Anyone else tried a 21.6/12 light cycle

[Green Bag]

This is definitely an experimental thing. I've not tried it on more than four crops and not in any standardised way that allows me to compare it properly against a control. I've also only tried it on clones of two strains from tried and tested mothers who have no tendencies to hermi, even under stress.

I first read about this a few years ago on a forum (Overgrow, I think). The basic idea is that you have a 12 hour dark period and then the lights go on for 21.6 hours, so the days last 33.6 hours. The plants get an extra 24 hours of light each week.

A typical cycle is

1 - Sunday 12 noon - Monday 9:36am
2 - Monday 9:36 pm - Tuesday 7:12pm
3 - Wednesday 7:12am - Thursday 4:48am
4 - Thursday 4:48pm - Friday 2:24pm
5 - Saturday 2:24am - Saturday MN

You need a seven day digital timer.

Trying it out I found out it was a really bad idea to do this in the first couple of weeks of flowering as it just seemed to delay the onset of flowering indefinitely. However, after about five weeks of 12/12 it didn't seem to slow things down at all, and the plants seemed ready to harvest on time or even earlier with a good yield. The timings are obviously meant to fit around the limitations of digital timings and are probably far from ideal.

I stopped doing it because I found it very difficult to adapting to the constantly changing light cycles to do daily maintenance.

Has anyone else tried this light cycle or similar? What results did you get?

 

[mjjohn]

I have never tried it but I have thought about it, now I don't think I'll try it.

 

[Ascended Master Kief]

Sounds interesting. However, I can see your point of making it difficult for the grower (not necessarily the plant) to adjust to the cycle. Don't want to accidentally open up the cabinet during the dark period. On another note, if the plants were to adapt to this, could you ever put their offspring outside without killing them, or at least hurting them in some way? Pretty sure darkness determines when it flowers, but hours of daylight must have an impact as well, I would think. Pretty sure almost every living thing on this planet is adapted to a 24 hour day. That's why it'd be difficult for us growers to adjust to this longer light. I'm thinking, if we can't readily adapt to it, why should we make our plants adapt to it? End rant. Peace.