best way to arrange lights

hey im doing a small operation to see just what can be done with such a low budget. The entire grow budget was $20 (soil bucket seed lights) and i have it up and running; 1 fem white widow seed by ghs under 2 26watt cfl's for a total of 52 watts, hopefully i can pull an once of white widow. Nb for $20!
Well shes 1 week into veg now, and this wont realy matter much until flower but i figure i better start looking into it now so im prepared.
So right the question is; how to arrange the 2 lights? I was thinking of eighter supercropping to get 2 colas, and then hanging one light directly above each cola.
Or just bending the plant over so that there is one light on the cola and one light on another bud site, thus promoting 2 colas without stunting by suppercropping
Or just growing her out naturally with one light on each side of the main cola at about the same height as the cola nose.
Which will be better for yield? 1 big cola or 2 smaller colas?

bump
also i was wondering how long should these be vegged for? Probably vegging for to long would just be a waste right?

John400HPS said:

hey im doing a small operation to see just what can be done with such a low budget. The entire grow budget was $20 (soil bucket seed lights) and i have it up and running; 1 fem white widow seed by ghs under 2 26watt cfl's for a total of 52 watts, hopefully i can pull an once of white widow. Nb for $20!
Well shes 1 week into veg now, and this wont realy matter much until flower but i figure i better start looking into it now so im prepared.
So right the question is; how to arrange the 2 lights? I was thinking of eighter supercropping to get 2 colas, and then hanging one light directly above each cola.
Or just bending the plant over so that there is one light on the cola and one light on another bud site, thus promoting 2 colas without stunting by suppercropping
Or just growing her out naturally with one light on each side of the main cola at about the same height as the cola nose.
Which will be better for yield? 1 big cola or 2 smaller colas?

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dude, u cant be serious are you? an oz from 52 watts is insane you will never be able to....no offence man, but its the truth

i say you put lights right above as close as possibe without burning the plant. . and i wouldnt do anything but maybe lollipop the plant, because your 52w will probably not cover much of the bottom if at all. . and you shouldnt kid yourself. . i would be surprised if you harvested a quarter oz. are you planning on using any nutes?

hm im kinda suprised, ive heard that cfls are more efficient then hps. But you can EASILY get .5g/watt oout of a hps. However you think that with 52 watts i should pull 7g? Thats like .15g/watt! lol

I saw a guy get over an ounce with 78 watts of CFLs and 3 plants. Didn't even finish flowering, had to pull em early. Kind of disappointing.

He also grew three plants under 1000w HPS. They yielded slightly less than twice as much as CFL's. Dry weight.

dude, forget the watts, how many lumens do those 52w pack? like 2,000?? that wont cover anything so yes i do think 7g's if that. . for veg you can manage, but flowering you need a different light spectrum.

waldocat420 said:

dude, forget the watts, how many lumens do those 52w pack? like 2,000?? that wont cover anything so yes i do think 7g's if that. . for veg you can manage, but flowering you need a different light spectrum.

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52 watts, 6500K, 3300 lumens. Sounds like this guy has a good plan. Of course the lights will need to be switched to 2700K for flowering. Put the lights you bought back in the pack and exchange them at walmart LOL, I've done it. Anyways. I've heard of people yielding .5 - .65 grams per CFL watt if used properly. This operation probably won't yield an OZ but maybe if you manually position the lights for 6 hours at the bottom and go back and move them to the top for the other 6 hours everyday you just might get that Oz. I would do just one cola and bonzi that bitch. Direct all the energy to one massive cola. Also switching the light schedule during the last 3 weeks from 12/12 to 14/10 might give it one final surge. I'll keep posted.

TeaTreeOil said:

I saw a guy get over an ounce with 78 watts of CFLs and 3 plants. Didn't even finish flowering, had to pull em early. Kind of disappointing.

He also grew three plants under 1000w HPS. They yielded slightly less than twice as much as CFL's. Dry weight.

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who yielded 3oz from a 1000hps? lol they did something wroong

https://www.rollitup.org/127242-post94.html

It was a plant for plant comparison. 3 plants under each type of light. One of the best comparisons I've found. A damn shame he couldn't go as long as he would of liked.

waldocat420 said:

dude, forget the watts, how many lumens do those 52w pack? like 2,000?? that wont cover anything so yes i do think 7g's if that. . for veg you can manage, but flowering you need a different light spectrum.

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hmm your right the 3500 from the cfl/135000 from the hps is .02b5 or 1/40th the lummens. And 500g(.025) is 12.5g so i guess the new goal will be half an oz lol. Good stuff i didnt realize that the hps is actualy more powerful per watt then the cfl

Directly comparing the lumens produced from two vastly different methods of producing light is fallacious.

Of course, HPS is more powerful per watt at producing lumens. But is it more powerful at producing light the plant can use? Which is, technically measured in mol*area*time.

To do this we need to convert them both to a standard measure that's useful for plants, PAR, photosynthetic active radiation, measured in terms of mol*area*time.

Very slightly, HPS is better, but only above 400 watts. And it continues to increase with 600 and 1000 watt fixtures.

Please read this, If you wish to learn more: http://www.aos.org/AM/TemplateRedirect.cfm?template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&Section=orchid_resources1&ContentID=5736 (PDF)

Page 352(or page 3) has interesting charts.

I'll talk about the bottom left chart, Table 2:

This is a conversion factor table. In order to get 1 micromol*m^-2*s^-1, you can take a light meter and whether you use foot candle or lux, take that measure you get and divide by the numbers listed here.

So divide your HPS lm/sq ft by 7.6, to get an idea of how good it is for plants. A cool white fluoro has a division of 6.9 for foot candles. So the fluoroscent light is more useful, by about 10%. Or for every 1.1 HPS lumens, you'd need only 1 fluoro lumen. CFLs pack several tubes in parallel/spiral essentially... so you'd get an even better, multiplicative result(like those 4 tube T5 fixtures, but very compact). Maybe as much as 2:1.

I've seen a huge difference between T8/T12 and CFLs. It may be slightly better than 2:1.

Interestingly, incandescents have the lowest conversion factors. But look at the total energy.

The end of article has credentials and contact info.

As for your grow room, to make best use of the light:

[6] Aluminized retractable shade curtains are used by some commercial greenhouse growers to provide a reduced and more uniform light intensity to an orchid crop

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Happy growing.

EDIT: And if anyone has a problem with this containing orchids... try growing one, and then get back to me.

Is it recommended to place a light that points up at the plant if there isnt much room?