Tip: Gradually increase your light intensity for best results during flowering
More is not always better. And that definitely applies to light intensity when growing cannabis.
For us, there was a time when we thought cramming as many bulbs in a room was the best strategy. More PPFD = more yield, right?
Well, not always.
We have since discovered that you a room can be "over lit." There is such a thing as having too much light.
How we discovered that "less is more"
A few years ago, we had a situation where 3/4 of our bulbs went out right after we started a new flowering cycle. We had just flipped 600+ plants from veg to flowering, and then
the lights went out.
From 60 lights down to only 15 that worked.
We were able to make a successful warranty claim, but it would be a few weeks until the new lights arrived. What would
happen in the mean time?
We tell this story in this article about how much fear, anxiety we had about this situation. If we didn't hit our yield targets, we wouldn't be
able to pay our bills -- electricity, payroll, vendors, etc.
We were freaking out!
And yet, all was fine. The bulbs arrived at the end of Week 3 of flower, and we had all the lights on full
blast the remainder. Our yield and quality were no different.
Our minds were blown.
How was it that our plants produced a similar outcome with only one-fourth the amount of
lights?
We started tinkering with this concept, which we dive into in this blog article.
Lesson: gradually increase intensity (and then decrease it back down)
Our discovery: we were shocking our plants during the veg to flower transition.
Coming out of veg, our plants were accustomed to a 300 watts. Going from that to the punch in the face of 1000 watts on Day 1 of flower was shocking and stressful to the plants.
So we began
slowly and gradually increasing the intensity. Our lights have dials that allow us to select various intensities. So we start at 600 watts. A couple weeks then we go to 800. A couple weeks then we go to 1000 watts.
We hold that peak wattage for three weeks before we then start tapering it down.
We explain exactly how we do it in this article.
Bottom line: don't waste the electricity and power when your plants don't need it. Don't stress your plants with unnecessary light intensity. Save it for the peak of flower (weeks 3 through 6), and titrate it up and down, before and after, like a bell curve.
