144watts per square ft. ???

Hello all. So i have a room with 6 600 watts HPS over a 5 ft. x 5 ft. growing area. By my calculation, I have:

6 x 600watts = 3600 watts

5 ft. x 5 ft. = 25 ft. squared

3600 watts / 25 ft. squared = 144 watts per square foot

If something is wrong with my math can someone please correct me??

I keep reading about some 50watts/square foot is a good goal to shoot for and so I am wondering if my extra lighting is just way overkill or if I am getting extra benefit by having the extra watts?? My buds sure seem to love the shit out of the extra light, they have been under this particular set-up for about 8 months now and continue to just get bigger and bigger. I have been growing for years now and am currently using the most light I have ever used and it seems to me that the extra light correlates to bigger buds. Let me know what you think though, I have been very intrigued by this 50W/squarefoot idea and am wondering if maybe expanding my area would be better and more efficient....

Thanks

6x600W HPS in a 5x5 sq. ft. space !!!!!!

sounds crazy to me, think two is enough .. but what do I know I grow 4 plants under one ..

For a 600 watt hps a 4 x 4 area is about as big as you want to go.
That is okay. I run a 600 watt hps in a 3x3 tent

Yea I know the minimum area is a 3 x 3 space for a 600 HPS. As a professional grower this just does not cut it. If you use a light meter you will find that about a 1.5 ft x 1.5 ft area is as much as you get for the higher intensity light. The spot directly under the light bulb is the most ideal spot for light intensity but it gets much less intense the further out from the center that you get (due to inverse square).

I have 16 plants in my 5' x 5' area so require the extra intensity.

Anyone familiar with watts per square foot and advantages to having it much higher than this standard 50Watt/hour I keep hearing about, please share your insight : )

Thanks

so what kind of yield are you getting from this room in a cycle? @1/2 gram a watt it should be 64oz or 4lbs but with that much light in that space itt should be closer to 1 gram per watt huh,so 8 pounds?how the hell are you controlling heat?sounds badass,got any pics of the setup or plants?

floydsmith716 said:

Yea I know the minimum area is a 3 x 3 space for a 600 HPS. As a professional grower this just does not cut it. If you use a light meter you will find that about a 1.5 ft x 1.5 ft area is as much as you get for the higher intensity light. The spot directly under the light bulb is the most ideal spot for light intensity but it gets much less intense the further out from the center that you get (due to inverse square).

I have 16 plants in my 5' x 5' area so require the extra intensity.

Anyone familiar with watts per square foot and advantages to having it much higher than this standard 50Watt/hour I keep hearing about, please share your insight : )

Thanks

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You can leverage those numbers with a good reflector.
Also, with that much light, i would say you're deep in the range of diminishing returns.
Finally, ultradense grows experience unique problems, such as bud rot due to insufficient airspace and circulation around the buds, especially in the last two weeks.

Unless you are a hobbyist doing this to push your numbers per area to an extreme, i see no benefit and several liabilities. cn

Subscribed. Id like to see the pics. Thats a lot oflight & the heat would be stunning.

show us some pics bra

Glad to see some interest in my post. I will work on getting some pics and have them up probably later today.

HEAT- Not an issue. I run a 12 inch fan with a huge ($400) charcoal filter and blast all the air outside which is why the heat is not an issue. I live in Oregon so we are cool 9 months out of the year. During summer switching to running the lights at night and turning a couple lights off on the hot days was all I had to do. During the winter I have a fan system that spreads the heat throughout the house using it to warm the house. Oh yea also the ballasts are in a separate room helping to further to control the heat issues.

AIRFLOW- I got so much air flow in there it ain't even funny. Fans at bottom, middle, and top levels of the room and they all oscillate. Its like a very windy summer afternoon in Chicago...

YIELD- I do not get 8 pounds a cycle that for sure. I don't even get 4. On average I get a little over 2. However I don't run full cycles. I run a perpetual garden in which I add 4 plants to flowering every two weeks and harvest 4 plants every 2 weeks. Doing this I always have 16 plants in the room (I am legal to have 18 ) and I average 2 ounces a plants so usually have 8 ounces every 2 weeks. I could do many things to boost the yield, however I care about quality too much to make many of the easy sacrifices.


I am trying to just boost my yields overall while maintaining my current High Quality. My thoughts on that, and most advice I get from experienced professional growers is to always always add more light. From my experience the only real "Good Light" spot (what I call "HotSpots") is directly under the light bulb where the light is 5x more powerful than it is even a mere 6 inches away. The outside radius of light underneath a reflector has plenty of lumens for sure, just not anywhere near what is needed to grow the kind of cannabis that I go for. I don't know much about all this Watts/Square foot idea and according to that rule, than yes, I would be way past the diminishing returns thing but I do know that the more of these "HotSpots" I have added to my garden over the years (started with 2 a few years ago, up to 6 now, gonna try 8 this winter) the better my product has become with every additional "HotSpot"

I also had the idea to cover the walls (which are an off white/very light beige) with that white plastic to help with overall room reflection and see if that effects anything...

It would be interesting to see how that grow would go with 4x600. In a 5x5 space, that's still a whole lot. Jmo. Other than that, i can't argue with what works. What sort of strain are you running?

Imo making the walls more reflective would give you a very marginal gain. I'm surprised at how little difference the supposedly 97% reflective walls of my tent make. cn

Yea thats what I was thinking on the reflective walls. I have tried tents before and had it on walls in past grow rooms and just never noticed any difference. Now if I went dexter style and did the whole room up....that'd be cool as shit. haha

wow cowboy love the idea, i would like to put 4 ~600's in my 4*4 and set it up as a scrog.

You say you aren't willing to sacrifice your 'high quality' for yield. Well the two are inversely related. Strains with super high quality usually yield relatively low, while super high yielding strains typically aren't top-shelf.
This is why great genetics are so important. Genetics will beat out your 'more light' philosophy. If your strain has already reached it's potential with the amount of light you're providing, you must either find a higher yielding strain or change your growing techniques.

Ok here is my first attempt at adding pictures, only have a laptop webcam so will try and get a digital camera for better pics at somepoint:

The plants with buds are TGA Subcool's PlushBerry (i'd give it a 6/10, disappointing for a Subcool strain, has nice big nugs but got 3 females from a 5 pack and none of them had any purple in them at all, which was why i got it in the first place, a good smell/taste, but nothing extraordinary or unique, would love to try it again and look for one of the purple phenos) at 48 days into flowering. They will be cut down on day 56.

The other plants which are only 6-20 days old are TGA Subcool's Jilly Bean (Jilly gets a 9/10. Phenomenal strain. Dankest I have probably ever grown. Stickiest, smelliest, most flavorful, most resinous, best effect, all around 9/10. Most of my patients favorite by far. Also a treat to grow, responds wonderfully, vegs super fast, tall slender stalks with TONS of bottom to mid growth. About 1/2 way down an entire stalk each side branch shoots out and up to become a top of its own, does all the work for ya : ) Also you can harvest every single bud all the way to the very bottom, even the teeny tiniest branch will atleast have a small head nug on it.)

The fly traps are for organic gnat control. It does work, after a couple weeks all the flying adults will have hit the trap, or regretfully, gotten stuck to a nice fat juicy nugget, and so they will stop making babies....however it takes a while. No big deal really, they just get stuck to the outside fan leaves which get pruned off anyway. My shit would be better with them not eating my Magnesium but thats ok, just means i gotta pump more Cal-mag into em...

Are you running 5 HPS and 1 MH? cn

Wow you have a good eye. But no, it is actually a digital ballast. The other 5 are cheap magnetic ballasts and the one that has the whiter light is a digital lumatek. It has always had a much whiter light than other ballasts I have used.

ok i see your room is quite a bit bigger than 5'x5',you are only using a 5x5 area of it? im like damn man how you gunna deal with all that heat n shit lol.nice setup,cool pics.jillybean is pretty good huh,i got a pack i have not had time to get to yet,guess i should bust it out

floydsmith716 said:

Wow you have a good eye. But no, it is actually a digital ballast. The other 5 are cheap magnetic ballasts and the one that has the whiter light is a digital lumatek. It has always had a much whiter light than other ballasts I have used.

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Thank you ... I just learned something! cn