Do I have enough light?

Currently growing one bag seed female and the buds looks pretty stringy with all white pistols and some crystals on day 31 of flowering. I have an aeroponic system in home made box 27" X 20" X 36"high coated with white paint and great ventilation. flower lighting is one 100 watt HPS mounted 7" above the plant(security light from Home Depot with a custom reflector) and 4- 24" T5 with bloom spectrum bulbs mounted vertically in each corner for side light. Total lumens is 17,000. I started flowering at 2 weeks and the plant had a lot of heat stress while in veg due to my newbiness. Is this enough light?

Thanks
No pics available, sorry.

One thing to remember is that you can never have enough light ...

Thanks for the reply, but I would like some input as to whether I can get some good yield with this light set-up for my upcoming lowryder 2 soil grow. Do I have to dump more cash into this thing for more lights? I have already invested much time and $$$$. the bud is for personal use and a little for the friends.

Ed

Well you can problem answer this on your own. If the buds are sparse, stringy and not very tight, then add more light.

Yea man, look I did the switch to HID fully (400w) from CFL and Fluro's and that 55,000 lumens - they cant be beat for the same price. On fixtures & everything you've prolly already spent the 130 or so needed to get a HID.

devilwacause said:

Yea man, look I did the switch to HID fully (400w) from CFL and Fluro's and that 55,000 lumens - they cant be beat for the same price. On fixtures & everything you've prolly already spent the 130 or so needed to get a HID.

Click to expand...

Are you implying it costs over a hundred dollars for a cfl grow? You must be crazy. With twenty bucks I could build anyone their own cfl setup.

Anyone with any experience with a 100 watt HPS with flouro side lighting want to chime in? I really don't want to spend more cash if I don't have to. I'm over $500 on this set-up so far. I tend to overdue things which leads me to spend more $ than I need to. If others have had good grows with a similar set-up I will use it for my upcoming lowryder 2 grow. If not I will grudgingly buy more lights.

thanks,
ED

If you are growing one plant that should be alright...I would just make sure you have the correct spectrum of light for the plant to flower in. The blue is good for veg but you might need more orange/red for the flower stage than the home depot hid can give...I don't know for sure but I am suggesting that you look into the spectrum thing as it is important for flowering to have the right spectrum and lots of it.
Good Luck!

I'm telling you from experience (although my HPS was a 150 at the time) that you might as well upgrade to a 400 watt. And yes I am implying that alot of your CFL growers could save cash with a 400HPS, maybe not on electricity - but for yield, initial setup cost its a good move. I ran CFLs for my first grow, and constantly worrying about light penetration with CFLs gets old. 23w bulbs are the minimum on growing and then I wouldn't set it up without a good ratio of 4 bulbs per 1.5 ft plant. Sure you save money on set-up and electricity with CFLs (I do wonder how many of you have done the math to figure your power bill jump if you were to switch.) But you are sacrificing yield.

You already said you spent over 500 dollars on your set-up. Mine wasn't that high, (though a bit higher than a HPS) and woulda been buying more and more lights. Do yourself a favor and put that bulb buying money aside and save for a HPS - CFLs are the bomb - don't get me wrong seen great results. But I've yet to see results better than a 400w HPS for roughly the same start up cost.

$500 ??? I could piece together 3 1k Units with 3 new MH and 3 HPS bulbs for that and still ? left over for a good bottle of wine...

You'd better get more resourceful my man!! money isn't easy to come by today!

OK I did the math and I lied I would need $540 ,,,and I couldn't buy the bottle of wine...
But those are switchable HPS/MH units ......new!

If you need help to do it yourself and save big $ just ask...


Hint!!! Don't look at hydro stores,,they assume everybody that comes in there has a wad
of cash, and are as dumb as they look...The prices reflect that.

Where do you go for your great prices then? I am in the market for a few things as I am sure some people here are too...thanks in advance for the heads up!

I get my cfl's at a local hardware and you get 4 bulbs per pack. 23w are only $4, 42w are i think $6. 125w there are a little more expensive i think its 8 bucks for two of em. I'll confirm these prices in a bit if the hardware is still open.

well let's see, I snitched two of my basement light fixtures (4 ft flourescents w/ 2 bulbs each) but I guess they cost about 15-20 each at Home Depot that and the fertilizers come to about 50$ for a start. to keep up on the ferts. I will need about $50 more, and to transplant from the (free) milk jugs to a 3 gallon size well just multiply my plants by cost of buckets (20 x $XX.XX). that's it. I'm not a big commercial dealer just looking for personal use so I never have to pay for it (thru a dealer) again so a toatl from seedling to final harvest is about $100-150 total plus my time and effort. that's it

Haven't gone to the store yet, but I'd like to price out my normal grows too. My one starter & cloner used a quad 4ft floro setup, my sexing chamber used 1 42w cfl, and my one flowering chamber used 1 42w cfl's and 2 26w cfl's and my other flowering setup used 1 125w cfl and 4 42w cfl's.

Lights:
4ft floro setup = Free from closing business
CFL Bulbs = approx. $25-30 at local hardware and I used alot of lighting.

Electrical:
Sockets and wiring = Free from past lighting fixtures
2 Timers = $10

Setup Materials:
Starter and clone setup = Free; Turned a past headpost into a 3 stage lighting growbox
Sexing chamber setup = Free; Turned an old tv stand into a sexing growbox.
Flowering chamber = Free; This one was an old fashioned garbage can grow.
Flowering area = Free; kept an old table in an empty room. Hung bulbs from ceiling.
White paint = $5; have about 50 bottles of flat white spray paint from an auction.
Fans = Free; had a few extra in storage.

Growing materials:
Nutes = $10-20
Perlite, Topsoil, Peat, & Vermiculite; one bag of each = $5

So far I'm only at a total cost of $55-65. If I can think of anything I missed other than utility payments, I'll come back and write it down.

Thanks to some of you for your answers. Three days later and the buds are filling in. I will stick with this set-up for now. And yes, I did spend more than I had to, but I always overdue things. The cabinet is really nice, and alot of trial and error that added up. I spent $150 for an aerogarden which was a mistake - too small and you have to add water every night. My next grow will be soil. I agree that it could have been done for cheaper. I should have never listed how much I spent.

ED