HID bulbs suggestions

A question from a fellow grower:

found HID bulbs in my area (Home Depot and Lowe’s), but they said that the ballast for it is not for sale anymore, as they’re doing away with this “obsolete” lighting technology and going more towards those newfangled bulbs.

I just don’t see any other options for readily-available light bulb options with more of a red spectrum.

Any suggestions?

Stoner wrote this not to long ago. I hope this will help Yuri out out. I also have links to lighting if you want.

B Safe
Will

"I don’t know about all the special lights, but l know you do need enough light for the plant’s stage of growth. Also you do need at least both the two frequencies of blue and two of red covered in the light spectrum provided to the plants. Most lights rated with a color rating of 5000-6500 K will cover these colors and are a relatively close equivalent to the color of the sunlight.

Seedlings and clones require about 400-1000 lumens per square foot.

Vegetative growth requires about a minimum of 2,000 to 3,000 lumens per square foot.

Flowering requires about 5,000 to 10,000 lumens per square foot, ideally, and can take possibly much more.

10,000 lumens is supposed to be about the average power of the sun at sea level on a clear day at high noon, or something like that, lol. 8,000 – 12,000 lumens is supposed to be about the average power of the full sun without any overcast or no clouds depending on altitude and potentially other factors.

When looking at this from an electrical usage standpoint, this means you need about 50 watts of actual electricity used by the light per square foot, no matter what type of light you use. Except old fashioned incandescent lights, even at 50 watts they won’t provide what a plant needs to stay healthy, but CFLs with the color rating mentioned above will provide a healthy balance of the light a plant needs. And of course “special” horticultural LEDs, T5s, CFLs, and HIDs at 50 watts per square foot will also provide everything a plant needs to stay healthy. If you notice, you can use half, or significantly less, the watts for veg that you would use for flower.

When growing in a container, for the most part, you can’t expect the soil to provide enough nutrients for the plant for the entire life cycle. So you will wan’t to feed it with something for most of its life, but you don’t absolutely have to buy or use specialty name brand nutrients. But you do need to provide enough of the right nutrients to be able to get your plant to yield its max potential.

Of course download and checkout the free e-book, it will help you get started no matter what you decide to get or how you decide to grow.

Hope this helps,

MacG"

HPS has color rating of about 2700K. Plants can use more red than blue, and will stay healthy as long as about 20-30% of the light comes from the blue spectrum, and so this is why HPS does such a good job for growing even though it doesn’t match the ratio naturally found in sunlight. HPS still has plenty of blue and other colors or it wouldn’t look like yellow/orange-ish, but still mostly white-ish light. White light is roughly made up of equal parts of red, blue and green light. 5500K to 6000K is the color of sunlight at high noon at sea level on a clear day.

And this is why 2700K is typically used for flowering, but flowering can be done just fine under lights that are rated 5000-6500K.

~MacG