well I got it, my new light
600w electronic (digital) ballast w/ metal halide and high pressure sodium (generic no doubt) lamps and a 4" vented (perfect size) air coolable small sized hood. everything has plugs and it looks pretty clean, somewhere arund 7 days until it arrives.
its getting colder here temps are going to drop 15 or so degrees by december so the bigger light will be beneficial for my temperatures as well, with the 600w and the hot little 20w air pump things should be pretty warm, my monitor tells me the lowest temperature its been in there was 61.1 which isn't bad but the lights have been on 24 hrs for some time now.
once the 600w pack arrives the metal halide lamps going up and they're getting naps 4 hrs a day for another wk or two until I'm satisfied to flower them... my vertical space is pretty limited but I have about 2 ft to go before they are growing into the reflectors and a cooltube should enable them to get pretty damn close to the 600w so I figure another 2 or 3 weeks of veg they'll be about 20-30" tall by then.
tent height - 62 inch
bucket height - 14.5 inch
cooltube height - 6 inch
head room - 2 inch
250 mh height - 7.5 inch
so I will have about 62 - (14 + 10) = 38 inches of plant height until they are at the glass, so about 32 inches of plant height to work with...
at 20 inches some serious LST will be employed and these girls will fall to somewhere in the 12 inch range, and I suppose I will need to flower them when they get another 4 inch spurt... I may try about 3 rounds of supercrop before the flowering and try to really get a good canopy going (16 inch tall canopy, that is)
the stems seem to be growing really thick this time, which is great for the potential Buddhisms buuuuut not so great for the spindly form needed to really get a good supercrop going on... I already did some leaf arranging as to expose the many tops on the blueberry (which already smells delicious)
The pineapple and the trainwreck are still a bit behind and well their solutions need to be upped because they are slightly yellower and growing at a slower rate so I am going to calibrate all of their solutions to 1150ppm (.7 :: 821 @ .5 :: 1.6 EC :: 1642 microsiemens ) asap.