GntlmnLsr

I have always want to try the above light cycling to increase growth. I have tried it but that was when I was using floro's and I didn't know much so I think I'm just going to forget all that. Does anyone have any comments suggestions? I sure there will be some shock but how is the plant to know how long a day is suppost to be? As long as the night period is twelve hours it will continue in the flowering stage right?

ButterflyDreams

Flowering is induced by a chemical in the plant. THis chemical is photo-degraded, or destroyed by light.

I think the length of the day would adversly affect the levels of the chemical.

Set up a variable timer and let us know how it goes.

Live, Learn, Grow.
BD

bgetting

Funny that this has come up, it has been a hot topic among my bros and I.

So the plant needs at least 12 hours of dark for the flowering to continue. This is because of a protein mechanism (probably mny of them)that has been dubbed phytochrome. This protein changes shape (for simplicity) when exposed to red light and far red light. blah, blah. Anyway, as long as you don't mess with the 12 hour dark, you should be good. There have been articles about how in nature, a plant receives ~6 hours of direct sunlight a day. Therefore, if you ran a 6 hour on, 12 hour off light cycle, you should be able to decrease your flower time by 1/4. I have seen no noticeable change in yield, so I tend to agree with the idea. The hard part is finding a tier that will do that. I had one made by an electrical engineering major at my college. careful about going with longer day lengths than 12 hours, becasue the plants are on a 24 hour cycle (diurnal rhythm), and will probably not like longer days. Plus, the goal is to get done faster, so it wouldn't make sense to prolong things.

art alexander

Hmmmmmmm....

With a digital timer you can have a different program for each say of the week, so if you had 12-on, 6-off the cycle would repeat every three days. So if you just went to a normal 12-12 on the 7th day of the week, you could do 12-6 the rest of the time.

It would be a pain to do though. You would have to keep a schedule just to know when it was safe to visit!

bgetting

yep, if you can get at imer to do it automatically, you are golden. I would be consistent with the day length, just for the sake of it. Plus, make sure you get it right, you want 6 ON, 12 OFF. If you try this, I would like to know how it works for you, if for no other reason than to compare results. Goog luck.

art alexander

Well, I think I'm just gonna stick with 12-12 this time, partly because this is my second full grow, partly because it would be too much of a pain to have to get the timing right, plus I like to visit the plants every night at the same time.

I like to think that if I tried anything, it would be with two separate grow rooms with identical clones, to try to isolate what the difference is for the sake of really learning more about what works and what doesn't.

GntlmnLsr

The thing I don't like about the 6/12 lighting schedule is that the total amount of light the plant gets over any give time period is lower then the amount received on the 12/12 light cycle. The buds develope quicker but they are smaller because they have less energy to grow over the same period of time. It helped some slow budding sativas produce what I though was tighter colas but I didn't do a control so who knows what brought about the change, or even if there really was one.

bgetting

There is another huge thread somewhere in here about all this. It's a debate. I dont' know anyone who has done a control either,but I have never noticed lower yields.

MistaMoonman

OK so if there is more about this in a different thread then please tell US which thread cause i wonder also!

And how about if you had the lights on for lets say 8 hours ON and 16 OFF? that would work for a 24 hour timer.
and would also be more energy saving while at the same time growing kick butt stuff!?No!?

bgetting

you could do that, but it speeds things up to do 6on/12off. The 12 off is the minimuum for flowering, and the 6 can be changed.