First time Grow! open for advice, guidance, and support!

A dimmible digital ballast will adjust for the bulb I ran my 600w in my 1000w ballast set at 600 and it worked perfectly plants loved it but trust me night and day difference with the 600w bulb rather than my 1000w dialled down fuller spectrum brighter plants looked better under it have since gone to completely new lights. So only keep ballasts and bulbs as redundancy

2 Likes

Ok cool, now I have a question, I only have them dimmed right now for veg…if I were to flower I’d buy new bulbs, but do you think it makes a difference now in the veg state?

That my friend is up to you I tend to run lights and equipment as it is designed ad rated for since research is put into getting lights to put out good spectrum at rated watts once you have the bulbs it isn’t lots of work to change them for me if I am buying 1 bulb whats 2 besides a saved trip to the store or 1 less order :wink:

2 Likes

Understood. Thank you, another question, I’ve seen hundreds of posts about soil runoff and blah blah, my question, is that doesn’t FFOF buffer down? Since their soil is tested at 6.5-6.8 Ph, it will buffer my water, for instance the other day, I watered at Ph 7 to see, and what came out right out of the plant was 5.8…I don’t know how to accurately check I’m assuming…

It does and doesn’t buffer down since it is hard to account for variable water sources tap water in one place can be 8-9 ph and in another may be 6-7 so assuming they test with RO or distilled they get an average ph in their correct range but not everyone uses filtered water. Also any nutrients added soil degrade chemicals added in local water all change ph, We as growers rarely rely on anything to work or be exactly as advertised and like to give our ladies every edge we can the plants themselves change ph of soil so we test run off to let us adjust ph for future watering and judge any adjustment needed. I prefer ph pens myself and grow in both soil and hydro so ph is everything in my grows if it is out and stays out for a few days my plants lose vigor so I test constantly.
90% of nutrient issues are directly related to ph ounce of prevention can increase yields just as much :wink:

1 Like

@Donaldj It must have been you that I read that from. That makes a lot of sense. Will dimming down a bulb permanently effect the spectrum or quality of light? Like if I ran a 1000w bulb at 400w for a month then switched back to 1000w would it produce the same amount of light as before the switch? Not including the amount it loses because of age

I would expect the oposite since bulbs (burn out) so reduced heat should improve life

Ok sounds good, I definitely will be way more efficient with testing, to be honest, the whole first month I couldn’t test, I didn’t have a Ph meter…I now have the Milwaukee. Anyways that was totally my fault, I’m recovering from surgery and thy grew a lot faster than I thought. Could you give me some tips on how to properly get a runoff Ph reading?

water slow so water actually trickles through medium and water with a 10-15% run off simply drain plant tray to measure :wink:

1 Like

Will keep updated with progress!!!
I do have to say though, the roots of the plants I took out of the nature Care was like 2x the amount of roots that the plants in FF had :thinking:

Ok, so transplanting right now…Ph going in @ 6.5, had a cup underneath 5 gal bucket that the plants were placed in collecting water after transplant.
Ph after 7.2…

so next water you would lower ph to around 6 and check again this should put you in closer range and over time the soil ph will drop and you adjust accordingly

2 Likes

Thank you, so since I’m trying to get the Ph best I can…I’m taking notes on what gets what…so on the next plant I transplanted, ph went in at 5.8 ( only one point lower, but it came out at 5.6… so 3 buckets, Ph went up, one bucket and Ph runoff went down :thinking: I think I’m just going to stick around 5.8, idk what’s going on lol, maybe because I was another bag of FF? Maybe it sat longer so the Ph of the soil declined?

1 Like

and that is exactly why we test everything

Talked to a friend, he said maybe it’s because I was taking reading from what came out of the bottom right away, he told me to let some runoff and then check it, I did, and it went from going in Ph of 6.0-6.1 and run off of 5.8-5.7, think I found my sweet spot :slight_smile: thanks!

But your plants are in soil correct? Run off should be around 6.5. @Mr.Chrontini Unless I got this all screwed up.

@Rugar89 yea, I am in soil…idk anymore lol so many different suggestions lol, just going with what feels good…

Male vs females am I looking at it correctly?

1 Like

@Mr.Chrontini
Is this the ph pen that you have?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005H78ZI0?tag=greenrel-20

Yes it is…