[DrunkenMessiah]

Greetings ICmag!

There have been a few discussions lately about light color temperature and it's effects on the quality of growth (specifically veg vs. flower). There is a general debate about HPS vs. MH and occasionally someone brings up floros. While they are praised for their cheapness and utility nobody ever really considers them in the context of 'performance'. The puny penetration rate of the light they produce vastly outweighs the benefits of a lovely, tightly-distributed, 6000K peak (or even bluer) light spectrum for veg. If your are serious about yield for most any given space (micro-cabs and such excluded) the general consensus is that you need to go HID.

However, I've always been an advocate for floros. Like many of us, I started out with them. Of course, as one is wont to do I moved on to bigger and better things, I would not personally go back from HID (400 watt Ceramic Metal Halide in an old-school magnetic ballast for both veg and flower are my preference!) in almost any situation. That said I still believe that florescent lamps are viable in some situations. In a lot of badly needed bang-for-the-buck scenarios I think that floros should not be ruled out; if you tinker a little you can get some real performance. And if you are willing to believe me on this, given the right setup floros can and will make a decent yeild all the way through flower, hand on heart!

Bah! Humbug you might say! Perhaps with super-spendy high-output CFLs, maaaaaayyyyybe, but at their current prices what's the point? Actually as many floro fans that have come to love the CFL, old timey seperate-ballast florescent tubes are where its at. Let me explain:

If you want a lamp for growing purposes there is a trick that the aquarium guys have been using for YEARS. Overdriving is the practice of linking up a pair of floro conduits in parallel to a single bulb. This trick works even better with the cheap, reliable new 'instant-start' flicker-free digital florescent ballasts. The best explanation on the internets of this process is here:

https://www.geocities.com/teeley2/overdrv1.html

Sadly, the best explanation out there doesn't have the best pictures, packing a pair of diagrams that are very informative, but somewhat difficult for many to tie to the real world. For the purposes of your instruction I have built up a high-performance, overdriven, 280 watt 48 inch T12/T8 floro fixture for well under 75 dollars whilst documenting the process.

Now keep in mind, this thing is kickass but still for rather specific applications. When I say that it could even flower I mean that if it where used in a certain way. Specifically in combination with a ScrOG flat-screen training regime. In this scenario, all of the buds that make it to the end are no more than 4 or 5 inches from the nearest light tube. It also entails using very blue (GE 6200K office) tubes for veg and very red (GE plant & Aquarium) tubes for flower. These constraints are very useful in low-headroom situations. A space that was 52 inches wide by 16 inches deep by 32 inches tall would easily accommodate an entire grow from start to finish based on this lamp. (think laundry-room cabinets and such) Even if you aren't height-constrained though, these lamps would veg some bitchin plants up to about 18 inches tall (which is miles if you supercrop) to be swapped under big daddy HPS or taken under the mother of all light-sources: the great outdoors.

SO HERE'S WHAT YOU DO:


ACQUIRE:

Some of these! It is a 48 inch narrow grid light fixture produced in the good-old-U-S-of-A by American Florescent. You will need at least two of them (Well, technically you don't. You could buy just one and use it to run a single pair of tubes for a total of 140 watts, but in my opinion this is not nearly badass enough)



They are dirt cheap, I got these at Menard's for 32 bucks a pop, not even on sale! Despite the cheapness they contain fabulous goodies such as one of these:



Its a frankly wonderful resi-tronic 2 digital ballast. It is labeled for use with four 48 inch T12 or T8 tubes wired in parallel. However, it will very happily run just two 48 inch tubes in Overdrive! In this state, a 40 watt floro tube will produce around 75% more light energy. (heat loss and such) This does make the tubes run a little hotter and therefore not live as long. However, if you are gardening with floros you need to toss them long before they stop producing light anyway. A yearly basis is usually good. There is a plus side though: the ballast, the bit you keep, is actually under less stress in this state. Only running two bulbs the load put on the ballast is of a much lower resistance and the ballast in return runs cooler and lives longer.

So, to work. The unit comes wired straight out of the box like such.

One side:


The other:


This is a typical configuration for modern instant-start digital ballasts and is actually a bit different than the ones featured in the big overdriving link I provided earlier. He describes the slightly older rapid-start ballasts that had two yellow leads that matched up with the paired grey/brown red/blue. Instant-starts are even simpler, with only a single yellow "return lead" to worry about.

Right, now let's mess with it!

The 'tombstones' in this lamp are typical of those that I have seen lately, although the modularity of the ones in this particular unit is profound. I was genuinely pleased to have stumbled upon this exact model which features the best tombstones ever, behold:



Its a little tricky to spot in this washed-out image, but the 'feet' of these guys have little conical spring-loaded teeth. They are very difficult to explain but a joy to work with, here's a shot of the backside showing just the 'teeth' poking through:



If you have a tinkery mind you should already be thinking of the possibilities. These suckers will mount to ANYTHING that is about 1/8 of an inch thick which you can drill a hole in. They are so incredibly easy to mount that I decided to take the mod a step further and drill new holes (they like 1/4 inch holes set about 1 and 5/32 inches apart on center) for each tombstone so that I could fit a set of six in place. This mod is unrelated to our overdriving lesson though I will elaborate on it a bit later.

Anyway, re-wiring these guys is a snap, the author of the link I posted indicates that its a little hard to get the leads out of them and he recommends some twisty-pully voodoo technique and mentions that even doing this he still breaks some himself. This is retarded. I have worked with many different styles of tombstones and they all respond to the same trick. Observe:

Take a stiff, thin piece of metal (a good thick straight pin works best, I love the needles that are meant for use in sewing machines for this purpose) and insert it in the little leftover space where the stripped wire end goes into the tombstone like so:



Jiggle the needle about:



The sucker pops right out:



You'll never break anything doing it this way. Armed with this technique, you will have a very easy time removing and rewiring your tombstones so they look like this:



(I could have posted a shot of the other side, but due to the symmetry it looks exactly the same >.< ) Note that the previously 'paired' grey/brown red/blue pairings have been swapped. This is necessary. If you preserve the original color pairings the lamp will work fine but it WILL NOT BE OVERDRIVEN. You have to swap up the color parings, whatever they are, so that each bulb is being driven by BOTH power circuits. Otherwise, the relatively intelligent ballast 'sees' a load that looks just like only two bulbs are plugged in and only runs a single power circuit as a result. This is one of the things that makes it "energy-star compliant", a feature that is trumpeted on the packaging. You need to be careful that you don't spend all this effort for no added output. If you aren't sure you've done it right, there is no danger in swapping one pair of a single color for another on two of the tombstones. If the results are brighter, you did it wrong, if its dimmer you had it right the first time. Speaking of results:



Boom Baby!! The top two bulbs are correctly overdriven and powered up. The lower bulbs are wired to the second ballasts but running on only one of it's power circuits and consuming the normal 40 watts per tube. I FUCKING SWEAR the lower bulbs are ON!! Swear to dog! To sweet sensi even! This is the absolute best picture I could get, I must have taken 20, there was nothing I could do to make it not look like the 'normally driven' bulbs weren't just 'off' bulbs!!!

Four overdriven tubes, in all of their glory:



View from the back:



Simply wire the hot and neutral leads up to AC current and away you go!

Now, in that final picture of the tombstones you might have noticed that I had crammed six tombstones on each side of the lamp (total of 12). It is a tight fit on the original chassis (which is a fantastic peice of kit BTW) and will not accommodate 6 T-12s. You could use this configuration to throw in a THIRD 4-lamp digital ballast hooked up to the set of tombstones that I had left un-wired in just the same fashion as I did the others and run a set of 6 T-8s. This would result in a wicked-bad 378 watt fixture for around 100 bucks. However, with this particular one things are a bit different. The eight tombstones that I did wire are going to run 4 overdriven GE T12 tubes (6200K through veg, Plant and aquarium during flower). To further my quest to prove that floros can run with the big dogs when it comes to final potency I am going to do what I always do:

Cheat.

The last four tombstones that didn't get wired up will soon be connected to a normal two-lamp digital ballast. In those sockets will reside a pair of these bad motherfuckers:

https://www.houstonherp.com/ReptiGloBulbs.htm

We have been able to source these things at a local specialty pet store in a 48 inch size. I had seen the 5.0 and 10.0s, but the 8.0 is new to me and I'm in love with it. I have dabbled with UV-B supplementation before and believe that carefully metered exposure to UV-B radiation can send trichome production through the roof! I had messed with repti-glo's 5.0 and 10.0 flavors of 32 watt CFLs with mixed results (that particular grow hadn't done well anyway) but had determined the 10.0 to be just too much while the 5.0 seemed lacking. We now have our hands on a pair of 48 inch T8 Repti-Glo 8.0 40 watt tubes and I think they're gonna be perfect. For this first trial they will be running at the normal wattage, I simply don't have the balls to overdrive these sons of bitches, they scare me enough as is. The UVB lamps will not run at all during veg and prolly wont run all day even late in flower. As a result we are missing out on some potential yield, as I mentioned we could totally cram a third overdriven quad ballast in there, but I think the added potency will be well worth it.

This concludes my instructional on overdriven lamps. I tried to be explicit as possible, but every lamp is a little different. As always when working with electricity: use your fuckin noggin! If anyone has questions I will be happy to answer. If you want to acquire a specific floro lamp and upload a couple of pictures showing its stock wiring and a shot of the original wiring diagram to this forum I can tell you how to overdrive it! You can overdrive floro ballasts meant for any length and nearly any brand so long as it is digital. The packaging does not always specifically mention 'digital ballast' so look for the terms 'rapid-start', 'instant-start' or any indication of cold-starting capability (usually rated down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit).

You could run bulbs out of a fixture like this and get great results, but I have yet one more trick up my sleeve to wring every last bit of light output from cheap floro tubes. I apply two inch foil-tape (with clear adhesive) to the backside of the bulbs themselves, stopping a couple inches short of the end caps. This is the most efficient floro reflector configuration possible and I will be making an update detailing the process very soon. Until then, good luck and happy gardening!

*EDIT*

Tanks to Pontiac for being awesome and having the link in his sig, I had no idea the old OverGrow FAQ was actually hosted in full somewhere on the internets. I have it as a Microsoft help file (XML basically). This is an excellent detailing of the foil tape process, I shan't bother posting my own guide unless someone has specific questions.

https://www.drugs-forum.com/growfaq/1475.htm

-DM

[pontiac]

Well done

[DrunkenMessiah]

Thanks for the love Pontiac, and so quickly! Big huzzah for a place on the DIY link list, I'm honored. Did you go by that same name back at overgrow? I don't remember you, though granted I've gone through a lot of ganj between now and then. I see you are a fan of the stealth cab, I bet a six-tube version of one of these bad boys would go pretty slick in a box not unlike your 250w HPS one! That's some pretty low headroom you work with there, ever considered ScrOG, even under the HPS? I'm quickly becoming an advocate for ScrOG in moderate-wattage applications. I think it has yield advantages over free-standing plants using lights up to even 400 watt HID lamps. Thanks again for the thumbs-up. Good luck, and happy gardening!

-DM

[madpenguin]

Awsome post. I thought of doing this very same thing last year but went with T5's instead. I thought this was a pretty popular thing to do in cultivation circles but this is the first post I've seen here on icmag that mentions it. Way to spread the word.

[DrunkenMessiah]

Originally Posted by madpenguin

Awsome post. I thought of doing this very same thing last year but went with T5's instead. I thought this was a pretty popular thing to do in cultivation circles but this is the first post I've seen here on icmag that mentions it. Way to spread the word.

Thanks penguin. Actually, as far as I know it is totally possible to overdrive T5s as well (though ballasts for them are still spendy as far as I know and it might not be cost-effective to do so). Overdriving is one of the few specialty indoor growing techniques that is actually more popular in legal growing circles than in cannabis growing culture. It was first employed by aquarium buffs and has spread from there. I think that overdriven T8s would have outperformed your standard T5s for a given space, but the T5's would destroy an equivilent overdriven rig in terms of efficiency. Floros already throw away a relatively large amount of energy away as heat ( watt-for-watt it is even more than HID lamps if you can believe it) and overdriving makes them even worse. It is a very cost-effective and space-efficient technique, but its energy-efficiency leaves a bit to be desired.

-DM

[Elite]

Well done, the thread in my sig should interest you!!

Elite

[Hydro-Soil]

Very well written explanation. Thank you

I guess it's about time I messed with overdriving PL-L lamps
(Nothing like a high-tech T5HO lamp bent in half!)

[DrunkenMessiah]

Originally Posted by Elite

Well done, the thread in my sig should interest you!!

Elite

I actually had a quick look at that before I posted this thread. Totally awesome, but it looked pretty labor-intensive to me. I must say though, I am a huge fan of bang-for-the-buck style kit and yours takes the cake. 624 watts of vegging power is a hell of a lot more than you could have gotten out of 150 bucks worth of HID lighting, that's for sure! However, I remain un-convertible to CFLs, mostly due to my love of ScrOG and how well-suited the long tubes are to it. Can't wait to see the completed veg room in action man. Good luck, and happy gardening!

[DrunkenMessiah]

Originally Posted by Hydro-Soil

Very well written explanation. Thank you

I guess it's about time I messed with overdriving PL-L lamps
(Nothing like a high-tech T5HO lamp bent in half!)

OoOoOo, that could be veeeerrry interesting indeed.

I know that overdriving is an inherent part of floro tech, any lamp with a digital ballast can pull it off if you wire it correctly. It is simply a matter of knowing what each of the leads did in the factory setup and swapping them accordingly. The only thing I would worry about is surface temperature of the bulbs. CFLs in my experience already run MUCH hotter surface temps than T12 and T8 tubes and overdriving only exacerbates this problem. On the upside, your ballasts would actually run cooler and live longer at the expense of bulb life. But, as I said, you need to be swapping bulbs on at least an annual basis anyway. Good luck, and happy gardening!

-DM

[SoEx]

Sweet! Cool writeup, I may need to install something like this for vegging in the future.