The room air temp is between 26 and 28 when the lights are on, but unfortunately, that's about as cool as I can get it. The outside temp is 46 during the day!
That's on the warm side but not too bad in the general scheme of things.
I FEEL for ya with 46C ambient temps- how fucking
miserable is that?! We had a 45.3C day here on 1 Jan 2007 and I thought I was gonna DIE. At 45C EVERYTHING is hot to the touch, even plastics like mouse & keyboard.
The lights actually run extremely cool. They are water cooled sleeves [...] I don't think they can burn with the sleeve on.
Ah OK, I didn't see your water cooled tubes in the pic on first glance- I see them and your plumbing now. Yes, even air-cooled tubes will permit plants to come in contact with the cooltube without scorching as the glass is cool, but there's still some short-wave IR that passes through both air and water cooled tubes. The radiated short-wave IR causes warming of plant tissues. Some of them, notably reproductive tissues, are pretty sensitive to heat and their growth pattern will change. Buds exposed to excessive heat will 'run' or 'bolt', making long strands of bud material instead of tight nugs. Can also explain elongation in vegetative growth, but elongation can also be caused by low light. You have plenty of light but you also have very crowded plants because of all the unpruned branching, which will limit the amount of light getting to lower portions of the plants. I think this is part of it, but vegging before flowering will also contribute to elongation between nodes. You vegged this mob for 2 weeks before flowering; I think that could be the main cause in this case.Don't veg the next lot, take them straight out of the clonebox and put them in to flower.
In a SOG set up (like what I'm trying to accomplish) it sounds like I should be trimming everything except for the main stem to encourage the growth of one main cola on top.
Dat's it, dat's da ticket!
In the future, I guess I don't need to veg at all if I'm going for SOG. I didn't realize that they would be vegging still for about 3-4 weeks, even on a 12/12 cycle, so that's good to know.
Yep, that residual veg growth during the 1st 4 weeks of 12/12 is enough to get good sized plants yet which are not so tall as not to be able to make best use of artificial lighting. Indoor lighting can only penetrate foliage so deeply; consider that intensity diminishes as an inverse square of distance from the lamp, so short plants are the friend of all indoor growers. I have to tell ya, I shake my head a lot when I see someone trying DELIBERATELY to grow 6 foot plants. They're shooting themselves in both feet.
Very nice what strain are you doing the sog with?
Sweet Tooth #4 from Spice of Life Seeds. I sprouted these beans in 2002 and have been propagating by cuttings ever since. ST4 in beans is hard to find these days. Good luck. If you can't find ST4, choose any primarily indica dominant hybrid.
Do you think water cooling the lights would work better than an air cooled light system.
I prefer air cooled cooltubes for a few reasons, notably simplicity, almost no maintenance besides periodic dusting and fewer things to break. The makers of liquid cooled systems usually recommend 50gal (189L) of cooling water reservoir capacity per 1000W lamp.
In my case, I simply don't have the room for close to 400L of water tanks to cool my pair of 1000s. Both air and water cooled cooltubes do precisely the same thing; beyond what advantages air cooled units have that I've just mentioned, the air cooled systems are
much cheaper, about $60-80 per cooltube.
Mind you, water cooled tubes have a
great advantage in cases where you're growing in a space that is impossible to ventilate. I recall a setup in a storage space in the sub-basement of an apartment block where there was no way the grower could run air ducts around through concrete walls. She used water cooled tubes which ran coolant water to a drain instead of to tanks and had to provide bottled CO2, but had a highly productive grow with good temp control despite the location of the op. Used a lot of water but she wasn't paying for water, so she didn't care much.
Good lookin setup satire, try throwing them into flower right after they have established roots and i think your setup will improve.
Yep, I agree. What he's got going really looks pretty good so far, aside from the stretch.