My 164 Watt CFL Grow

Just thought some of the other CFL growers might like to check out my set-up. This is a project that has been going for a few weeks now. I wanted to try and grow some decent buds myself because my locality has been notorious for over-charging on pot lately, and to be frank, I am tired of that shit. 60 dollars is still a lot of money to me, and I don't like using it to be ripped off on a shitty eighth that I felt obligated to buy because a friend is "hooking me up". Growing myself, I will be able to take my time finding good quality ganja deals as I will always have my own to fall back on. All of the little guys are bag seed. Two of the seedlings are three weeks old and the others two weeks. I plan to LST the two plants in the larger containers and top the small ones, maybe a couple times. I do intend to buy a larger pc fan later on in the grow, at which point I will use the small one I have now to feed the exhaust. The exhaust will later be attached to a home made carbon filter to be constructed soon as I am already able to smell the plants just a lil' bit. The light hangs from the cord so I am able to adjust the height to meet the babies needs, thinking about adding another later on we'll see. Any tips are welcome as I'm pretty new to this.

Light: sylvania 65 watt 4100k roughly 5000 lumens(this cfl is HUGE)
Soil: miracle grow all purpose potting soil
Ventilation: small 12 volt pc cooling fan with exhaust hole near top
Nutes: plan to use cheap wal-mart organic bloom nutes(there is enough nutes to veg in the soil)
Space: a cardboard box(thats right motha truckers, a cardboard box) lined with stark white sketch paper
Photoperiod: 18/6

holy shit man if thats ur only bulb ur plants a dooomed i got like 12 rite now 6 warm 6 soft n just settin em up is gettin me worried

Its a 65 watt man its about the size of four 26 watt bulbs. I opted for one high watt cfl as opposed to several small because lumens do not add up. having a bunch of small cfls just gives you lots of low intensity light. if you have 12 23 watt bulbs rated 1800 lumens each your plants are still only getting 1800 lumens. the larger wattage light allows a light intensity closer to 5000 lumens, which you cannot acheive no matter how many 23 what bulbs you have. plus, as i mentioned i may still add another 65 watt, this time warm spectrum light to the box. just look at the plants, they're doing just fine.

Should be interesting to see the out come of this grow. Good luck buddy. You might want to research fixing light horizontaly

ghostsamurai25 said:

Should be interesting to see the out come of this grow. Good luck buddy. You might want to research fixing light horizontaly

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yeah i thought about that, actually. i thought maybe if i just zip corded it to the roof on the side, i dont think the bulb gets hot enough to melt the plastic, maybe wrong though. but then it would not be able to be dropped close to the plants, conundrum. i think im going to add another light anyway though and the socket splitter angles them so the side faces the top of the plants at an angle.

Darkness - how did you determine the lumens don't add up? Say you have one 42w bulb 2600 lumen or two 23w bulbs 1600 lumen, are you trying to say the two 23w bulbs only total 1600 lumen together? If so I would rethink that. The higher watt cfl's kick off more heat than you think, I just pulled my 42w bulbs from my flower cab and added five new 23w 2700k's for a total of ten on my two gals. With the lower heat I can keep them close and the plants are doing great. It is not about how big of cfl you can get, it is bulb placement.
Second you are using a 4100k bulb, that is like trying to drive you car in neutral. At the stage you are get 6500k bulbs, you will see veg go much faster.

Can I ask something here? I can't seem to find 42Watt cfl's anywhere.SHould I look for lumen #s on the packages?

FWIW I just found the 42W CFLs at Target. They have a red tag in the upper right hand corner that reads 150, indicating it is the same as a 150W "regular" bulb. $7.49 each.

E=MC420 said:

Darkness - how did you determine the lumens don't add up? Say you have one 42w bulb 2600 lumen or two 23w bulbs 1600 lumen, are you trying to say the two 23w bulbs only total 1600 lumen together? If so I would rethink that. The higher watt cfl's kick off more heat than you think, I just pulled my 42w bulbs from my flower cab and added five new 23w 2700k's for a total of ten on my two gals. With the lower heat I can keep them close and the plants are doing great. It is not about how big of cfl you can get, it is bulb placement.
Second you are using a 4100k bulb, that is like trying to drive you car in neutral. At the stage you are get 6500k bulbs, you will see veg go much faster.

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First off, LUMENS DO NOT ADD UP, look it up from a trustworthy source. i heard a good analogy once. its like two cars on the highway, if two cars going the same speed merge they are still both going the same speed, whereas if another car comes speeding up at twice the speed he would fly by both cars. or like a machine gun firing at a brick wall, having two makes no big diff, but add a canon and blow the whole wall down. Just the same adding more small cfl's just gives you MORE low intesity light, more evenly spread, thats the only advantage. But I assure you, the highest lumen bulb one chooses to use trumps the smaller ones in intensity. Oh, and 6500k daylight spectrum is FULL spectrum light. 4100k cool white still resides mostly in the blue spectrum, and if anyone would read the first post I am adding another light later on.

oh and my plants stay at just the right temp, thanks

what dankness says is partially true, but you can completely curve that notion by placing your CFLs close, i mean i sued 27 watts all of them every single one and some are kinda far away and i am seeing great yields, but it does have some truth to it, dankness' lights will cover more areas as it is bigger and is more intense therefore the light will go father (in a whole 360) so it can reach that much farther, but if you can afford to/ have the patience to place 2 27 watt cfls in that same little area you will see the same if not more light actually reaching the nodes, the kelvin spectrum doesn't change, only how far that light will penetrate, so there really is no lost buds or anything from using less, i use 12 1800 lumen cfls though so my shit is fine either way, 21600 lumens

the rate of lumens per watt and dollar around me is unbelievable, the 27 watts are 1800 while 42 watts are 2400 and 65s only give off 4600 and cost like 18 dollars, a 3 pack of these 27s is 6 bucks so i find it awesome for the price, you get lumens out the ass for jack shit

So how are the plants doing now? any pic updates?


As far as comparing small cfl's with larger cfls... I think the important deference comes in how it is applied... in my grow... a few smaller cfl's spread around give me just what I need... but if my setup was different, I can see myself going for a larger CFL or even HID.

What ever your thoughts are on lumens and heat and all that..... what we need to do is to a side by side comparison with 3 small 24w cfl's -vs- 1 65w cfl. And then sit back and see how they do on 2 similar clones..... any body up for it?


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IM new to growing and was thinking about starting my first grow would 8 T8 flouo tubes supplemented with 3 105 watt CFLs be sufficient for flowering? A little help will be greatly appreciated

If so what type of budding can I expect

E=MC420 said:

It is not about how big of cfl you can get, it is bulb placement.

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Lol I'm glad to see you took my advice to heart E!

Let's all get off Dankness's ass about his choice of light, and congradulate him on starting this beautiful grow! Awesome job, bro. Can't wait to see the end results.

Secondly, (as we've all heard) CFL's lose lumens significantly by distance, so I can see where people assume the bigger the amount of lumens, the better, but if you have to keep a 4800 lumen bulb 4 inches from your plant you're probably actually only getting (+/-) 2400 to the plant. This is what E=MC420 was saying. A 2400 lumen bulb can be placed closer without damaging the plant, giving 2400 lumens directly.

It's whatever you choose to make it. I think you're doing a great job, but remember the plants will grow and will need more light! Keep it up!!

Ravioli said:

Let's all get off Dankness's ass about his choice of light, and congradulate him on starting this beautiful grow! Awesome job, bro. Can't wait to see the end results.

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Can't argue with that =]


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Thanks guys, but I maintain that LUMENS DO NOT ADD UP. So take a look at this and see if you can help me out. I just did the mod to allow my light to be in close proximity to the babies, and I noticed some browning and curling right on the tip of the inner blades of the third leaf set. I held my hand in front of the plant and didn't experience any noticeable excess heat, and I keep them like three inches away. also, my pics suck but there is some... i guess you would call it spotting? but not rotting, more like its dryed out or something, watered yesterday...fucking weird. anyway you can kind of see it on the left side of the middle blade, it looks light green buts its more turning dark.

I just moved the bulb up a few inches, god well maybe some of you were right about the heat the big ones cause, but i am not altogether convinced that's the problem. the other plant in the 6" pot is just fine, so I don't get it. please reply soon I don't want this to get out of hand.

It looks a little over watered to me, but you seem to know what you're doing, and those pictures are crappy, so I'm not sure. If they're browning and crisping it's definitely the light, if they're just drooping then it'd be the water. They should perk up within a couple hours to a day in either case.

You're right, though, about lumens adding up. It's the lumens that actually reach the plant that I was talking about.

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CFL lumens dont "add" like HID because the intensity isn't very high. The light doesn't travel as far. A light meter only a few inches from even a larger cfl bulb shows massive falloff. hps and mh lights produce light that travels far enough to make the "adding" noticeable. If you tied two cfls together and measured the light right between them, about an inch away, you would see the lumens "add." larger cfl's do get better "range," but cost per lumen goes down considerably.

I use a mix of both. during veg i use smaller 26w bulbs above and vertically hanging between plants for maximum coverage. for flowering my scrog, i use higher wattage bulbs above the canopy because i dont need any "sidelight."

i like quotation marks today =/

READ THIS THREAD:
16k lumens HPS vs. CFL