Tuff

Who r u? Srry but o dont member u!

topping is pretty simple.
you cut the top off of the plant, the very top where the newest growth is. typically there will be a node with 2 big fan leaves on the top of the plant, right on top of the 2 fan leaves is the node with the new growth. when you cut off this new growth, instead of one main stem growing back, there will be 2 main stems.... let the plant grow 2-3 more nodes (a node is the spot on the stem where the leaves and buds grow from) and top it again, now you will have 4 main stems... you can do this over and over to get a plant with as many main stems(or colas, as they are properly called) as you can handle. i find that 6-8 main colas give thye best yield on my strian. any more and the buds get smaller, any less and it is a waste of space and time, as it takes the plant a good week to recover from the stress of being topped.

yeah you can switch to 24/7 as long as your not budding yet.. they might wilt a bit for a day or two but they will be fine. if you are flowering, depending on how far along the plants are, the change may mess with them a bit, as it interrupts the hormone cycle of the plant. a 'revegged' plant will take a week or 3 to get used to the change in lighting, and u might see some wierd growth for a bit, strange leaves and whatnot, but 9 out of 10 times they turn out great once they get used to the lighting change. some people have been able to get 2-3 harvests off the same plant by doing this, after running a full flower cycle, instead of killing the plant and starting over, you can switch it back to 24/7 from 12/12 and save weeks of grow time.

Roseman (another member of this site) has the time to actually write some pretty extensive and very accurate threads on growing with CFL's, and he words them in a way everyone can understand, his work is an excellent reference for any grower, so i suggest you look him up...
hope i answered what you wanted to know, if not hit me back!



ps- sorry about the wierd message... it will make alot more sense if you read it from the bottom up! lame ass 1000 charecter limit

on timers: personally i run 24/7 when i am vegging. there is no need whatsoever to give your plants darkness while they are growing indoors during the veg cycle, unless your a miser and trying to save a few cents on elec. it simply extends the time of the grow, pretty simple. darkness during veg = longer time till harvest. i have found this out the hard way LOL! when i feel my plants are ready to bud (and I decide when the plants bud, always. if i cant control a plant then its useless to me, and just about any indoor grower. this is crucial to get big yields, as you must top or fim to do it. topping and fimming stress the plant, and a stressed plant does not grow, it stunts untill it has recovered from the shock) so i keep my lights on 24/7 to speed up the recovery from the the topping process. i top 3-6 times depending on how i think the plant will bud. it takes practice to get it right, tho some people just seem to get lucky.

another thing to consider is the placement, or height of the lamps. your lamps should be as close to the plant as humanly possible... but keep in mind your plants will grow, so keep them no closer than 2-3 inches from the closest leaf to the lamp. cfl's get hot, as im sure you know, not as hot as HID or halogen lamps but hot enough to kill your plant if you let the lamps touch the leaves. so to keep it simple, you want them sideways, you want them close, but not close enough so that the plant will grow into them while your @ work.

however, through my own experimentation, and the results of others on this site, i have determined that this is wrong! I always mix my spectrums now, always. the plants end up much more robust and just grow beautiful sticky, stinky awesome tasting buds that will get you stoned like you remember it in my 4 x 46w setup i use 2 3100k lamps, and 2 4700k lamps. this is what worked out best for me, however, it may not be the best for you, it just takes a little experimentation to figure out what works best....

reflectors are bad, in my opinion, and only should be used with HID lamps. they are heat sinks(trap heat and then radiate it into the grow room), and block more light than they reflect! also, cfl's should almost always be horizontal or as close to horizontal as you can make it. also, if you FIM or top, a cfl can be placed directly INSIDE the plant! this works great for the lower branches...

now concerning color temp, or K rating:
this is very, very important. commonly there are 5 colors of cfls easily available.
here are the colors with there avg k rating:
warm white/soft white: 3000k or less. most commonly 2700k
brilliant/bright white: 3500k
cool white: 4000k
daylight: 5-6000k

each strain (and sometimes each individual plant) has different lighting requirements, and it will take you more than a few grows with the exact same strain to determine what colors work best for your plants. however in your case, growing weed, you need to be concerned with just 2 of the 5 colors- soft white and daylight. thats 2700k lamps and 6000k lamps, respectively. some people will say that 6000k lamps should be used for vegging, and 2700k should only be used for flowering. this has been the 'standard' for quite sometime.

THE KEY to using cfl's is having the correct combination of wattage, color temp (also known as K rating... this is THE MOST important part of using cfl's) also placement is a big thing. buds grown from cfl's tend to be a trifle fluffier and extremely tasty compared to those grown with HID lamps; however it is the good kind of fluffy, not the nasty kind of fluffy you get with mexican schwag lol... with my 4 x 46 w setup i can net 1.5-2 oz's of dry weight off a plant that is less than 36" tall. (see threads on FIM, topping or supercropping for the trick to this)

as far as wattage, the more the merrier. you almost cannot have too many cfl's. However as your skills advance you will find that some lamps perform far better than others, which is how i settled on my 4 x 46. i would not ever have less than 150w (actual wattage, not what the bulb is rated to replace. if your using a 25w cfl that is equivialnt to a 100w bulb, than your actual wattage is 25w, not 100. remember that!)