Lighting wattage question

Hey guys, quick question about lighting. Im setting up a small veggie room and a small budding room, but I have 1 150watt hps and 1 250watt hps. Would it make any difference which room the 250 was in or vice versa? Im also suurounding both rooms with a few cfls.

Always more for bud

Thanks Rick. You guys think surrounding with cfls is usefull in both rooms as well? The way I see it the more light everywhere the better, but I know my hps are small. Hoping to keep moms and clones under cfls and the 150 in the veg room along with 4-5 girls. Sound ok?

You should definitely use the 250 for flowering, and for flowering the cfl use is not nearly as important. The plants love the red spectrum of light during flowering.

Use the 150 for seedlings/mothers and use cfls on the sides. When getting the cfls make sure they are more towards the blue spectrum, "daylight" bulbs, the plants need the blue light much more during veg.

Excellent, great info guys thanks. Im kinda confused with fert schedules too, we only have 1 hydroponics store in my area and I like to shop for that stuff with cash so I dont really wanna order things online.

hey man. what are your room demensions. i have a 4x2x8 flower room that i use a 250 and a 150 hps that i have in a horizontal configuration. the first grow i had in the room just had the 250hps set up. i was able to get 6 plants that i vegged for about 5 weeks (topped at 4 weeks). left me with about 2.5-3 ft tall plants and a little over 200 grams cured. problem was the optimum light that i felt was only about a 2.5x2 ft area under the bulb.

With the extra 150hps on the grow i am doing now i have fewer plants. only 5, but i am seeing larger bud production at 5 weeks flowering then i did with the last rotation. i am pretty confident i can use a little more than 3 ft of width at optimum light intensity.

i havent quite figured the whole mother thing out b/c i am terrible at cloning, but if you are just vegging from seed then flowering you dont need much room at all for the veg...especially if you are only vegging for 4-6 weeks. you can load a little cabinet with cfls (i used to use a 16"x16"x32" with 4-5 twenty something watt blue cfls and 1-2 45watt red cfls = 6 total lights). with that just keep the little guys as close as possible to the plants and they will thrive

i keep talking about lighting about optimum lighting because it is important in creating nice and DENSE buds. hps is great for flower cycle. however, the penetrance or distance of good light traveling isnt nearly as far as a larger bulb like a 600 or 1000 watt. with 2 small bulbs next to eachother you get light overlap...a larger effective grid, and overall higher quality buds.

My veg room is 4.5x4.5x7, low hagning lights and then I think ill surround it with cfls. My flower room is a bit smaller about 3.5x3x7. This will be my first grow with this setup and second overall. My first was with just the 150 hps one room 3 girls. I got the 250 so I could keep a constant little cycle going

i know less about larger rooms like that. you are going to need more light if you want to use the entire room for growing. i have never used cfls as sidelighting but you are probably going to need a bunch...may be more benefical to just get 1 600hps.

keeping the same lights you have now you should probably keep your actual grow area to about half of the sqare footage and use the sides for storage and whatnot. i am not saying buds wont grow in those areas...it is just that the buds will be more wispy and fluffy.

It is possible to grow dense bud, not "wispy" or "fluffy" using ONLY cfls, therefore I do not foresee you having a problem supplementing with cfls, but keep in mind the side lighting will take up space in the grow rooms and wont travel very far if your only getting the standard 23 watt cfls

and the shear amount of those cfl bulbs that you are going to need to cover the entire perimeter and being close to the buds is going to jack up your heat and wattage usage to the point where you are way better off getting a larger hps bulb

That is true, for the cost of running the 250 watt hps and 10x23 = 230 watt cfls.
You would be running 480 watts flowering.
150 watt hps and 8x23 = 184 watt cfls
and 334 for vegging.

A total of 814 watts.

You could get a 600 hps for flowering and a 250 watt Metal Hallide replacement bulb for your 250 watt hps ballast for vegging.

This would allow you to run 850 opposed to 814 total watts, and you would most definitely see it in your end product. You can get a 250 watt MH conversion bulb for $20-$40 and you will definitely enjoy the results.

Ahh thanks guys! Im not planning on using all the space in there for my girls. Its actually a much larger room, My plan was 4-5 plants under the 150 for veg and maybe It would be better to go with fluorescent tube lighting as fillers and for my moms and clones. I could put a 3ft tube in the middle of and 2 more surrounding the girls and another for the little ones.
Which brings up another question, would it be bad to put the 150 above and some tubes below like say at pot height? Would that maybe cause them to not want to grow upward?

Ok today I picked up a 4ft tube fluoro with 40watt grolux bulbs and a 4ft tube fluoro with 40watt daylight 6500k bulbs to go with my 150 and 250watt hps. It seems to me this setup should be okay. I need to get my nutes and a tds and ph meter and im going to germ some bag seeds I have. Out of 18 seeds hopefully I can manage one fem to make a mom from. When you guys are testing ph are you using soil meters or... how exactly do you do that? I also picked up a ph/light/dampness in soil peice of crap meter for $10 but I dont think the ph part of it trustworthy.

You are going to get what you pay for in most cases concerning ph meters. The flouro tubes are a very good idea simply because putting up numerous cfls around the sides can be costly and time consuming.

As far as having the flouros on the sides, that is fine, you are right that it might not encourage as much vertical growth but that is not a problem, if anything it will work in your favor and allow you to veg for longer without getting really tall plants.

With 18 seeds, as long as they are relatively fresh, you should be able to get get multiple females. What I would suggest is simple, you should be able to get at least 10 of the 18 seeds to crack the shell, veg them all (you have plenty of light/room) Out of these 10, you should be able to sex them and get at least 5 girls. You could then either throw all but the strongest out and keep her as a mother or just flower 4 of them, have some weed earlier, and keep the one as a potential mother.

This will not only give you some weed earlier, but it will allow you to watch the plants go through the flowering stage and will allow you to better know what to expect when you start flowering your future clones.

Good luck with whatever you decide, you setup seems great.

Excellent thanks! I think my assortment of lights in the veg room should work well now. Gathering up the last bit of things I need and should be germinating in 3 days or so, gettin excited!

i would use the larger room for flowering and the smaller room as your veg/cloning-seedling room. your plants will tripple thier size when put into flowering so if your plants almost fill your veg room dont think that their going to fit in your flowering room once they tripple in size. i would also use both the 250 and the 150 hps for flowering and just get some flourescent tubes for veg and a couple cfl's for cloning and starting seeds.the more light you have in flowering the bigger your buds will be

I personally would not depend on cfls just get a hortilux bulb that has a little of the blue spectrum. Then you are good to go.

grow1 said:

i would use the larger room for flowering and the smaller room as your veg/cloning-seedling room. your plants will tripple thier size when put into flowering so if your plants almost fill your veg room dont think that their going to fit in your flowering room once they tripple in size. i would also use both the 250 and the 150 hps for flowering and just get some flourescent tubes for veg and a couple cfl's for cloning and starting seeds.the more light you have in flowering the bigger your buds will be

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WildBill420 said:

Im not planning on using all the space in there for my girls. Its actually a much larger room, My plan was 4-5 plants

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Only 5 plants, your 250 HPS is fine for flowering.

However, if your going to use the 150 for veg, I would strongly suggest getting a 150 Metal Hallide bulb for it. MH provides a much more efficient light spectrum for vegetative growth than HPS does. It will definitely be worth the cost in the long run.

I know it seems most people prefer mh as a veg lamp, thats why I thought having the fluoros would help with that side of the light spectrum in that room. My budget doesnt allow for a mh or any more lamps right now, but my searches show that most people were pleasantly surprised with the hps as a veg lamp. Hopefully I have the lighting for the first couple grows and then I think I might pick me up a big mh and move the second hps to my bud room, just so I can personally experience the difference between the mh and hps if ya know what I mean

Yeah I understand. If you do decide to invest in a large light, 1k or so, you should get another HPS and then just buy a 250 MH light for flowering.

Good luck with your grow