I am preparing for my first indoor grow this winter and I have a question. I am going to use four 40W, 6500k fluorescent tubes for veg because they are cheaper to run. What I'd like to know is what wattage of HPS should I use to flower? The space I'll be using is about 4'x6' and I'm planning on having 4 plants in 15 gal pots.
OK. WTF? I've seen way dumber questions on here. I just want to know what wattage of HPS would be adequate for a 4'x6' space. I would like to use the lowest wattage possible.
if wattage is truly your concern, just flower with 2700k soft white cfl's. general rule is 30watts per a plant. as for your question i don't know the answer, but simply put the more light the better. you can probably get away with 250-400 watts
600w. You could do 1000w, if you could cool it enough, I like 100w per plant better. I have a different grow section blocked off with 7 plants under 400w hps & just loving the shit out of it.
I guess I steered away from the fluorescent lighting cuz I couldn't find any grows on here that used it. I can find lots of CFL grows, but no pics of the finished plant, so I kinda figured it must not work all that well. So how well does 400W work for your 7 plants? Cuz I'm only gonna have 4, so 250W would be good--easy to cool and relatively cheap. Thanks for the help!
Agreed, 400-600 HPS would give you nice flowering, and I would still use the flouros in the corners or wherever they would fit just for the extra light. less
The 400w works great, the thing I love about the lower wattage is that I can lower the light very close to the canopy, however the lower you go you start to loose the light footprint. My main grow area is lite by a 1000w hps, big fatty buds, but a pain to keep cool in the summer, I use a reflector open on both ends sucking fresh air in through the reflector & right outside, the glass still gets hot as shit though.
I happened to be driving through a town that has a hydroponics store and they said the same thing as you guys: 400W HPS for my size space. I'd rather pay for the extra energy cuz it's cheaper than bud I guess. Nonetheless, thanks for the advice.
for what it's worth, i got a nice harvest from my last grow, all T12 40W tubes. buy some of those plant & aquarium bulbs from walmart. they are 6 or 7 bucks each, but they are heavy in the red spectrum.. lumens and watts are really not as important as the quality of light in the plant's usable spectrum (for flowering, plants want a higher red spectrum light). here's a great post about lighting.