Alternative light cycles

redcaes said:

A lil off topic but has anyone ever tried triggering flowering with 12/12 and and then just leaving the lights on 24/7? Is this possible? I mean from what i understand veg and flowering are triggered by sleep cycles. So if you don't let it sleep til it's done will it completely finish it's flowering in one really long ass day?

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best you`ll ever get is a 2 to 4 week run if you switch to 24/0 around 4 to 8 weeks into flower but after that they start to veg again and you just end up with bud sitting there with huge branches growing out of it

check out monster cropping, that`s vegging plants or clones from plants that are in flower, you get loads and loads of branches

churchhaze said:

8 hours of light will definitely reduce yield as it significantly decreases daily light integral. In order to keep DLI up, you'd have to use higher intensity lighting. In my opinion, it's better to increase DLI through extra hours than it is through light intensity.

You could just as easily save light by having fewer lights spread out over more area. (less intense light)

I flower under a 13/11 hour schedule, with a 730nm pulse after lights out. This allows me to get an extra hour of light per day and 1 less hour of darkness meaning a faster rate of leaf starch->sugar conversion at night. (allowing faster respiration) Me and other people using 730nm sleep pulses have all been reporting an extra harvest per year from flowering finishing a few days early.

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have you tried using a ceramic heater element to produce the 730nm instead of leds ? just thinking large scale a 300w ceramic heater a few meters above the plants would probably mean a lot less work needed to install them over putting up leds or units made for IR cams ?

redcaes said:

A lil off topic but has anyone ever tried triggering flowering with 12/12 and and then just leaving the lights on 24/7? Is this possible? I mean from what i understand veg and flowering are triggered by sleep cycles. So if you don't let it sleep til it's done will it completely finish it's flowering in one really long ass day?

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They need a certain number of long nights, consecutively, to produce full flowering. Even one interrupted long night will set back flowering. With just a few long nights and then 24 hr light, just a few loose flowers will form, and then all leaf again.

BobCajun said:

I've been trying some unusual light cycles for veg stage. I first tried 3/3 repeating and it worked pretty good but growth was slower than I would have liked. I've now switched to 5/3. I figure 15 hours a day of light should be enough. Why the short cycles, you may ask? It's an attempt to defeat midday photosynthetic depression and also to avoid the stretching that comes from long dark periods.

The 3/3 plants did indeed stay much more short and stocky than the same strain grown under normal 18/6, even though they only got a total of 12 hours a day of light. Some other cycles I've been considering are 6/2 or 7/1. Personally, I'm trying to keep power consumption as low as possible, which is actually why I tried the 3/3 first. Three more hours a day shouldn't break me, hence the jump to 5/3. I've also wondered if such cycles would be beneficial to auto strains or not.

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Sort of on topic, I think...

I've been thinking about mimicking seasonal changes with my lights. I built a DIY COB light with (2) 5000, (2) 4000, and (4) 3000k Cree 3070 series COBs. Each group is on its own plug. The simplest way I've used this is to veg under 200w -- the 4's and 5's, and flower under 300w -- the 4's and 3's. But there's nothing quite as satisfying as complicating something simple that has already proven to work...

I've thought about vegging under the 4's and 5's for a few weeks, and then adding the 3000's -- but using separate timers, so the 3's come on first, then 60-90(?) minutes later the 4/5's come on, and then "at the end of the day" it reverses and the 4/5's shut off first, etc. A couple of weeks into veg, I would also go from 18/6 to 20/4 in increments, to mimic the lengthening of days. I would maintain that for a week or two and then reverse it out, and start to shorten the days until I hit 12/12 (a half hour beginning and end of day would bring me from 20/4 to 12/12 in 8 days. I use those cheap mechanical timers with the flip tabs, each tab is 30 minutes, its not hard to knock an hour off a day). I'd run that for six weeks, and then drop the 5000's and move it to 10/14 for the remainder.

OK... no doubt I have too much time on my hands. The hypothesis is that a happy plant produces better bud, and the more "natural" the environment the happier the plant. Science is not in the building, this is just late night stoned speculation.

Humanrob said:

Sort of on topic, I think...

I've been thinking about mimicking seasonal changes with my lights. I built a DIY COB light with (2) 5000, (2) 4000, and (4) 3000k Cree 3070 series COBs. Each group is on its own plug. The simplest way I've used this is to veg under 200w -- the 4's and 5's, and flower under 300w -- the 4's and 3's. But there's nothing quite as satisfying as complicating something simple that has already proven to work...

I've thought about vegging under the 4's and 5's for a few weeks, and then adding the 3000's -- but using separate timers, so the 3's come on first, then 60-90(?) minutes later the 4/5's come on, and then "at the end of the day" it reverses and the 4/5's shut off first, etc. A couple of weeks into veg, I would also go from 18/6 to 20/4 in increments, to mimic the lengthening of days. I would maintain that for a week or two and then reverse it out, and start to shorten the days until I hit 12/12 (a half hour beginning and end of day would bring me from 20/4 to 12/12 in 8 days. I use those cheap mechanical timers with the flip tabs, each tab is 30 minutes, its not hard to knock an hour off a day). I'd run that for six weeks, and then drop the 5000's and move it to 10/14 for the remainder.

OK... no doubt I have too much time on my hands. The hypothesis is that a happy plant produces better bud, and the more "natural" the environment the happier the plant. Science is not in the building, this is just late night stoned speculation.

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My plan now is 5/3 for veg, since it's working fine, then 12/12 for the rest but on the last 2 weeks I'll have a 60w incandescent blacklight go on for 5 minutes when the main lights go off. That will simulate 14 hours of darkness and cause the plants to go into ripen mode. The blacklight puts out almost all far red.