Hello blades! This is my first plant EVER and currently my set up is pretty cheap and bare minimum until and I can build a good stealthy box thing. So I have these CFL Lights it says it's a 100w replacement and only uses 23w, it's 6500K and produces 1600 lumens. It is currently about around 4 inches from the bulb How far should it be at this stage? I plan on running a 18/6 light cycle or a 24/0 cycle. The sprout has only been out for a day. I will post some update pics if it gets bigger. Pics:
Never go 24/0 all plants need a sleep period and maybe a foot of space should do Sent from my PantechP8010 using Grasscity Forum mobile app
In the day time you get top growth and in night time you get root growth Sent from my PantechP8010 using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Your distance is pretty good. Generally keep your lights as close as you can without the temperature exceeding 30℃ but for the first week try and keep it a the temperature a little lower. 24/0 gives the most growth per day. Plants do not need sleep, even some animals don't sleep. Plants don't have conscious minds so don't sleep. Their chemical processes go dormant in the dark because of the lack of light but give them 24/0 and they love it. Roots don't only grow in the night time. If that were true none of my plants would have roots and they have plenty so that clears that up. You probably heard that roots only grow in the dark. Not strictly true either but they do better when kept in the dark, and it stops algae growing on them
what gold said, but just too add that's 30c at the top of the plant not the ground. im on 1st grow and made that mistake 2 plants out of 4 now. but the 2 survivors have turned into monsters
Gold hits it on the head every time. 24/0 is fine in seedling stage, they don't need "rest" at this stage in their life. When you go to veg (2 weeks, or after the first true leaves form) then you can drop it down to 18/6 and let them get those 6 hours of sleep. Also, as Gold already said...3-5" distance is optimal for CFL's. Too far and the plants will stretch, too close...and well...heat spots, deformation, death. Where you have it now is fine. My grow (in my sig) was all CFL and I got them into 6 weeks of veg with all CFL's and now have them under 1000w HPS, but you're doing it exactly right.
23 watts,just no, is it possible to put the plant in the bulb Sent from my GT-I8190N using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Shouldn't matter about the watts brah. It's still 6500K Daylight effect. On the box it says 100 watts with a cross over it saying it only uses 23 watts while getting the same effects as if it was 100 watts.
It's posts like this that make me facepalm so dam hard . The Kelvin temperature really doesn't have that big effect. 23 watts is only good for the first week really. 50w per square foot of area is the bare minimum, double that is a good figure. The 23w CFL is equivalent of a 100w incandescent bulb. Incandescent bulbs are not suitable for growing plants. They give off hardly any light per watt. I really wish people would stop comparing CFLs to incandescent bulbs with light output
It doesn't. But the light output certainly does. And the amount of electricity it uses is in direct correlation with how much light it gives off when comparing the same type of lighting. But comparing wattage of two different types of light systems is useless because for example incandescent lights give off way way less light per watt used than fluorescent lights. Even comparing lumens isn't really a worthwhile gauge because some parts of the visible spectrum isn't used as much by plants. Some parts of the spectrum give more energy than other parts too.
Yeah but that plant isn't going to die from being under that light a couple weeks. If you have the money for more bulbs now, by all means, go, now.
I mean I used friggin 2700k bulbs for like 3 weeks to start from seed and did fine. I only had 52 watts total. Real watts. 4 seedlings.
I'm not disputing that, did you even read what he said? But besides that, your "fine" and my "fine" may be completely different