Am I better off with MH or HPS for autos?

autos are no different in their lighting needs verses any other plant. if you can run both simultaneously that would be ideal, but if not then mh veg and sodium flower will give you your best results.

 

Completely disagree on "run both is better". If you need more intensity get a bigger wattage lamp.

Blue wavelengths are higher energy/shorter wavelength. Stimulate faster creation of sugar through photosynthesis. This means plants grow faster under heavier exposure to blue than red. MH gives off heavier blue, HPS heavier red.

Reason to switch to HPS in flower is that the plant requires less intensive sugar conversion...all the energy is going to "growing the babies"...like a pregnant woman, she needs her diet changed a bit, less "energetic" food taken in in slower, smaller doses, if she's not going to top 350 pounds after giving birth, but ENOUGH energy to grow healthy babies. Less energetic red wavelengths produce sugars slower, and more consistently.

An auto is going to veg for however long it vegges, determined by genetics, and flower when it flowers. The difference in light delivered is "how MUCH it will grow" and "how much will it yield, and what quality"...do it 100% under heavy blues, it'll veg like mad...but the flowers are going to be less quality, and likely less mass for volume. grow primarily under red, it won't grow as big during veg, but the flowers will be a lot better for what weight you get. Plant switches stages of growth, so should light.

 

Dunno why not, if you can manage the heat. I'm running 2 1,000 watt HIDs, a Solar Flare 200, a pair of LED spots, and 8 watts of reptile bulb in a 5 by 10 footprint tent, and the plants are loving it.

 

all I can say is prove it. Show me the data......

 

If you try to divide the tent you need to make sure its 100% light proof so light from the veg side doesn't leak into the flower side when the lights are off, so the ones in flower don't stress out. I bet it would be a huge pain in the ass and then depending on how you attach the divider it could always fail allowing light threw without you knowing until its too late. i use separate set ups for flower and veg, keeping separate is the best way to go. Plus your only in a 4x4 set up it will be tight as hell setting up 2 different spots inside the same tent, really limiting how much you can grow, probably only a plant or 2 on flower side by the time you get stuff in there, double the lights, double the fans, etc. Then there's humidity, lower humidity is needed for flower so buds don't mold, but on the veg side you ideally want slightly higher. I'm sure its doable and has been done before, but it sounds like a huge pain in the ass and then too have to have the divider possibly fail after months of time and $ would be so disappointing. Even setting up some CFLs in a closet to get plants started works well that's how I started out. Timed it so they're ready to be transplanted into their final pots and moved into the tent when the ones in the tent were finished with flowering, worked great.

 

Might have. Some tents do state such limitations, usually correlated to the quality involved. But I've seen it done with great results. And I'm getting great results in the system I described.

 

Which data would you like? That the blue wavelength is more energetic?
Simple version
 

Blue is shorter wavelength. Thus higher energy. Higher energy means more energy to convert nutes and water into sugars, sugars are used to create the energy the plant uses to grow.

Photosynthesis explained, simple version 
 

 
 
Red wavelengths are lower energy. Lower energy means it won't convert light and CO2 and water to sugar as well. Which means less energy for growth. More blue, more energy, more growth.
 
However, if it gets too much energy in flowering, it continues to grow, instead of flowering as well.
 
Multiple reasons, but the easiest way to illustrate is, as you approach the end of outdoor growing season, the area it's being grown in is tilting farther from the sun, less of the naturally occurring blue reaches the plant (blue is refracted by air, which is why the sky is blue), more of the red...and that's when they flower, even though they start flowering at 45 degrees latitude (about Portland, OR or Denver, CO latitude north) around mid August...even though you don't get 12/12 light conditions until the last 10 days of September. It's the fact that the balance of red intensifies daily that actually causes this. When the plant isn't getting as much "rapid growth" light, it knows its time to flower, because soon enough it won't get enough energy to do so, and without flowering, it can't reproduce. In a way, reproduction is the whole purpose of existence for any individual living thing.

Is that the data you were looking for, or would you like a different form? Perhaps a comparison of outdoor light qualities across growth periods of a normal season compared to what running a MH and an HPS side by side delivers in equivalent bandwidths? Outdoor plants yield more...anyone should know this. They do so because outdoor conditions are what they developed to thrive in, over a few million years. So they will do best if you do YOUR best to deliver them the conditions they developed to prefer.

Can't be effectively done properly indoors...you just can't manage it. But with a bit of concentration, you can come as close as YOU can for YOUR conditions. And running blue-heavy MH alongside red-heavy HPS doesn't do so. Blue-heavy MH mimics grow season throughout the veg stage. Red-heavy HPS mimics what happens outdoors as days get towards and past fall equinox.

 

I have done autos under hps only for years works great

 

I don't screw with autos (have the patience, legal status, and space not to)...but shooting from 2 node clones to 10 inch bushes that spread over the sides of a 12 inch bucket after 2 weeks in soil, and are this healthy:

 
View attachment 148616

And single node clones going from buried to the point where the initial fan leaves literally sit on the soil, and the next node is just starting to form, to 2-4 inch plants in 4 days (though, being 4 days in, they're still a touch shocky, as you can see if you look at the group pic)
 
If you're not matching that kind of growth, they are missing something mine get...whether that's proper nutrition, higher energy light, more sugar development, or what.

Usually the difference that's most obvious is light energy. DEFINITELY an influence if you're using something delivering more low energy red than high energy blue bands.

But only that...an influence. You can grow in sub-optimal conditions...all indoor growers do. We can't come CLOSE to matching what they developed naturally to need, outdoors. But ideally, you want to get as close as you can, to get the best results.

 

 
you're hypothesis is lacking in several areas. you've taken several fields of data and combined them into your own hypothesis, without any science, just thoughts.
 
"Outdoor plants yield more...anyone should know this."  exactly and yes i can manage it just fine, perhaps you have fallen short but i  and many have not.
 
i could post some cutting edge data that's being done currently, but i wont because i do not have permission to do so at this time, but may in the future.
 
btw- blue and red stay pretty much the same seasonally adjusted at the equator, that alone should be enough to demonstrate you're hypothesis is null.
 
did you know cannabis can use red wavelengths far better than blue? no you didn't, because you don't have access to the data sets that i do.
 
i'll leave you with this though, "the closer you can get to reproducing sunlight indoors, the better off you will always be" has stood true for tens of thousands of years of plant evolution.
 
 
here are a couple blue and red bud shots from my last grow, tell me do they look like they're lacking something to you?
 
View attachment 143610
View attachment 143612
View attachment 143613

 

Yes, they use more red wavelength...the span of the red band is wider than that of blue. More exists to BE used. About 590 nm from useful deep orange to 750 borderline IR in red (a span of 140 nm of bandwidth), compared to about 400-500, blue through violet (a span of 100 nm in bandwidth).

http://csmgroup4project.wikispaces.com/file/view/spectrum.png/215302814/spectrum.png


But energy (frequency) is MUCH higher in blue.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrTcXZa5HlUXpcA75WJzbkF;_ylu=oDMTIzbTc2ZmZ0BHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZAMxNzU0MzBkYWIxZDZlMGVmZmQ1YWU2OTcyODJhOGViMQRncG9zAzYzBGl0A2Jpbmc-?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3Dvisible%2Blight%26_adv_prop%3Dimage%26va%3Dvisible%2Blight%26fr%3Dyfp-t-307%26spos%3D12%26nost%3D1%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D63&w=685&h=413&imgurl=escience.anu.edu.au%2Flecture%2Fcg%2FColor%2FImage%2Fspectrum.gif&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fescience.anu.edu.au%2Flecture%2Fcg%2FColor%2FvisibleSpectrum.en.html&size=26.8KB&name=...+energy+having+wavelengths+in+the+range+400-700+nm+as+%3Cb%3Evisible+light%3C%2Fb%3E&p=visible+light&oid=175430dab1d6e0effd5ae697282a8eb1&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-307&tt=...+energy+having+wavelengths+in+the+range+400-700+nm+as+%3Cb%3Evisible+light%3C%2Fb%3E&b=61&ni=288&no=63&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=1233mq6kf&sigb=14c348ep1&sigi=11np0vjik&sigt=12dtu8t3t&sign=12dtu8t3t&.crumb=UKruQYoo.5T&fr=yfp-t-307


 
 
https://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=AwrTcX1Z5HlUCFgAUxuJzbkF;_ylu=oDMTIzMzkzZDFrBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1nBG9pZANkMjU3NzJiMzgzYWJjYmJhMjM1OTZlYmM1NTBjNDgwMARncG9zAzExBGl0A2Jpbmc-?.origin=&back=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3F_adv_prop%3Dimage%26va%3Dvisible%2Blight%26fr%3Dyfp-t-307%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D11&w=528&h=365&imgurl=csmgroup4project.wikispaces.com%2Ffile%2Fview%2Fspectrum.png%2F215302814%2Fspectrum.png&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftraversqneers.blogspot.com%2F2011%2F09%2Finfrared-visible-light.html&size=20.4KB&name=%3Cb%3Evisible+light%3C%2Fb%3E+spectrum&p=visible+light&oid=d25772b383abcbba23596ebc550c4800&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-307&tt=%3Cb%3Evisible+light%3C%2Fb%3E+spectrum&b=0&ni=288&no=11&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=125qqcnfh&sigb=13dgvnom6&sigi=12diu6rhn&sigt=10tg7o8fa&sign=10tg7o8fa&.crumb=UKruQYoo.5T&fr=yfp-t-307
 
E = hf

E = energy of 1 photon or light particle
h = Planck's constant
f = the frequency of the light

A difference of 1.7 X 10^5 joules at 700nm red (lowest red bandwidth) to 2.4 X 10^5 jouls at 500nm blue (lowest blue bandwidth)...or, in total spread of useable light, a range between 2.4 X 10^5 and 3.2 X 10^5 blue-borderline UVA, or 1.7 X 10^5 to 1.8 X 10^5 borderline IR to deep orange.
 
 
While you're correct, at the equator, light quality changes very little throughout the season, giving fairly close to equal balances of emissions (neither set of bands is much affected by additional diffusing by having to travel through more atmosphere), Can you deliver equatorial intensity sunlight to your plants? I sure as hell can't find ANY way to do so under manufactured lighting without the production of enough heat to torch your house in a heartbeat if you move the emitters far enough away to avoid flat roasting the plants at the nearest points so you can get that intensity throughout the plant.

Which translates into "they ain't getting tropical condition sunlight, Bob."
Usually they're not getting temperate zone conditions sunlight, in intensity.
But in temperate zones...what are the qualities of natural light? From winter solstice forwards, increasing amounts of blue wavelength in balance, decreasing red, comparatively. From summer solstice, blue starts decreasing, red increasing. If that's the intensity (or less) you are able to deliver, that's the pattern you follow ideally, yes?

 

 
you still have posted nothing but conjecture, isolated data and hoping someone will believe your theory, it's all good as i like people who think.  you and i can very well emulate the sun indoors, if the electricity bill is not over bearing. as a side note you should know that "plants" in general can adapt to an array of changing natural light conditions by changing how and what wavelengths they use at the time.
 
you should know that plants require full spectrum light at all times to accomplish this task as well.
 
i accomplish this by using proper cooling, proper RH levels, organic soil, open bulbs with no heat shield glass covering them up and my plants literally grow to the bulbs. it can be done and is far less complex than one thinks.
 
 
i have at least one plant now growing within inches of a 400 watt 10k bulb, with no signs of heat or any other detrimental effects during flower.
View attachment 148453
View attachment 148451

 

Correct about adjustment to spectrums...that's why under some light conditions, leaves are darker than under others. Absolutely can't argue that. And yup, we're in agreement as to how hardy the plants are...that's pretty much my point, throughout the posts being "slammed". They're hardy, "by the book" conditions aren't necessary, and really don't have the impact imagined. They'll adapt, and do passably if you give them anything NEAR what they like, any place they grow well.


As for delivering sunlight intensity and wavelengths (or at least the useful ones)...delivering 128K lux at the base of the plant without "overdoing it" at the top, with manufactured lighting...I'd like to know how you figure to accomplish it in the footprint available, even using a hood.

Industry standard for emissions rated in lumens is "at emitter"...being impossible to ACTUALLY get that, with an incandescent (which is where comparison standards originated), it's actually considered "at one inch from the core" or "against the glass housing surrounding the actual emitter at 1 inch".

You get 1 lumen all the way down, in a "single photon's path"...but light diffuses SO you have to calculate loss between emitter and 1 meter to figure 1 meter lux (scientific standard), or jump straight to 2 meters, with a known "fall-off" of 25%...at the bulb, a 92,000 lumen bulb provides 92,000 lux, which means 2 meters away, it provides a "mere" 69,000 in direct footprint.
Figures for a typical 1000 watt HID, which typically has about a meter square "direct" footprint for every meter in height, with use of a hood.
A hood reflects, typically, at about 75% efficiency, going by ratings on various products I looked into before buying. But adds about 40%, average, to the light intensity, between the inefficiency of reflection and increase in distance traveled from the emitter to the matching point of "impact" (if direct light at 2 meters is 69,000 lux, effect of reflector and direct light is 96,600 lux in direct footprint, as an average).

So you'd need about 1400 watts of HID light for every square meter of space at the base of the plants to match sunlight intensities average in tropical zones, all focused in the same footprint. At 18 inches over the top of an 18 inch plant..."too much" light, to get proper light at the base. At 18 inches over a 5.5 foot plant, the top of the plant is getting (marginally) "too much" (inverse square). At 24" over a 4 foot plant, the soil level leaves get about perfect amounts, and the tops are getting light just a *little* stronger than average normal intensity in tropics...or about what you'd see at the equator on a bight summer day, possibly.


All check, so far?


LEDs measured in PAR...comparison of emissions of a given bandwidth. Depending on the efficiency and accuracy of the LED in question, you have no more than 15nm on either side of the rated wavelength. So you'd need about 6 channels of varying "borderline IR" to "deep orange" to match the bandwith coverage in those spectrums an HID provides...with emitters that are inefficient and imprecise enough to have that 30nm variation.
Those 6 channels, all rated at a 1 to 1 PAR, would EQUAL the intensity in red. If they were 4 to 1, those 6 channels would give 4 times more useable red. But, by what I've been looking up, the LEDs used typically have no more than 5nm on a side variance from rating. 10nm total.

Need 17 channels of near-IR to deep orange to match the coverage.

Without it, there are gaps. If your gaps exclude 50% of the total useful band range, your effect is going to be half the PAR the emitters supposedly deliver. Might be right on the money for 700 nm at 4 times an HID, but completely missing at 690. Effect? Between 720 and 690, you get only 2 times the effective light in those useful bandwidths, yes?

As I've openly stated multiple times, between focusing lenses, increases in emitter strength, addition of channels, the introduction of better targeted emitters....LEDs are catching up (if you spend enough money, surpassing) HID, at lower heat and electrical impacts.

I assume, since you're not able to disclose the technical information you alluded to, it's for products not yet on the market? Then of course they're the next step up. Whether better PAR ratings, better spectrum coverage, better focusing lenses, any combination of the above, each successive generation is getting better. A couple years, there will be no doubt they are superior. 3 at the outside. Able to deliver intensities/values in the most effective bandwidths for less heat and less electricity for reasonable investment.

In the end, yes you CAN do it under balanced light (400 HPS 400 MH), but unless you ARE delivering daylight sunlight intensities, those aren't the conditions the plants are used to, for best growth...tropics work under a far lesser range of daylight/nighttime periods (staying 12/12 constantly at the equator), but the RH and temp conditions vary less, not just light wavelength balances. Move out of the topics, where the light intensity varies more, they use more and more blue during veg, more and more red during flower, and they start and end season with far less than 12 hours of light. At 45 degrees latitude, 11 hours of daylight mid October, 10 by Halloween.

And the light's less energetic and direct. And intense.

So if you're delivering intensities normal for temperate latitudes, not tropical....not conjecture, reasonably called theory, as the hypothesis bears out mathematically and in practice, but it hasn't been proven to be DISprovable, at this point (and probably can't be), and you are using temperate light CONDITIONS (timing, temp, intensity), then relative bandwidths in use are also called for, to get equal results.

With more trouble in ANY form of gardening coming from overcontrolling, and trying to provide "perfect" circumstances, changing conditions too far too rapidly (or too often changing them in significant amounts, in some cases, like pH or nutrient use), "perfect" circumstances, IMO, and IME are to try to mimic natural RANGES of what the plant deals with under the conditions you don't have the control over to make them "naturally variable"....THAT much is opinion.

Sure, if you can deliver tropical conditions steadily, from light intensity to timing to wavelength, do everything else you can to keep the environment stably within tropical ranges of conditions. 70 to 80 degrees, RH 40% to 80%, CO2 balances, neutral to a half point of acidity in soil....But if you CAN'T do so, you work within the tolerances of what you CAN provide steadily. If you deliver temperate zone temps and intensities, use blue-heavy and an 18/6 light timing. What the plants get when they're vegging best at those latitudes, keep the temp between lows of 50 and highs of 90-95, only BRIEFLY sitting at the extremes (and remember the upper end of temps there are for the US midwest...those summers are hard on hemp family plants), trying to avoid topping 70 during flowering, humidity between 20% and 90%, variable...avoiding the extremes as much as possible, but there's your acceptable range.

The plants ARE hardy, and will adapt to a lot. We agree on that. You won't hurt them keeping things "perfect" by the book, or by matching tropics conditions. But you won't hurt them matching temperate conditions, either. A BIT of extra care taken in certain aspects, you won't hurt them matching Anchorage, Alaska conditions. But the less able you are to match tropical conditions with the things you CAN'T work within "proper range for the locale", the less able a comperable natural environment will be to keep the REST in "ideal balance", and the more "range" you have to be loose with, yet have healthy and happy plants.

 

BTW...when you CAN release those specs on that new system...or point me to the product itself, please do...I'd love to check it out. I find light endlessly worth study since finding a practical use for it outside of classroom conditions a LONG while back (and they were quite a while back...hence having to go back and look up some formula on occasion when calculations don't add up to what they should, obviously enough to make me go "now that's not right"--love the math involved, occasionally completely fuck up the applied principle).

 

i have to apologize, it was never my intention to try and change anyone's minds on this topic, you take care and have fun growing the way you wish to my friend. cheers

 

wanted to mention though as far as aiding in getting the proper photons down to the lower canopy, for anyone it may help. what i do is prune any side branches during veg, usually up to about the 10th -13th node depending on the chemo type. i let the fan leaves on them, but just prune out any side branches because by the time i flower, i then have about a 18-20 inch deep canopy to service, instead of 3-5 feet.
 
with the remainder of the "deeper canopy" as nothing more than fan leaves. i measured the surface temp on that plant i mentioned was an inch or so away from the bulb, 99 F is what i got with no signs of degradation to leaf or other plant material. surprised me actually that it's so healthy under that high of a temperature.
 
anyway hth