Request for Controlled Experiments subforum under grow journals.

Before I buy a new product I always research the hell out of it before purchasing, so that I don't end up with buyer's remorse and a product that ends up collecting dust. However, there is just so little information out there on the efficacy of certain products.

There are so many products available, some with ridiculous claims, that the first time grower usually ends up wasting valuable time and money.
I'm hoping to test the usefulness / validity of some in the near future, but one person is limited by space and time to the number of experiments they can do. I'm hoping that if we have a subforum like this, a lot of people will jump in and we'll have every product on the market tested in no time.

I think we should have an experiments section which will be like a journal except that people post results of their grow with a product vs without. (It will also bring more traffic to the site if that's desired).

Examples:

superthrive vs. without superthrive
Big Bud vs without Big Bud.
Topped plant vs fimmed plant
FFOF vs Roots Organic
FFOF vs Roots Organic vs Miracle Grow
Coco vs Soil
Foliar feed vs no foliar
metal halide vs HPS for flowering
CMH vs MH
one brand of bulb vs another brand

etc.. test criteria are endless.

There should also be a sticky with the guidelines for posting and the rules for anyone wanting to conduct an experiment.

Only one variable or as few variables as possible should be tested at a time.
There should be no other additives added other than the bare minimum to keep the plant from having deficiencies. In other words, base nutrient + cal/mag if needed.

Other obvious things like similar setup, tests done by same grower / same growroom, etc need to be mentioned as rules.

good idea mate

humpty dumpty

very good idea. i've seen a few experiment threads and they would be nice to have in one place

#1
Christiandome
Learning How To Roll
Learning How To Roll


Join Date
Dec 2009
Posts
33

This is an type of experiment our little team did; not with chemicals but with light, and there are many, many questions that need to answered before there is any conclusive evidence to be shared. It is perhaps, a small beginning of sorts..................

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 t

thanks. interesting how 14 hours will flower but right when you hit 15 it'll revert.
I put my plants outside to flower in mid July and they started flowering late July, which is kind of interesting because they're only getting 9-10 hours of darkness and 14-15 hours of light (with 4-5 hours of that being indirect light from 5-10am)

I was going to do an experiment with 2 hours of darkness in between every 3-4 hours of light in veg to see if the plants would grow faster or what would happen, but don't have the spare plants to experiment on at the moment.

bump. i really want to see this going if at all possible. vote please!

it's a very good idea. i just have these visions of the section getting cluttered with "dude how do i use these nutes?" threads. kind of like the smoke report section. it's a nice idea and there is a big fat sticky about what types of threads belong there. but over time the section has become extremely cluttered with people "reporting" on random sacs of no name weed they bought off some dude on campus. not what the section is for. i still like your idea though. it would be very helpful to have a special area to look through those types of threads.

well people asking questions in the thread is fine. But threads not about experiments should be removed.

So like... how many votes do we need to get this going?

any mod comments appreciated

keep bumpin this!

Would be cool to see results between the different brands and lights side by side

keep bumpin! what do mods think of this? \

Sounds like a great idea to me, especially if some sort of protocol can be established for the experiments in order to help eliminate variables. Also, a standardized format for the final reports would be helpful.

This idea has fantastic potential, I think!!!

Let's go, let's make this 100 votes and 100 replies!

I don't wanna have to keep bumping this everyday. Someone bump for me if you remember, thanks~

well this sucks. Do I have to keep bumping this? Or can we like sticky for a month and see what people think of it

Yeah, maybe the mods are busy because it's definitely a good idea. Growing weed is a science. Some things work better than others and this is a community, we should share knowledge. Controlled experiments would be great to see all in one place. Newbies would benefit greatly.

do the study

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

awesome idea!!!!! you can use me and my journals for cutting edge solutions full line up on the using side, used it both in hydro and now in soil on week 4 of in soil and have 3 harvest with it in a hydro.