Newbie needs advice with fluorescents !

If you can get T5s get those. CFLs are more of a pain as the spectrum for growing is about 2-4 inches from the bulb. You could use CFLs for side lighting.

Fluorescent Grow Lights

 

I am also no electrician but most wiring is so simple that once you do it a couple of times you can apply it for most electrical items. It is also very easy to find diagrams online and information on what wire goes where. Of course always ensure the wires are dry, not plugged in etc all the usual safety stuff and you will be fine. Of course I am not saying to go and start rewiring your house but simple stuff is very easy once you get the hang of it

 

i,d like 2 c some good pics of these t5,s in action, mostly around flowering time. i,ve heard stories about grows with these t5,s but i have,nt seen the pis. how close do u keep the lights from the plants? i,m interested in these t5,s also..i sure dont want 2 do any wiring---lol.

 

heyjude, i,ll keep an eye out for yur grow. i,m still gonna stick 2 the t5s for now, i can always change my mind later on. good luck!

 

i,m trying 2 find a grow journal done with t5,s in these forums but i,m not having any luck yet. the reason i,m gonna use the t5,s is cause i already have a 4 bulb unit and 2-2unit lights, but i,m wondering what those lights will do 2 my electric bill. they r the 4 foot lights. i figure the 4 bulb unit on top and a 2 bulb unit on the sides should give off plenty of light. but like i said, i,m trying 2 find somebody thats done it already and hear about or evan see their results...........

 

I am doing one plant (bagseed, but i have others to compare it to that are currently under flowering under HPS) that is about a month into veg right now under a 2 foot 4 bulb t5 and i honestly cant believe how well it vegges these things. Like astoundingly well... super fast, super healthy looking and some of the fan leaves early on were 3x the size of the ones i did under MH.

12/12 started yesterday. Ill be posting pics of it soon in my other thread, or starting a grow journal more likely, because that is what this thread is becoming anyways...

http://forum.grasscity.com/indoor-marijuana-growing/1075561-experiment-hermi-crosses-some-nycd.html

I also built this t5 setup for 4 plants in 4 gallon square pots... its got 6 lamps in the 12 inches usually devoted to 4 so im hoping it will work well too for a future closet job.

http://forum.grasscity.com/lighting...-flourescent-tube-12-x-48-pics-questions.html

 

im sorry, are you retarded? they run on 120v lol sure... then they take 24W per bulb so usually 96W for a 2 foot 4 lamp one... 96W is not a lot of power for growing reefer. Its not really enough actually. the fixture uses nothing though. im kinda grossed out by how stupid that sounded. sorry.

 

let,s all just smoke us a big fatty and get along now. all answers to questions asked will always get several opinions, i enjoy all the answers cause it gives me alot of info to use. but i would like to keep it on the friendly side........

 

If you reached adulthood without knowing what 120V means, or thinking it will cost you money than you are super sad.

THEY 100% for sure WERE 24W bulbs... I promise. and 100W is minimum so if you cant afford 5 dollars a month you cant grow reefer.

You may have done "reasearch and math" lol but you dont understand how power works...

you are infuriatingly stupid.

peace.

 

right... and what bothers me, is when people say things that arent true... like all of that stuff. NO T5 SETUP USES 5 dollars a day. 5 dollars a day is roughly 25 kwh per day if you are paying 20 cents... which is high... that would be a 1000W system running all day and then some!! and 28 cents a day would be fucking 1.5 kwh or about 6 watts... NONE OF THAT MAKES SENSE!! 28 cents a day man??? show me the calculations or shut the fuck up.

a 2 foot 4 lamp t5 will use 96W and therefore in a whole day will use 2.4kwh running constant! that would cost around 50 cents a day! not 5 dollars...


you are dead wrong! about all of this. you "research" but arent capable (apparently) of understanding what anything is or means or does.

show me the math that illustrates a t5 setup that sucks 5 bones a day and then the math that shows "your setup" lol that grows reefer for 28 cents, and then... then... ill show you how its wrong. Because it is. And you are dumb.

Read a fucken book.

 

well, i don,t know where the post went i just sent, i think i sent it advanced so i dont know. i,m real new to computers so i,m always pushing the wrong buttons---lol. any how, if i can run 6 or8 4foot t5,s without drawing a red flag is what i,m worried about. i run 4 and 5 a/c units just 2 stay cool right now so i,m not worried about spending a few extra bucks on elec if they dont draw 2 much energy. like i was saying in my lost text, i,m an old timer and i use 2 grow outside but it,s getting hard 2 find places anymore without getting ripped off!!!!! so i feel like i,m being drove 2 do indoors. but since i already have the t5 set ups i figure i dont have 2 invest in light set ups if these will work for me. and also, being an old timer i still feel the love and the peace but it sure seems 2 be fading away real quick these days. so with that being said i reacon i,ll start my day off with a nice phatty!!!!!!!-----and see what comes out of this new day. peace and stay green!

 

unless you are being completely insane nothing will flag... like 4000W or more insane. The power company will alert YOU first too, and not any law enforcement. Also, as always, the power usage is a zero issue for bringing on law enforcement... Thats a total misconception. The power records are an issue ONLY if there is already an investigation and they subpoena your records for evidence. If they get that far you are almost certainly fucked anyways, so dont worry about it.

Power doesnt bring the heat, it just helps them make their case if they catch you.

You can easily make a cool setup for 2 huge plants and take 4+ ounces a harvest for like less than running an xbox. Most bulbs are cheap too so you might as well get what suits you rather than trying to bend the T5's to your will, if there is an easier way for the kind of grow you want to do.

As for peace and love? Its all good man. I'm just viscerally intolerant of complete stupidity/ignorance... I don't want to be. I just am. The nerve it takes to come on here and ask questions and then just write fucken words that dont even go together or make any sense at all. Just a big ol' pile of words and numbers and a comical lack of understanding for how your own friggen power bill works!!!

People like this give weed smokers (and i guess just mankind) a bad name! There is no excuse for not knowing that 120v power setup has NOTHING TO DO with how much wattage you draw, or for being so adamant about your research when not a single part of it holds to its own accounting!

Yes i get mad at that, but only because it really does give me a stomach ache and make me sad that people are like this... Wake up!

If you need help with the finer points though, or you wanna see some CFL setups i could recommend, im always happy to help someone who is trying to help themselves. So feel free to ask.

 

i,m bumping this text to see if i can get any info from any one that is using t5,s for they,re grow......

 

Lighting is a very complex subject but some people try to make it a lot more complicated than I think it needs to be. First, you need the vocabulary of how they measure the light that you're using for what you want to do with your plants. I'm not an electrician and I certainly don't have all the answers but I'll try to simplify it for you.
Wattage is the load rating of a lamp or the amount of electricity that the lamp draws or uses. As I recall from a Physics class I took in the mid 70's, but don't hold me to it now because I don't have the book in front of me: “Watts is current/amperage draw times the supplied voltage,” and it's usually read in fluorescent lighting in a relatively small number. CFL's typically draw:14, 17, 21, 29 watts. Incandescent light bulbs draw: 40, 60, 100, and MH and HPS draw: 250, 400, 600, up to 1,000 watts. What that means is: the higher the wattage rating of the lamp the more electricity it uses and the more it costs to operate per hour. I think that's the important thing to know about wattage.
That's what got us all to convert to those little curly-cue CFL's, (compact fluorescent lamps), and they dropped my electric bill drastically on a level pay plan to the point where I don't even get a bill from the power company for three months of the year. Before my incandescent lights were burning 60 watts each, now they're using only 14. It makes sense.
The really tricky part of this is that they advertise the wattage of electricity they use and the amount of light they produce compared to the equivalent used by an incandescent lamp putting out the same amount of light. The ones I just bought claim they only draw 14 watts but they put out the same amount of light, lumens, as a sixty watts incandescent light bulb. The one I use on my clone mother draws only 29 watts but claims to put out the equivalent light brightness of a 100 watt incandescent bulb. Now is that clear to you? Or are you just as confused as everyone else? But we're not done yet.
Lumens are a measurement of the amount light, the intensity/brightness a lamp projects and it's usually measured in hundreds of lumens. I don't know where the top of the scale is but the new brighter, Ecosmart CFL lamps I just changed over to in my home advertise that they generate 850 lumens of light while consuming only 14 watts of electricity. Now you don't have to light a match to find the damned things at night when they're turned on like their earlier predecessors. My wife used to bitch that the old ones being too dim to read under but now she complains that the new ones are too bright. Go figure. Now let's consider the color of the light they're producing for what we want our plants to do.
Color, frequency or temperature of the light it produces is measured when it's run through a prism and seen in the available spectrum of colors. It's measured in Kelvins; K's. These new lamps I bought are rated at 4,800K's, which is pretty close to my 5,000K green/blue T-5 grow lamps I use in my tent for vegging. The lower the K's, the redder and the warmer the light. The higher the K's the cooler the light and the color goes from green to blue. Cool, green to blue light is for vegetative growth and warm red light is for flowering. Got that?
If you can keep that straight, think about what the sun produces during the year. In the spring and early summer the light is bright and cool, it has a higher K rating number; it's greener toward blue and our plants grow. If you have a copy of Cervantes's “MARIJUANA HORTICULTURE THE INDOOR/OUTDOOR MEDICAL GROWER'S BIBLE,” look at page 160. Grow lamps are green to blue and that's the cool light that's suitable for vegging. Come fall we get those beautiful warm red orange sunsets and the light is red and warm and that's the 2,700K red light we use for flowering.
Now let's look at the practical side of this. I'm going to fool my plants with the right diet and lighting to go from seed sprouting to harvest in half the time they would normally need in nature. From seed sprouting through vegging I feed my babies a high N diet that's low P and K to go along with the 5,000K grow lights and the longer time period the lights are on. Right now I'm using 5,000K T-5 grow lamps for my plants to veg under. I'm told this is a moderately green light they like for growth and photosynthesis.
One grower I know uses 6,000K's lamps and another uses 6,500K's. I was warned against the higher K rating by a person I trust at the hydro store. The other lamps cost a little more but my friend at the hydro store claimed he sees less light related problems with the 5,000K's so that's what I bought, and they've worked fine for me. Most people have these on for vegging anywhere from 24 to 20 to 16 hours a day. You choose.
When my plants begin to preflower I change their diet to a lower N and higher P-K nutrient blend and the lamps in their T-5 fixture to warm red flowering lights that are rated at only 2,700K. I also drop the light interval, (the time they're on). Some folks go directly to a 12/12 schedule but I use a progressive light schedule. Mine start under 5,000K lamps for 20 hours of light at seed planting with 4 hours of resting darkness. I reduce the light by one hour a week. They start preflowering at about 14 hours of light and 10 hours of darkness and I change the lamps to red 2,700K's and their diet to a lower N and higher P and K for flowering. But the progressive light schedule was a brain fart of one of my teachers and that's another issue altogether. I've already explained it here in another post.
After some experimentation I settled on a progression to a bottom figure of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness and stayed with that until harvest. And the strains I'm growing seemed to really like it.
So if you're asking elementary lighting questions I suggest you RTFB. Refer to the following sources: 1. Read: SeeMoreBud's book, “MARIJUANA BUDS FOR LESS GROW 8 OZ. OF BUDS FOR LESS THAN $100.” 2. Read: Jorge Cervantes's book, “MARIJUANA HORTICULTURE THE INDOOR/OUTDOOR MEDICAL GROWER'S BIBLE.” 3. Read: Ed Rosenthal's, “MARIJUANA GROWER'S HANDBOOK.” 4. Read: Mc Carthy's book, “GROWING MARIJUANA.” 5. Read Greg Green's, “THE CANNABIS GROW BIBLE-SECOND EDITION,” it's every bit as good as the ones I mentioned above but, like Rosenthal's, it's a lot more technical.6. You'll want to subscribe to, “HIGH TIMES,” magazine. Each issue is full of useful information. .” All these resources are very well written, well illustrated and packed with information that will answer most of your questions before you know to ask them. All of these resources are available at major book stores and at most growing forums. They will save you and your plants a lot of stress. The only problem with these forums is that if you get in a jam and need help right away it may be a while before we can get back to you. I sincerely hope this helps. Hank