Okay so before i begin, I AM 18! I made my own little PC grow box last night, rigged up to the teeth. I have 5 (23w) CFL's hooked up to it. and 2 computer fans for intake and exhaust I'm just wondering will this run my Electric bill so much that my parents will freak? I am going to use a 20/4 light cycle!! Thanks!
Not at all. If REALLY worried, conserve elsewhere. But cfl's shouldn't cost more than $5/month anywhere unless you are running hundreds of watts. My 513w grow increased my bill by about $15 in central Cali.
5 CFLs and 2 computer fans is "rigged to the teeth"? That setup will not result in you stealing a lot of electricity from your parents, only a little. But it's still stealing. It's still their house. It's still a huge risk that you are placing on them. Don't grow in your parents' house without their explicit knowledge and consent.
Here you go dude. 23 watts is .023 kilowatts per hour. .023 kwh X 5 bulbs = .115 kwh .115 kwh X 20 hours = 2.3 kwh 2.3 kwh X 30 days is 69 kwh So, if you use 5 CFL's which consume 23 watts of electricity each for 20 hours per day for 30 days, you will use a total of 69 kilowatt hours for those lights. HOW TO DETERMINE THE INCREASE AS A PERCENTAGE if you can find out how many KWH's your house uses in the average month, you can figure out the increase as a percentage quite easily. Now that you know your setup will use 69 kwh per month, just divide 69 by the number of kilowatt hours your house normally uses per month. For example, if you determine that your house uses 250 kilowatt hours per month, you would do 69 divided by 250, which is .276, or 27.6%.
okay thanks, and yea rigged to the teeth for my kind of work, i thought it looks good Thanks for the responses though! I'm really only using it to veg them up a week or two so they don't go to the wild weak :]
Not to start any arguements, but i am running a vegg on 24/0 at the moment. This thing is hauling ass. I read up a lot on the sleep cycles, and putting it at 20/4 is kinda throwing it off more, Since plants don't need anything but light. There's controversy to wasting 6 hours of a day to let the plant "Root" I'm rambling cause i'm baked. But my 24/0 plant is lookin fucking sick from my pc gb.