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Old 08-05-2011, 05:54 PM
jamromhem jamromhem is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Central Florida
Posts: 143
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it is a pleasure to meet you as well. I have little to add as far as crop production and so on yet. I am on teh fence about HIDs due to their initial investment and heat increasing. I am growing in my house and in florida I am not wanting to pay too much more for cooling lol.. It is not as bad is GPS for cooling, but I don't like to spend more than needed.

I am currently using 2x 6500k@32W each, and 2x 5000k@32W each on my 6ft lettuce settup. It is set up to expand to 3 6ft 4x4 vinyl posts. I only have 1 in there at the moment. I have only been running it for a couple days and have little to show as far as plants :P a couple 1 inch tall lettuce that are in shock from being put in the STG cube (I am testing them. I hate fiberglass and decided to try not to use rockwool. I used to work in a fiberglass plant and went from impervious to it "not feeling it" to hyper sensitive lol)

I currently have a few tiny lettuce, a tomato seed starting to push a root, a lettuce seed pushing a root, and a few other seeds that are getting wet lol..

I am hoping to get more from the flourescents even if I have to run a little more by taking advantage of being able to have them stretch over a long area, and their long life/low power usage.

I am currently using 128W for 10k lumens (more calculations in my previous post) over a 4ft area. I am thinking this would be less than favorable to try to replicate with HID lights. The investment/running costs would be significantly higher for a non flowering plant.

I am going to be testing tomatos later and each plant will probably have some 400W each. (3 walls of 128W settups surrounding the plants). I will have multiple breeds of tomatoes near eachother and don't want cross polination so they will have isolation booths and only share the nutrient flow.

I will be stepping up the lighting little by little to see what the plant requires. starting at about 128W a plant and slowly step it up as the plants tell me what they want. I will probably do a test booth with a full settup and then build a booth with the custom light requirements for the plant.
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