Just as I thought I had my whole first grow planned out, I talked to a guy who's been growing hydro for about 8 years and he pointed out something from my plan that he disagrees with. My original lighting plan was to use a 125w daylight spectrum CFL for the vegetative growth of two bagseed plants, and then switch to a 250w (maybe even 400w) HPS for flowering. He said that it would be much wiser to just use the HPS the whole way through instead of starting with the CFL's. I'm on a budget so this actually sounded like good news to me. I'm just wondering what you guys think about this?
I was given the same advice by my local growshop. I vegged and flowered under a 600w HPS. No probs, but nothing to compare it with, so this grow I'm vegging under a 200w 6400k flouro. My new cabinet should be finished soon, and then I'm gonna veg 2 plants under 3x200w 6400k flouros, and the other 2 plants will veg under the HPS until I can see a difference in growth. It's a short term thing, as I'll need the HPS for flowering at some stage, but I thought it would be nice to have some comparison between the lights. In short, the advice is sound IME.
If your on a budget, then going with just the 250w or 400w hps would be your best bet. Most of the people that I know, Only use a 400w hps, for veg and flower, or use floro's for the first couple weeks of veg, then switch to hps.
yea, floros (tubes or cfl's) for small seedlings/clones until they are at least a couple weeks old then hps all the way. if you have the $ get a mh conversion or even a switchable ballast for vegging. but alot of people have said they've used hps start to finish with no problems what so ever (although i think they still used floros for early stages). maybe the grow after this current one i'll use just hps for veg and flower and compair the two.