first grow here's the basics of what i am setting the room up

any suggestions,

i have:
6 - 105 w 8,400 lumens each cfl's
2 - 85 w 8,000 lumens each cfl's
3 - 4 foot t5ho 54 w 5000 lumens each
1 - hps 150 w 16,000 lumens

all for an area of about 4 ft by 3 ft. which gives me a total of about 7,900ish lumens per square feet. which is acomplishable with the ratings of my bulbs i think. and i want to grow five plants under all that lighting.

take a look at the pic and tell me what you think. do i have the lights in the best place?

now i am going to have to keep the lights a good 6 in away with the cfl's and probably a good 14 in or so with the hps just cause of heat with all that power consumption. but luckily my placements give me a ton of lux so i should loose that much by moving the lights away a bit.

l8r

oh ps, the layout is for the most part to spec on inches. i mean each sq is 1 sq foot. fyi

Your using about the same amount of space I'll be using. I'm still in the design and planning phase for my room, but thanks for sharing what you're doing as it helps me understand what I might want to consider doing. I'm too ignorant to make any other comments about your setup. Good luck!

ReinventinBudz said:

any suggestions,

i have:
6 - 105 w 8,400 lumens each cfl's
2 - 85 w 8,000 lumens each cfl's
3 - 4 foot t5ho 54 w 5000 lumens each
1 - hps 150 w 16,000 lumens

all for an area of about 4 ft by 3 ft. which gives me a total of about 7,900ish lumens per square feet. which is acomplishable with the ratings of my bulbs i think. and i want to grow five plants under all that lighting.

take a look at the pic and tell me what you think. do i have the lights in the best place?

now i am going to have to keep the lights a good 6 in away with the cfl's and probably a good 14 in or so with the hps just cause of heat with all that power consumption. but luckily my placements give me a ton of lux so i should loose that much by moving the lights away a bit.

l8r

oh ps, the layout is for the most part to spec on inches. i mean each sq is 1 sq foot. fyi

Click to expand...

How many plants are you growing and i'd ditch the HPS for veg. I had a 150w and with all those cfl's your just creating more heat than you need.
And what is the color temp. of the bulbs?

apparently the key is to take all your lumens and add them up from each bulb. then divide that number by the amount of sq ft to light. this gives you your lumens per sq foot. but thing is i think someone said you need at least 3000 or 4000 lumens per sq ft to grow okay buds. so since mine is 7,900 ish then i should be getting some decent yields per plant.

to be honest i am hoping for about one ounce per plant. but i see so many posts on here about low yields i might only get a half an ounce per plant.

oh did i mention it is a dwc, and each plant is in a 5 gallon bucket. and i have a 10 gal res and a 6 gallon flood that leads to the buckets.

but there you have it. good luck with your grow man. do you have any started pics or diagrams of how you are going to set it up? i would love to see what you are doing and with what you are using.

l8r

half cfl's are 3000 kelvin other half are 6500 kelvin (4 and 4). and all three t5ho 4 footers are 6500 kelvin.

i don't wana get rid of the hps because it has the highest lumens. and since lumens don't add up, i want those lumens on my top colas for better photosynthesis with the 16,000 lumens from the hps.

i am growing 5 plants at a time in this setup.

ReinventinBudz said:

half cfl's are 3000 kelvin other half are 6500 kelvin (4 and 4). and all three t5ho 4 footers are 6500 kelvin.

i don't wana get rid of the hps because it has the highest lumens. and since lumens don't add up, i want those lumens on my top colas for better photosynthesis with the 16,000 lumens from the hps.

i am growing 5 plants at a time in this setup.

Click to expand...

I'm not saying get rid of it all together. Thats a flowering color temp. The 6500k are the veg color.
Lumens are just what our eyes see. This is a post from my journal with a similiar thought as you.

Quote:
Originally Posted by RandyRocket

I know it's odd but a physicist at work gave my the formula.


Yeah, that's right - lumens are candela-steradians which is a measure of light times a unit of solid angle. If you double the number of lights you double the number of candelas, but you're essentially using the same (approximate) solid angle, so you have to account for area (which is a square unit) and so you have to take the square root. Lumens can be a poor measure for plants anyway, depending on the spectrum of the lamp. Lumens are really a measure of how bright something looks to the human eye and not how bright something looks to chlorophyll. If your sources all have a similar specral distribution then then it's a decent comparison, but 10,000 lumens of CFL doesn't necessarily equal 10,000 lumens of MH or HPS, for example.



^ if you look here, you see the absorption spectrum of chlorophyll A and B. From 400nm to 500nm is "blue" light, from 500-570 is "green", 580-600 is "yellow" , and 600-700 is "red" and beyond that is infrared.

During veg it's the blue peak that is most important and during flowering it's the red peak on the right. You see that there is almost no absorption by the leaf in the middle, which is green (and which is why plants look green!).

Lumens, however, measure light as seen by the human eye, which sees most dominantly in the green portion of the spectrum. Thus it's possible to have a very green light with a high luminous intensity but which doesn't have anything that a plant could ever use. It could almost use a new unit of measurement like plant-lumens, or even red-plant-lumens and blue-plant lumens - a number that tells you how bright a light looks to a plant, not to a human.

This is why you see some of these new LED grows which don't seem to have very bright sources, but which work really well because you can get LEDs tuned exactly to what chlorophyll wants - that's to say that the LED lamp spectrum looks much more like the chlorophyll absorption spectrum. It's all enough to twist your head in knots...