how many watts for 30 plants!!??!!??

Originally Posted by UncleBuck

30 plants @ 2-3 feet after vegging and hoping for 1/2 a pound per plant?

go with about 25k watts to be safe. you might be able to pull it off with less.

justification: wants 8 x 28 = 224 grams per plant. wants 30 plants. 30 x 224 = 6,720 grams.

an expert grower can do a gram per watt. something tells me that although ambitious, we don't have an expert grower.

so go with 1/2 gram per watt, about what a decent grower can pull off, that gives us about 14k watts.

throw in beginner error, that gives us about 25k watts (roughly).

good luck.

thx man but i dont think ill be doing no 25k maybe when i have more cash and go into a warehouse ill do that but ima go for 5k right now and half pound per plant should be to hard my last grow i got qp in a 2g pot that i let veg'd until it was a foot tall but i topped the shit out of her so i dont see why i cant get half-pound in 5gal pots doing the same thing

Well, I grow 1 plant per light to produce a pound a plant. For 30, a min. of 12,000-15,000 watts will be needed to produce that little amount. Why not drop your plant count and produce bigger yeilding plants???

vaper

well see outcome thx for your opinons everyone except that retard.

Originally Posted by merkstillgrows

thx man but i dont think ill be doing no 25k maybe when i have more cash and go into a warehouse ill do that but ima go for 5k right now and half pound per plant should be to hard my last grow i got qp in a 2g pot that i let veg'd until it was a foot tall but i topped the shit out of her so i dont see why i cant get half-pound in 5gal pots doing the same thing

not hating dude but 5,000w to produce 15lbs. is just not gonna happen. that's like 1.4gpw on a large scale grow. you would need to do some kind of vertical stadium grow or something. even then you're not getting 8 zips off plants in a vertical grow. think of it this way...to get 8 zips off a plant it needs to be like 6-7' tall and like 3sq.ft. around. unless you SCROG each one and that would be a bitch. you'd need a TON of space. anyway, plants that big (7'x3') require a ton of lighting. say you set them up 5 plants by 5 plants. that's 25 plants but it makes a nice even lighting footprint. 5 plants at 3 feet means 15'x15'. a 1000w light has a footprint of 5x5 under perfect conditions. that means you would need 6 of them just to cover those 25 plants. and then another 2000w to cover the other 5.

Originally Posted by merkstillgrows

i got 30 girls in 5gal pots im looking for atleast 1/2 pound per plant vegging for them to be atleast 2-3ft tall hopefully topping 3-4 times please let me know what i need to reach this goal

If you want to grow a 15 pound crop then what you need more than anything is a LOT more experience than you probably have.

When you're ready to do what amounts to a small/mid sized commercial grow you'll know how much lighting you'll need, how to maintain your plants, etc. Starting off with that size of a grow with negligible experience is a recipe for disaster.

The fact that you already have 30 plants going, but don't know what sort of setup you want to put them in, means, at the very least, that you didn't quite think things all the way through here!

Not to be too mean about this, but the FIRST thing you do is setup and equip your grow room correctly. There is a lot more to it than just plugging in a whole bunch of lights. There are electrical safety issues, cooling, ventilation, potentially light movers, humidity, odor control, etc. These things aren't "rocket science", but they're absolutely critical to a successful grow. You do these things BEFORE you start sticking plants in 5 gallon buckets.

But to answer your question, as a first approximation, figure if you're a competent experienced grower, you can pull maybe 0.75 grams/watt with the right strains. So your 15lb target equals about 6800 grams, meaning you'd need roughly 9000 Watts to get there. If you're a top level experienced pro grower, AND you use the right strains, once you get everything perfectly dialed in, you might be able to do it with only 7000 watts of lighting. Note that these figures exclude other necessary energy consumption from cooling, fans, timers, security, water pumps, etc.

Now though it "could" be done with that little juice, it this actually applied to you, you wouldn't be asking the question.

As a novice, you'd be lucky to pull 15 lbs with 13000 watts of lighting.

My polite suggestion to you is to start smaller. Once you have 3-4 crops worth of experience growing only a few plants and strains at a time, THEN you might be ready to move to gigantic kilowatt commercial sized grows, but not before.

Originally Posted by merkstillgrows

li did a test grow with 150w and pulled off a lil 4oz so im pretty sure i can do it.

You can divide, right?

If you grew 4 ounces under 150W, then to grow 15 lbs will take you 9000 watts.

Interestingly, that's exactly the number I quoted in my post above.

But the important thing to realize here is that a 9000W grow operation is a different "animal" than a 150W one. There are a lot more design and setup issues you need to consider before you can get a grow of that size going.

I, also, was not expecting my plants to be this big... I have 5 under a 1000W and there's not much room... My suggestion (I don't have much experience - but still) would be to do a perpetual grow on the strains you have, picking the best to clone along the way, maybe 15 at first with three 1000W's, picking the best to clone and maybe even scrapping a few strains along the way. Then with the next one, do the clones and the next 10 pre-started seedlings for maybe 5 clones + 10 new strains. Then you'll keep 15 plants under there at a time, find your strains you like, and have a (somewhat) perpetual grow going on. Maybe start seedlings when you take clones? Then the seedlings would be ~2 weeks behind. Just my two cents.

thx for your input everyone, well see were this takes its self. Has anyone ever used genoratores to grow and would that be more expensive then electricity?