Long Light Floral Cycles?

Does this work?



So could I turn on the lights for flowering plants to, say, 36h on and only 12h off, this way skipping every other night. And the plants will still stay in flowering mode?

Did anyone ever try this out and can confirm it'll practically work out well?

edit:
the pic is taken from Prof. Lee's "Marihuana 101"

I have heard of this before and found it interesting, there was actually a study done which verified that you could keep a plant flowering this way, but there was no mention of increased growth. On top of that I dont know if the study was cannabis specific or not.

After a certain point in the day Im pretty sure that the plants metabolism slows down significantly, after a certain amount of consecutive hours of light photosynthesis begins to slow down. Im not sure about specifics and imagine it would differ between strains. I dont think this would cause you to be able to harvest any more quickly either.
In order to reduce flowering time by altering the photoperiod it would make more sense to gradually reduce the length of day by say 15 minutes every other day until you were at 11:15 or 10:45 or even shorter day lengths. I dont have anything to back this up, but you certainly wont see me going out to spend 100$ or more on a special timer to try this out.

I've heard it also that after a few hours photosynthesis will go down in rate. I assume this is due to internal sugar storage whatevers are being filled up. There was that guy who did give light 4/4 4/4 4/4 each day and still successfully veg. But without a control-group-experiment we'll never know if that did also result in the same level of growth than the same plants would do if under 24/7 lights.

The book mentioned also stated that under 24/7 growth would occur the most with 18/6 suffering about 30%, and 16/8 up to 45%. If you do the math you'll see that it'snot even a linear loss - it's more than what would've been expected, the author claims that this is due to metabolic processes that first have to rise slowly once the light goes on again.

If a 18/12 or 24/12 or 36/12 lightcycle doesn't increase harvest-weight or cut down bloomtimes then there's no point to it. But I doubt it. IF the plant receives power from being under light for 36h and stay in flower it will try to use that energy, mostly in trying to form buds. I have a digital equipment and 2 similiar tents to try this out, but IÄm not going to flower anything for the next 6 months.

edit:
The book is also quite detailed about light-cycles and from what I can gather the author gives the impression that the more light a flowering plant will receive during its lightcycles the bigger the buds are. That is, some strains may only need 11h of uninterrupted darkness to bloom, and if that's so, the author recommends giving 13h light.

But how long could the light-cycle potentially and maximally be until the plant "thinks" it has to revert to vegging again? Could I, uhh, give 12h darkness only 1 time each week? The plants circadian rhythm only works in 24h steps so actually the whole lightcycle as illustrated above seems unnatural to me.