it's not going to increase their yield and just give them less room for plants.
At the end of this, there's always other variables affecting yield. So I may not have ever broke .5 grams per watt, but maybe I'm a crummy grower, have crummy genetics, etc. We won't ever really know until we isolate variables, and light intensity is a huge variable. GIven that low lighting options have become so much more niche than high-energy lighting options, I feel like having a thread where that light-intensity variable is somewhat controlled will give people much better ideas of what to do to improve. Long story short, people should compare to others growing with the same light intensity, not others growing with 4x as much light. So hopefully this thread provides that option.
So with those that have read all that, or maybe skimmed, I'd like to keep the discussion based around footprint and light intensities for now.
Light intensity = Light wattage / Growspace area
So if you have a 400 W light, in a 4x4 tent, then you would have a 16 sq. foot area. Divide the 400 by the 16, and you get a 25 w/sq-ft light intensity.
SO based on that formula, I think a great start would be for low-energy light users to post their light-intensity level and the yield per plant they've got. Also some comments about how many plants you fit into that footprint would be good, because yield per plant doesn't mean anything unless we know how many plants people are squeezing into these spaces.
I'll start.
I run 25 w/sq-ft in a 4x4 tent, 5-6 plants in 3 or 5 gallon pots, and get about 1-1.5 oz off each.
I think another great topic of discussion would be PAR and whether LEDs and CMH with more PAR per watt are better than just running a higher wattage HPS, but I'll wait to see how this is recieved in general. My guess is there's only a couple more of us out there.
Oh well. Here's my current garden in a 4x4 under 350w of 3500K COB lights from CobShop.
).
. The thing was screaming for a reflector. Or at least... something was doing a bit of screaming, at the time of this discovery. . . .