Oh thank god I figured out how to post. Okay, so here’s the situation:
I am at day 25 flower on the following strains:
BBK
Blueberry
Strawberry Cough (Am aware this will take longer.)
I’ve had their light on a timer switch and the viewing windows closed. It’s a fairly cheap/basic timer that you manually push down or lift 30 minute time segments on it to set it.
The tent is primarily HPS, so it can take a bit to turn on if it only recently turned off.
It was running fine for a while, but today I went to check it and realized, somehow the times on it are all popped up and down strangely. I fully admit I panicked and set them all flat-off before thinking to really analyze the exact time periods, but the shortversion is, their online time segment looked extended in general and they had random off times in what I would estimate to be about 2 hours.
Any time I HAVE checked on the plants, during the hours they SHOULD be on, it Appeared To Be On. I know for a FACT that this timer wasn’t like this worst-cast 36 hours ago, and really I’m pretty sure 24, unless somehow it popped its nodes while I was asleep last night.
I am genuinely 100% clueless how this happened. I do not know when, where, or HOW it could even happen. A timer mechanical failure, my cat on stilts, a reefer madness ghost, unclear, but my question is:
If there’s the chance that sometime over the last 24 hours they went through rave lights, on a scale of one to taking it up the pooper, how screwed am I, because I’ve never run into something like this.
The three times I went in the tent today the lights appeared to be on. I may somehow be entirely over-reacting. But if the lights might have gone out for something like a 3 hour stretch to pop back on for another stretch, will that bone me? I do know they’re pretty stable strains that can take a proverbial beating compared to some, but.
Advice? My instinct is telling me to essentially longnight them. Give them a solid 20-24 hour dark period so they go “OK, it’s really night now” and even bounce up their chemical processes.
Otherwise, these plants have had a stable light schedule for the most part, with the worst error being +1 hour from a weird situation that I also offset by just slightly extending their night (my theory is always, “plants don’t have a stopwatch, as long as night was longer than the day and it’s one day, you should be fine”) but I’ve never had a situation where this crap might have been playing clap on clap off in half hour or maybe few-hour stretches while I wasn’t there hawk staring at it.
Is the longnight a good idea? Bad idea? Any other ideas beyond “keep eyes out for nanners and neuter 'em”?
