-- On flood/drain vs. DWC -- could you elaborate on why you think flood/drain is more slacker friendly? It seems like DWC is pretty brainless, and with less to fail when you're not paying attention, but you're by far more experienced a grower than I--so what am I missing?
DWC has much MORE to break than flood. DWC requires a constant air supply or roots will drown in hours. If an air pump fails or an air stone becomes fully or partially blocked with nute salts, you're screwed. I would not run a DWC without redundant air pumps and stones/bubble curtains (and spares on the shelf). If your area is prone to power failures, a modified UPS for a computer can run an air pump for a day or so depending on the size of the battery added to the UPS. Even if you can't run lights due to a power outage, a DWC still needs an air supply.
If a water pump fails in a flood system with pots of absorbent media, you have 24-48 hours (dependent on plant size) to catch it. Floods can go without tank aeration for weeks, but they work much better with it. There's no possible hardware failure in a flood system that will leave you in the lurch if the fault happens at the beginning of a long holiday weekend when all the shops are shut. In terms of power failure survivability, floods beat DWC hands down as no watering is needed if you can't run the lights- and you can always handwater. I wanna see the poor sod with a bicycle pump trying to keep his DWC alive while the power company is repairing storm damage.
DWC is great stuff. Owing to the lack of media, it is possible to get much more O2 to the exposed roots than with roots in pots of media in a flood system. However, that performance has a reliability trade-off, that being the loss of fail-safes.
I can guarantee you that over time, I have lost less production to using the somewhat less productive flood system than I would have lost from power or pump failures in DWC, where I would have potentially lost a tray (or 4) at a time.
--Flowering under CFLs--I've been preparing a scrog in a long, short horizontal cabinet that I don't think is workable w/o relying on CFLs: the bulbs are barely more than an inch or two away from the cabinet walls, and the buds will grow up from the hydro sites between the bulbs.
What's a hydro site?
Turn your long, squat cabinet on one end and you'll be much better off.
I've been reading a lot of CFL journals and have seen a fair number of good looking flowering pics. Is it your opinion that weed flowered under CFL is *always* inferior to that under HPS, or that it's a lot harder to get enough light and setup right under CFLs to equal an HPS setup?
It's not a lot
harder to get a CFL setup to equal an HPS- it's
impossible. Won't happen, simply due to the inherent limitation of low intensity light from low pressure mercury arc (aka fluorescent) lighting. You can put that idea out of your head right now.
Because the low intensity light of CFL tends to cause elongation of the plant, there will be a couple of inches between nodes. That's further than the effective range of a CFL for flowering cannabis. The only CFL flowering I have ever seen that was even remotely successful took several CFLs in clip-mount bell reflectors on a pole beside the plant, pointed at bud clusters along the mainstem. Several CFLs
PER PLANT to get light within 2" of each bud cluster. As the plants grow, lights will have to be moved to suit. This is a
daily event!
The lower intensity of CFL results in slower and less vigorous growth than under HPS. You can add about 30% to veg & flower times of HPS and still won't get the same veg mass (as in mothers) or bud weight yield.
Now, work out how much you smoke. Figure on 1/4-1/3oz per heroically CFL-flowered plant. How long will it take to grow with CFL, how many plants will you need, how many CFLs per plant, how many watts do they consume compared to a small HPS, to make enough smoke for you?
The low intensity of CFL simply doesn't produce rock-hard, will-support-a-brick-without-smooshing-flat bud density, even if you give each bud its own CFL. Cannabis relies on high intensity to drive production of tight buds.
So, is CFL ALWAYS inferior to HPS for flowering? Yep. Absolutely.
If you use CFL's for flowering your buds will be light puffy popcorn balls. You need to use HPS to get large dense buds. CFL's put out the least amount of lumins and also cost the same amount of money to operate per kw hr as a HPS does. The only reason to use them would be for the amount of heat they put out in a small confined space but you can get around that by using cool tubes and good ventilation. Why would you want light puffy buds if you are going to put all that time, $ and effort into growing? CFL's are good for vegging but you really need a HPS for flowering. That's my 2 cents on CFS.
Yeah, what he said.
(except that HPS is significantly more efficient than CFLs in watts/lumen, on the order of ~30%... which is a bit meaningless as you'll never find a CFL with similar luminous intensity to HPS and ganged CFLs' lumen ratings don't add!)
I know traditional tube flouros are said to flower light, airy and poorly formed buds, but there seem to be plenty of pics on RIU that show CFL grows with good flowering. The See More Buds vids/book would seem to support the possibility, at least.
Practically speaking, I'll get to see for myself, as I have a closet w/a 430W HPS and then the little cabinet that I'm trying to set up for six flood/drain sites under a row of staggered CFLs. Seems like I should be able to get one decent small cola from each clone if the buds grow up from the screen into the space between multiple 32 & 40 watt bulbs.
Anyway, I was just curious if Al was making a relative comparison (HPS is always better) or an absolute statement (CFLs are never worth the bother.)
The higher output CFLs are roughly equivalent to T5HO tube fluoros. There's really not a hell of a lot of difference between CFL and cylindrical fluoro tubes other than the electronic ballast, and we don't much care how we limit current to our fluoro tube, whether that's with semiconductor or inductive devices. CFL and tubes are both low pressure mercury arc lights and behave similarly. CFLs with spiral tubes may look mighty interesting, but they are in fact the least efficient sort. The spiral shape means that half the surface area of the tube is facing another part of the tube, blocking the light. You can't see the shadow, but the light from one part of the tube does not pass through the other parts. Only a straight cylinder lamp shape has no interference in light distribution owing to its own shape.
You'd be about the squillionth person to try parallel CFL and HPS grows. There's lots of pictorials around. It's not uncommon to see such experiments abandoned around wk 6 of flowering when the HPS buds are beginning to pile on weight while the CFL raised plants are still thin and weedy.
Rotsaruck, but I think you have come up with a round thing, novel to you, when everyone else has been using wheels for years.
Really, this CFL-HPS thing has been done to death. We know what works better and precisely why. You can dick around or you can just get down to growing some dope.
