Is this yer own guess, or proven some how by someone
Don't buy it personally
Don't buy it personally
Trying to understand grams per watt
- Thread starter RuleAndrews
- Start date
The nutty bud
Well-Known Member
The nutty bud
Well-Known Member
The nutty bud
Well-Known Member
Most definitely, buddy had given me some northern lights clones from the same mother he had used for a crop, same amount of watts for plants we had, ended up looking like 2 totally different crops when finished, was really cool to compare our 2 rooms and progress of everything with different variables, he had a chiller I didn’t, I had more room, but his filled in better in the end. I know this isn’t the exact scenario you want to compare but it was close. We both ended up yielding roughly .7-.8 grams per watt of actual wattage from led lights, we were both pretty happy to see those numbers but I’m shooting for 1-1.2 GPW next time around
If you want a pound of bud, seems like it'd be easier to hang a 600-watt HPS in the garden and then sort of coast along, lol.
BtW, a kilogram isn't a pound, it's 2.2 pounds.
Kinda, yes. Measuring gram per with all the variables is like a pecker measuring contest between blind people.
Best yields I got on known strains came from a rotation I ran in one room. After lots of years of trial an error I dialed in one room good.
This was based on nine weeks of flowering. I started plants under Nanolux CMH 630s running the blue lamps. Then, after three weeks I moved them under a hooded 600 solis tek with eye hortilux lamp. And finished them for the final three weeks under platinum p600 leds.
Since then, I've run the same strain only under p600s and I get a much different yield.
I know the overall light spectrum, and in general environment in that room with all those lights increased my overall gram per watt compared to the same strain watt for watt.
Lots of variables for these contests or ways to measure production, value, yada yada.... I'm just trying to be a better grower then the last run.
I just grow for the oil now anyway..... and then,, all grams aren't equal
Its just a waste of time. you will get more weight faster running multiple plants. looks good but its a poor use of time and space. growing a 1000gram plant indoors is possible but as a new grower there are far easier ways and you will likely fail. If you have a problem with your plant and lack the experience to correct it that is your whole crop gone. To get a 36oz plant you will need more than a 4x4 area also.
BigDIRTYBill
Active Member
From what I've read, you want to have 5000-7500 lumens per square foot for optimal growth. Yield in my opinion really depend on the grower and the nutes used. You can't always go by wattage of light.
nutes has very little to do with yield really. You need the basics and everything else is splitting hairs.
The 3 most important things for growing healthy plants with big yields are in this order... Light, CO2 in the canopy, O2 in the rootzone. Everything else is small details to help maximise the plant. But without these 3 you have nothing.
The 3 most important things for growing healthy plants with big yields are in this order... Light, CO2 in the canopy, O2 in the rootzone. Everything else is small details to help maximise the plant. But without these 3 you have nothing.
I've gotten well over 1.5 g/w with LED in total flower but the trick is effort. Prob 1.5g/w if you discarded the lesser flowers. Your strains will affect yield sure. Nutrients and environment affect as well. This difference between weight with the same input variables is effort.
1g/w is gold standard for HPS. You can get much more with LED
What I mean with effort is with LED you track the canopy day by day or every few days until flowers are set. Then hold as close as you can. This maximizes the PAR hitting the plant with the same watts. If you left your lights up high and set it and forget it less light hits your plants throughout the cycle even though its the same light and watts.
Another effort move is having a filled canopy. In a 4x4 you have plant covering every inch. If you have big holes where a lot of light penetrate to and hit that is light that could have been used for photosynthesis. So top and possibly lollipop if applicable. Even with defoliation if you leave the bottom leaves on at the base you can pick up light that would hit the floor.
Then you can max.
1g/w is gold standard for HPS. You can get much more with LED
What I mean with effort is with LED you track the canopy day by day or every few days until flowers are set. Then hold as close as you can. This maximizes the PAR hitting the plant with the same watts. If you left your lights up high and set it and forget it less light hits your plants throughout the cycle even though its the same light and watts.
Another effort move is having a filled canopy. In a 4x4 you have plant covering every inch. If you have big holes where a lot of light penetrate to and hit that is light that could have been used for photosynthesis. So top and possibly lollipop if applicable. Even with defoliation if you leave the bottom leaves on at the base you can pick up light that would hit the floor.
Then you can max.
There's a thread around here somewhere in which a cat named Heath Robinson got 1.77 grams per watt with HPS lighting, lol (and I believe he has broken 2.0 g/w on another forum).
Getting to fully know your strain/phenotype, nutrient line, AND your lighting - and taking full advantage of all of their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses can make all the difference in the world. It seams to me that "the best" (in terms of harvest weight) type of grow setup for one type of light is not going to be the one that works best with a significantly different light technology. I think that is why people using the first generation of LED panel grow lights did so poorly - the gardeners were treating the things like they were HIDs (another reason is that most of those early LED panels were junk, lol).
Getting to fully know your strain/phenotype, nutrient line, AND your lighting - and taking full advantage of all of their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses can make all the difference in the world. It seams to me that "the best" (in terms of harvest weight) type of grow setup for one type of light is not going to be the one that works best with a significantly different light technology. I think that is why people using the first generation of LED panel grow lights did so poorly - the gardeners were treating the things like they were HIDs (another reason is that most of those early LED panels were junk, lol).
Yeah. In the last 5 years the white LED efficiency has more than doubled and the color efficiency has improved as well. Take that and add in people selling junk it was a recipe for it getting a bad name.
If you get 2lbs out of a 1000W HPS you're getting about .9g/w. Less if you're running it at 1200W. 1.1g/w if you could the elusive 3lbs out of a light and ran it at 1200W. Getting 2lbs w/ a 600W HPS is 1.5g/w which is more than difficult. I'd believe it more if it was that weight with a CMH.
Anything less than that wattage would be a waste of time in my opinion unless it is a tent grow or something in your home. Than maybe just maybe 2g/w with 300W HPS. Even so, more than very impressive if that is real. I'm not going to be a hater and nay-sayer without seeing it but a rarity for sure if ture. The plant does experience a logarithmic output meaning for every next unit of light it puts out less output until it reaches a saturation point but we're talking like 1500umol/m2/s.
Also to someone's point above you can't go off lumens or watts that is correct when talking about LED. Best way is PAR since lumen is a weighted measurement towards green and the human eye and not plants and watts tells you nothing about efficiency. Then once your looking at PAR then you have to look at spectrum and where it is in the action spectrum.
If you get 2lbs out of a 1000W HPS you're getting about .9g/w. Less if you're running it at 1200W. 1.1g/w if you could the elusive 3lbs out of a light and ran it at 1200W. Getting 2lbs w/ a 600W HPS is 1.5g/w which is more than difficult. I'd believe it more if it was that weight with a CMH.
Anything less than that wattage would be a waste of time in my opinion unless it is a tent grow or something in your home. Than maybe just maybe 2g/w with 300W HPS. Even so, more than very impressive if that is real. I'm not going to be a hater and nay-sayer without seeing it but a rarity for sure if ture. The plant does experience a logarithmic output meaning for every next unit of light it puts out less output until it reaches a saturation point but we're talking like 1500umol/m2/s.
Also to someone's point above you can't go off lumens or watts that is correct when talking about LED. Best way is PAR since lumen is a weighted measurement towards green and the human eye and not plants and watts tells you nothing about efficiency. Then once your looking at PAR then you have to look at spectrum and where it is in the action spectrum.
A pair of 150s, you mean? Not going to happen; the efficiency simply isn't there.
Sure as the sunrise.
You can "see it" easily. I don't think he has been active (or at least not like he had been for YEARS up to that point in time), and many of his threads - disappeared when the forums they were hosted on crashed and burned, there are still extensive threads remaining on at least two (other) forums. I don't know if his ~2.4 g/w one is still up, because I have since lost the link to it
. But there's more than enough information, pictures, and drawings for you or anyone else to replicate many of his methods (he was always improving things, so there was an evolution to the process). He always had a kind word and freely gave out advice (and thousands of seeds) over the years. He wasn't just a grower, he was a teacher (of growing cannabis), too, and truly understood "the big picture" as well as anyone I've known - and better than most. If you do end up searching out some of his old threads... There's one picture I remember of the root system of one of his plants; there was the usual heavy mass of beautiful healthy roots, of course - but the top portion of it close to the trunk of the plant had roots that were thicker than the the above ground base of many ready-to-harvest plants. I think he mainly used 600-watt HIDs, but his epic 76-ounce tree might have been lit with 1Kw ones, I cannot remember which. 600-watt ones are certainly more efficient.Or you can work real hard, lol, and figure much of what he knows out on your own, I suppose. If you manage to attain the state of being in which you can harvest 76 ounces (4.75 pounds or 2.155 kilograms) from one plant, indoors, I imagine you will have gotten there
).The best thing about Heath wasn't his growing skills/knowledge - it was that sharing of methods and information. He was doing all sorts of interesting things years before others found out about them and coined catchy nicknames for the methods, lol, and every setup (that I saw) of his was done relatively inexpensively - which just seems to make the results he consistently got that much more impressive. It doesn't really matter which one you pick, colosseum, vertical (IDK how that one could really be accomplished with LED lighting, though), et cetera, if you manage results like he did, people will consider you a grand master cannabis grower. I'll never be in his class. Although... If I saw that he was working at the local community college, I'd try to enroll in one
.I've been chasing cannabis knowledge off and on for a long time, since back when doing so via the Internet meant using the old alt.drugs.pot.cultivation newsgroup (the alt.drugs.* hierarchy was created in the late 1980s when John Gilmore's request to create rec.drugs was denied), back when the average person's online experience was a dial-up modem connecting to their local BBS which, if they were extremely lucky, was a Fidonet member (well, the average person at that time had likely never touched a computer, let alone owned one) although there was some dissemination of cannabis information even before that on CompuServe - but that cost $5.00/hour for us to access it, if I remember correctly (and you could eat lunch for a fiver at the time and not have the person you were ordering it from ask you what you wanted on your bean burritos, lol) - and getting on the Internet meant having an account at your local college so you could get time on their VAX/VMS mainframe. I'm not stating that in hopes of causing anyone to think I have any great skill in regards to growing cannabis (I'm both lazy and poor - which is never a good combination), but so you'll understand what I mean when I say that, in all that time, I don't think I've ever encountered anyone who was as talented at growing our favorite plant indoors.
I wish he was still active. I wish he'd become active HERE.
On the other hand, now that I think about it, his skill level might actually preclude my using him as a valid example of HID performance in an LED vs. HID type discussion, lol. I've never seen a thread of his in which he used LEDs, so I have no way of knowing whether he'd be able to accomplish much of what he did... with an LED setup of appropriate quality/output.
But, yes, his threads are pretty educational. And kind of entertaining (IMHO).
But, yes, his threads are pretty educational. And kind of entertaining (IMHO).
