Autoflower light cycle

I have been running autos in the light cycle 18 / 6 in a dwc system, they are now in flower, do i continue with the light cycle or do i switch to 12/12?

You don’t need to go to 12/12 as they are autos. They need as much light as they can. Keep on 18/6 and you can even go to 24/0 if you want. I grow my autos on 24/0 as the light helps keep temperatures up

As mentioned above, you don't need 12/12 for autos. Most would not recommend 18/6 either.

If you have lower temps, maybe stay at 24/0. If you struggle with high temps, use 20/4 and pick the 4 hours where your room would get the hottest and have lights off during that time.

TheDifferenceX said:

If you struggle with high temps, use 20/4 and pick the 4 hours where your room would get the hottest and have lights off during that time.

Click to expand...

This

Plus unless you have some weird circumstances I would give the plant some rest even if it’s 2 hours.

With Autoflowers you typically run the same light schedule through the whole cycle. I usually go with 18/6 to let the plant feed the microbes in the dark phase but with dwc you could do 20/4 or even 24/0. Just make sure you don't exceed the DLI. Too much light will stress your plant, decrease yield and increase the chance of getting into trouble.

lilbeanmerchant said:

With Autoflowers you typically run the same light schedule through the whole cycle. I usually go with 18/6 to let the plant feed the microbes in the dark phase but with dwc you could do 20/4 or even 24/0. Just make sure you don't exceed the DLI. Too much light will stress your plant, decrease yield and increase the chance of getting into trouble.

Click to expand...

DLI , what does that mean? Yeah my leaves been pointing upwards almost the whole time, i guess that is a sign of light stress, yield is pretty low, but atleast i learn, managed to fight root rot and it's my first dwc

DLI is daily light integral and is the amount of light a plant can handle in 24h in its current stage. PPFD is the light intensity a plant can handle in its current stage.

PPFD Seedlings: 150 - 300 umols
PPFD Vegetative: 300 - 600 umols
PPFD Flowering: 600+ mols

So depeding how many umols you throw at your plant multiplied by the hours per day you get your dli. This might come in handy to do the math:


So lets say you are throwing 200 umols at a seedling for 18h a day that gives you an DLI of about 13. What the max dli per grow stage is depends on a lot of factors like strain, temperature, humidity, how much water a plant gets, co2 concentration in the grow area. You can find research papers on the net to give you some ideas.

For me in my grow environment seedlings do great at a dli of 10-15. vegetative does best at about 20 and in flower the max they can handle is 35 before showing sings of stress. These numbers may apply to your environment to some degree for seedling and vegetative stage but might go higher in flower.