Autoflowers?!

You can choose a LED grow light, which is very kind for autoflower.

 

It aint the electric bill, it's the start up cost. Everybody uses qb boards now. How many and what kind is the new endless debate. 50 watts per square foot was the old rule. Now everything is par. But yeah, I love autoflowers, they need to run with the lights on 24/0. Leave your soil outside, go hydro/soiless indoors.
First you get the lights, then you decide what the optimum plant number will be based on those lights. Indoors light is everything and everything is built around the light. Run those autos 24/0 baby, you'll love it.

 

Light will depend on what size your grow area will be. 40 actual watts per s/f is a good rule of thumb. May I suggest starting with photos? What medium are you using?

 

I grow only autos, and wish I'd done so my first grow, but everyone has different preferences.
I get seeds from 3 sources.
Mephisto has autos only and ships from inside US. They are excellent. Order directly from them, to get more great freebies, not unwanted surplus seeds.
Growers Choice has autos and photos, and ships from CA.
Most foreign breeders won't ship directly to US, so a seed bank middleman is needed. I use Sensible seed bank to buy Dinafem and other foreign seeds.

Grow autos exactly the same as photos, except there is no need to switch to 12-12 lights.
The most popular lighting schedule is 20-4, followed by 18-6, then 24-0.
Feed 1/4 to 1/2 the nute pushers' recommendations or risk nute burn, at least that's true for hydro.

 

The problem with photos is they need total darkness whereas autos can be run in any spare room where light on all the time is no issue. FF is not too hot, it's just pointless if you are going to be dumping chemicals. I grow in perlite. Most add something to their perlite like vermiculite or coco. The elec is not even noticable now with these new qb boards. Perlite is the most forgiving of all because anytime you make a mistake you can run a gallon of water through and you are back to square one. If you were using any nutes outside in soil you can use those same nutes indoors in soiless. I find in perlite I can pretty much take any nute program and follow the manufactures recipe exactly and it works fine. But that gets kind of expensive. But yes I grew in organic soil in big Air-pots and that works just fine indoors if that is what you are comfortable with. Hard to mimic exactly everything that is going on outside in soil and you end up spending money on something just to fool a plant and make it think it is outside. Whoever told you FF is too hot for an auto is just passing on another auto myth. Nothing is too hot for an auto that hasn't already burnt a photo.
24/0 is optimum, but with autos you can shut down for an hour to cool off, or I turn everything off after dinner before going to bed just to get quiet and reset. So it's loose, any time on or off you call it, and it doesn't have to be the same every day. Just more is better. But less is fine if that works for you.
Also, you don't have to start with 4 plants because they are all on the same light cycle and you can just raise or lower new and older plants to keep them all at the same height under the light. I would buy the best light you can afford and start one auto seed. When you see how much you like it at 30 days start another one. Come spring you will be harvesting one plant a month.

 

If you can grow errorless on your first indoor try, then I say go for it. However autos are not more forgiving - if anything they are less forgiving. Autos have a predetermined life and any slow up in growth due to grower error or mistake will adversely affect your yield. Whereas any problem that should occur with photos during veg can be corrected before you switch to flower and not affect your yield. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with autos - I'm growing two right now - but I'm an experienced grower. I don't know too many beginners that can grow a plant from start to finish with no problems - maybe you can. Good luck with your grow whatever you decide.

 

I love autos man, I always have a few growing in my veg tent to just soak up the excess space and light otherwise it will be wasted

Something to expect is the size is hard to judge. You don't have any direct control of how long the vegging period is so the finished size can be a bit of a gamble

You will likely need to add nutrients at some point but it depends on the size of your pots and the soil you have in them.

HPS or LED are your best options, I really wouldn't bother with flourecents. It depends on how much money you have to spend on the set up and the size of your area

You could grow 5 autos in an area of 3'x3' or 4'x4'. A 600w HPS would be a good match for this. LEDs are a bit more complicated because many companies lie about how many watts the units use, but a comparable amount of watts would be good if you can be sure that the LEDs actually use that many. Also, some LEDs are a lot more energy efficient than others

Soil is a good option if you're already familiar with growing plants Ffof can indeed be too strong to start seeds in. Many people use happy frog for the first couple of weeks and then transplant to larger pot with Ffof.

600w is unlikely to make a huge change to your bill but it depends on how much electricity you already use. How much does your electricity cost per kw/h? It's very easy to multiply this by how many watts you have and then convert it to months to get your monthly cost

No, quite the opposite in fact. If you make a mistake with photoperiod plants early on you can simply veg longer to make up the shortfall. But with autos you don't get this luxury. But if you've grown before you probably will be fine

 

Happy to help man
I use these even in my soil grows. Mainly because I used to grow hydro and have a 50 litre barrels of the stuff which is probably going to last me for the rest of my life. When switching to soil I carried on using the same nutrients. It works very well ..



I mix up the nutrient solution to an EC of 1.6 Siemens per cm (about 800ppm)

My yield varies a lot from maybe a couple of oz to... I think 7oz was my biggest. But I guess maybe 4 is about average. 5 would be a good one. There are a lot of factors that influence this though

I use a 600w HPS in my flower tent and it works very well. I usually get just under a pound from it. I've had over a pound a few times

 

600w hid is a great light, if possible get a swichable and veg under mh and switch to hps at 28 days. All this too hot nonsense, you can start an auto seed in anything you can start a photo in. I start my seeds in something like Espoma organic seed starting mix or you can make your own 50/50 peat vermiculite. At day 30 from germ consider yourself in full flower and something like Maxi Bloom is a good choice or I still like my old soil combo Jacks Cheap 10-30-20 $10, with Magical.
I grow in 5 gallon smartpot/perlite/hempies. You'll have to really do a lot of things wrong not to get 3 oz from an auto in a 5 gallon smartpot.
Any novice can mainline an auto to 4 tops if you have height room because those 4 tops get tall, but with 600w hps you'll be fine. Each top will be approx .75 oz minimum, so there is your 3 oz.

 

I do hydro, 6 plants in two tents that add up to 17 square feet.
Using a platinum p-600, 3 qb-65 boards, and assorted fans/pumps runs my bill up about $60 per month.

 

GH Flora is fine, you are correct it's just a personal favorite debate, they all use the same ingredients. You can google around for the Lucas formula for soil which uses just the bloom and the micro. I would not add any nutes to prefertilized soil until I noticed they need something, and an auto will at about 30 days, then you can start pouring on the phosphorus in the Bloom formulas. Calcium is the one to be aware of. Some growers have enough in their tap water it is not even an issue. Others like me have to add it either in the fertlizer it is mixed in with or separately. Somebody sure scared you with auto myths. Man that Ruderalis they are crossed with is a true weed and wants to grow and get it over with fast and you can't really stop it no matter what you do wrong.

 

If you get an HPS its very much worth getting a dimmable ballast. It's a godsend when the temperature gets too high in the summer and you have the option to knock it down a few watts

Dosages are exactly the same for autos as photoperiods, they draw up the same concentration. This varies a little depending on your set up and individual plant but them being autos or not makes no difference

My personal rule which works out extremely well for me is to wait until the tips of a couple of leaves to reach out past the rim of the pot, (basically when the plant is wider than the pot) then either transplant to a bigger pot or start using nutes. Usually a quarter to a third of the recommended dosage is good at this point. Add nutes to every watering and you'll unlikely need much more than half strength even in the the middle of flowering. Taper off the dosage a bit in the last couple weeks as they take up a lower concentration because you don't want to end up overdosing the soil. This can make the bud taste not as good and its the reason why so many people rinse the soil at the end. If you don't overdose then you don't need to rinse the soil out