Adding 5 more days of photons, just for your precious girls !

Hey Folks,

Been running a small test this past year. With various groups of girls we have gathered together

Thus our team found:

1- Going from 24 hour of vegging to 14 to 14 1/2 hours of light daily, instead of the usual 12 hours, appears to help plants flower quicker. In many cases our team saw flowering occur as early as three days if plants are pretty healthy. (an unhealthy plant, no matter what can take a month to flower.) The average however seems to be about 4 to 5 days. Less than 1/2 of the usual time.

2- Most of the different plants involved required absolute darkness to flower, and man when we say darkness; we mean like the Marianas Trench kind of darkness. Were not kidding !

3- 14 1/2 hours seems to be the max in pushing the photons, as 15 hours or more slowed down growth and in a few cases some plants even started to revert back to the veggie state. ( those few plants then took two weeks to get back to their normal growing status, once we dropped the light back down to under 15 hours.)

4- The test were ran were mainly on hybrids (jillyBean, Pandora, etc.) One time we actually threw in some unname bagseed just to see what would happen, p.s. they handled it fine.

5 - This will give you a little over a hundred and twenty extra light hours per your end grow. The overall buds were only about 10% to 15% bigger compared to previous grows of the same kind of plants. (We were planning and hoping for a least 20% increase.) but except for "1" plant that for some reason had about a 150% increase in overall size and yield, the rest only topped out at a max of about 15%, as mentioned.

6 - It was also assumed, that in lew of the added extra test time, (even with a little more on yields results), it would however carry a penalty of an increase of time to reaching maturity for another at least another week or more.
a- Majority of plants tested, matured either on time at 60 days or before, which still has us puzzled ??? ( the extreme end was almost a month early, and yes, all of it weird to say the least!)
b- There was one grow were the plants did have their time increased by about a week. This however was the for-mentioned grow of particular plants where we pushed a few of them beyond 15 hrs. About 8 plants slowed down their growth. Three more begin to revert. And the rest went on with out hindrance as far as we could tell. In talking about it, the final thought is to just lay out the facts as we saw them and then let you make up your mind on what it all means to the each of you, the Growers!

7- About 70% of the 50+ plants involved throughout our grows this year, were done in a passive hydro, single pot/ single plant environment. The rest were in a combination of quality dirt with a 50% to 100% general hydroponics solution. (We did start out at 100% solution and slightly burnt a few of the plants early on. We then made the decison to slowly up the strength of the solution from 50% to 100% over a week or two with each consecutive grow.

8- The light source ( at least for this particular years test) were done totally with 100 to 150 watt CFL's. It was decided early that that we didn't want to risk blowing out the circuits here, because we have several large electrical "thingies" going on here. And over cooking this turkey dinner using the the HPS lighting, as good as it is, just wasn't an option for our team on these tests.

9-The discussions of pictures and documentation came up several times. In the end however it seemed pointless to put up the hundreds of photographs and various scientific facts we had collected in hundreds of hours of research. Most, but not all is avalible on Google or else where on the internet. Also more importantly ,with one of our team members, working at a highly classified government position and another (for all intents and purposes) and who as far as I can tell is just nothing more than extremely paranoid; it has then been decided to just make these test strictly as a reference point for the general populus here and let the real Veterans here at RUI prove or dis-prove them. We had fun and gained some serious insight on things here. If nothing else, mabey that is enough for us, for now!

Thank you all for your kindness and patience here at RUI. We wish you the very best on all your grows.
 

Total Head

Well-Known Member
very interesting indeed. i wish i had the extra space to try this out. i would love to see some others try this and post some results. some of the outcomes may have been strain or pheno dependent and any extra data on it would be very exciting.
 

TwooDeff425

Well-Known Member
hmmmmm, interesting idea....any chance someone could do a side by side w/ pics to compare? id be very curious to see that
 
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