Help with switching from Cfl to HID

Hi everyone! I'm new to the HID side of growing as I've been using 68w cfl's to grow for the past 3 yrs. I have this dresser I converted that's 42"T x 24"W x 18"D with 5 of the cfls accross the top and 6 26w cfls on clamp lights for lower lighting.

My girl got me a Hydrofarm 150w for the micro setup for Christmas. It came with the braces to put on the unit plus 2 2' chains to hang with. My G13 clone is about 16" tall including the pot height. Can anybody help the uninformed in making his plant happy with the new light as I'm not educated on how far to suspend the light from my plants. I currently have it mounted to the roof of the much like the cfl's and have boxes that I swap out as the they grow to keep the lights closest to the lights.

Hey there man looks like you got yourself a great woman there. I have a similar setup however it is a closet grow but has basically the same dimensions. Here's what i have learned along my path with HPS and i am by no means an expert....

I run a Hydrofarm 400wHPS hanging anywhere from 6" to 18" above my girls. With my unique space issues i cant move my light up much further so each to his own. It really depends on the strain I'm running and if i have LST'd. I do have a 3 fans setup to aid in air circulation and temperature control which helps dramatically as that 400W puts off some heat. I have yet to get light burn or bleaching and have had the same setup for a few years. Hope this helps ya brother.

With a 150watt HPS you should be able to keep it about 6-8" from plant tops if you got a little clip on fan pointing at the light bulb to keep it cool. Hope you got something to keep the air circulating, because even going from CFL to a 150watt hps is probably gonna bring the heat output up a little bit

I successfully proped everything up and in place. Though I want to rig it up even higher cuz its hanging at the length of the braces which are about 3-4" long so I can have plants close to the same height as with my cfl's. But I can only expect larger and tighter buds with the hps now plus a few cfl's hung low and close for mixed spectrums and greater lower buds than with a cab strictly full of clf's. They used 478 watts not including fans, vs 304(372 if I have 2 plants in the cab). Plus hps having stronger and longer traveling lumens, lux and par I can't wait to see the results.

And if anyone's familliar with uploading pic here with smart phone I could use some help. I've always used my macbook but it took a fall and isn't working and have never done it by phone...

man sounds good. Post some pictures when you can, but right now i think the site is having picture troubles....I';m on my laptop and can't get any images to load on the website....and im definitely at a loss as to how to do it on a phone haha

Still no luck with the phone pic uploads, I click on the icon to do so but it just blinks and doesn't open the page to browse...

imlovnit24/7 said:

Still no luck with the phone pic uploads, I click on the icon to do so but it just blinks and doesn't open the page to browse...

Click to expand...

That's OK, they're not really necessary. I just finished a veg experiment comparing 500 *actual watts of CFL's with 600W HPS, and believe it or not I prefer the CFL's. 150W isn't all that much, that fixture isn't going to out-perform the 11 CFL's you're currently utilizing.