400, 600, or 1000w hps/mh which is best for my set up?

In a 3X7 tent I would into a cooltube refelctor unless you can find a regular air cooled light hood that will fit in there good. Depending on how many plants you want to do and how big you want them to finish out at will help determine how many watts of light you would need. With HID lighting you got increased heat. You already got the fans that will handle that size of tent but also need to take into consideration the ambient temp of the cooler air being brought in and where your exhausting your hotter air out to. If you can vent the hotter exhaust air out into another room or outside that would be a plus.

 

3 isnt alot of grow space so 3 maybe 4 plants at most. 400 watt light would be plenty 600 if you could manage the temps. We use a 1k HID light setp up in a flowering room and we have to run a window AC in the summer for heat. The thing is you always want to leave a little bit of room to work with. If your gonna do medium sized plants then 2 plants. Our flowering room is 6X6X7 and we can squeeze 6 plants in there close to each other and they finish out around 4 feet but thats a crowded. It leaves us room to work aorund them but because light hoods are limited in the size of their light foot print. We use a Raptor light hood and its light foot print is about 5X5.

 

The only two in your list that I have grown is the Chocolope and the Pineapple Express. For indoors I would go with the Pineapple. I`ve grown both outdoors but the Chocolope really outstretched the Pineapple in flowering. The pineapple was medium to large size dense buds while the Chocolope were small dense buds all over. Both plants put out about the same maybe the Pineapple by a little bit more when it came to dryed & cured total wieght.

 

yeah doing some Buddha tahoe OG but ran into a nute defficiency problem. It seems that the new type of nutes were trying out is pretty weak, low NPK numbers and with them being in coco the problems hit fast. Going to transplant them into some Fox Farms Ocean Forest soil sometime tommrow and give them a dose of some new nutes that are stringer on the NPK. Coco is like a hydro grow in the sense that you PH everything the same as hydro. In hydro when problems arise they can hit fast leaving you less time to correct the problem as compaired to a regular soil grow where soil is more foregiving. If we get two good mother plants out of these 6 their gonna get cloned for an outdoor grow along with some other strains for this summer.

 

I have a 4x3 grow area and run 1000w using 10" fan in air cooled hood. Mines digital and has adjustments. If I did it again 2 600's would be brighter and cheaper than a 1000. Remember that temps need to stay under 85. The more light the more yield, however. I can fit 9 plants in 7 gallon Geopots in my flowering room. I veg for about 2 months and I top the plants multiple times.

 

Yeah 2 600 watt digital lights would be the way to go even better if he can go with a 240 volt set up but he`s growing in a 3X7 tent. The only way I can see that working inside was if he were to run a portable AC which would still eat up some room inside the tent or find a way to vent it inside the tent. Then he would need to run the hot air exhaust hose either outside, into another room or up into the attic. If you got some idea I would like to hear them as well on how to make it the best and efficient as possible.

 

The 600 watt dimmable ballasts are the most efficient when it comes to watt of electricity used per lumen of light generated. With a dimmable ballast if the temps start to get to hot you can always dial it down to a lower watt setting. With HID lighting you want to figure about 80 watts of light per plant minimum. The more light the better but once you get aorund 1k there is going to be alot of heat to deal with. LED lights are nice since they dont put out alot of heat and the one you have would work as a supplemental light or for one small plant. I would look up the strains you have and look for a couple that finish out around the same time or just shortly apart. Personaly i like to do strains that are more sativa outdoors because they can stretch quite a bit more then an indica strain.

 

I have grown Sour Cream indoors before. It didnt stretch much more then the more indica ones growing next to it. As for digital ballasts theres Digital Greenhouse, Quantum, Phantom, Lumatek and a few others I dont recall the name of right now. I heard of people having warrenty issues with Lumatek a while back and one grow shop near me that has been around for years quit carrying Lumatek because of it. I would look for a dimmable one.

 

Alright. A couple things. You're likely going to be successful because you invested the money in pretty decent equipment. You have enough ventilation to run a cool tube with a 600w HID, and can still use the big fan for the carbon filter. Make sure you have smaller circulation fans going. Plants gotta breathe. Consider upgrading your tent, space permitting. It might sound counterintuitive, but going from 3x3 to 4x4 tent almost doubles your square footage. That means 4 can fit in their comfortably. You have good genetics, and will be happy with any of those seeds. I think it's easier the first time to grow 4 of the same plant (same watering schedules and tolerance of the environment) but sounds like its not an option. By a book and read it from cover to cover. Lots of good ones out there. Make sure you've read up on ph and nutes and record everything you do. Make sure you have a healthy respect for the plant, but don't kiss it's ass. Good luck.

 

at least a 1000 watt.... i use two 1000 watt tents to veg and a separate room with 3000 watts for flower, fox farms soil general hydroponics organics fertilizer line (awesome stuff) aeroponic cloning machine....just remember, if you have the room go with the most light possible....i forget what the exact minimum number of lumens needed to grow cannabis but i belive its around 50,000 per sq ft...as long as you dont set the tent and plants ablaze, the 1000 watt is enough to grow 5-7 plants really well and up to 9 so so. i use 5 gallon buckets mh for veg then mh/ hps or just hps for flower

 

ok.. the last guy is way wrong.

The SUN gives 10,000 lumens per sq foot, 50,000 lumens per square foot would be retarted and unproductivly wastefull. To even get 50,000 , it would take 3, 1,000 watters in your 3x3 area to get 50,000 lumens per sq foot.

A 600 watter is best for efficiency and it will provide almost 10,000 lumens per sq foot to your tent at 85,000 lumens per bulb divided by 9 sq feet.

If your looking to get a good yield fast, id recomend doing a hydro scrog with rumple bubble buckets. Easy to DIY and make for a reasonable price. Thats just my oppinion and what I personally did myself.

He also has a DIY cloner that is crazy useful, but you would need a reverse osmosis water filter. If you have that, its just add water and let sit. no special anything. and a claimed 100% success rate

Scrog method will increase yield , tho it would be ideal to be able to get to 3 sides of your tent from the outside, otherwise you'll have to cut like 1/2 of a foot off the front part of the screen to be able to reach.

Here is a pic of results of one plant that rumple did his his Bubble bucket scrog. He uses co2 so without co2 it wouldn't be quite this good, but still. It's what inspired me.



Below here is a post I made to someone else in the beginner forum trying to convince him that the bubble buckets were the way to go in my opinion. I was going to link the links for those here, so i figured to save myself time i'll just quote that post.. Pardon the hugeness of it, Tho it does have some information in it. Gardenmaster a high rep guy on the site liked the post so it must not be that far off.

P.S. I agree with the other poster that said It would be better to grow one strain. Go pineapple express, thats what im currently growing, and I did so because it is also my first grow. =D I bet it will smell like god's vagina.

Feel free to post follow up questions if you like