GLR-Gas Lantern Routine (12-1 lighting) grow journal- Bruce Banner

[KingKush]

Another grow to show. This time with a variation in Vegetative light cycles. The Gas Lantern Routine (GLR) is the idea that if plants could restore their phytochrome levels during the night, this would interrupt the signaling to flower with short days and long nights, and keep the plants in a vegetative stage without the need for 18 hours of electrical usage.
Lets put the opinions to rest and see what happens to these 4 Bruce Banner bagseed with this technique. I just grew 4 identical sisters in the last journal so it will give me a great idea as to how the variables are affecting the grow. I also have other strains in the veg room, under the same schedule. This will be a sort of a photo journal to document the progression, and a reference for the future, hopefully putting some misnomers to rest.
A shout out to
Corso4Life
and the post Experimenting With Supplemental Light which got me thinKing of the idea even thought it has been in existence for a few years.
Nebula Haze did a brief acknowledgment of the idea HERE on the GWE main page. I pulled this from interweb image search below:


This is the idea.
Here's the specimens

[KingKush]

I currently have the "day time" on for 12hrs. and the night is 5hrs off, 2hrs on, 5hrs off. It's basically a Bloom setup but with a 2 hour ON in the middle of the night. Saves 4 hours of lighting per day.

[KingKush]

Doing the math:
4 hours per day X 30.5 days = 122hours
122hours = 6.778 days
So I save almost a weeks worth of electricity per month, or roughly 20-25%

[KingKush]

March 10 Sprouted
March 27 and seedlings are alive

April 16th, Transplant

#RootBound

[KingKush]

April 26
Still Alive
-Its been a few weeks now on the new lighting schedule and nothing is dead (the opposite in fact, things are thriving).
Two different ladies out of the foursome:

[Chefbjy]

I'll sub. I saw glr a while back and always wondered about it. Save a little electricity and battle the heat of my hids.

[DrPhoton]

Must...resist... ^.^

I would have been happier with a side by side but beggers cant be choosers. Just asses the vegetative growth. Not the flowering stage.

[KingKush]

April 30
Manifold

7 nodes, then top down to the third.

[KingKush]

Campesino
After that Bruce Banner harvest it's been quite the space travels, lots and lots stoned moments lately I'm lucky to even get water on my plants some weeks I think we played golf 5 times last week and end up drinking so lots of cross faded evenings and late mornings.
Good stoney stuff that Bruce Banner, just got me space cadet a few weeks, too high to take pics of the party going on haha

[Campesino]

Ha!
I am traveling through some space myself
Now I need to start golfing again...

[D.A.A.S.69]

Hey KingKush,, yes, this is nice. You like to hit the round ball, huh, me too. Dang near every day, !!!
Good luck with your grow.

[KingKush]

Different Plant

[Californiakid]

Subbed for sure 👍

[KingKush]

May 7
Things are still alive and well but I perceive a reduction in potential growth and overall leaf mass. This is not making them grow any faster, but probably slower.

[KingKush]

This experiment has multiple modes. The first is this journal with the four Bruce Banner; should be similar and familiar with the last grow I just completed.
Secondly, In the background I received some more Pre98 Bubba clones from my sensei and left 2 in the veg room a few weeks ago to be sort of the 'Canary in the Coal Mine' for this lighting routine. I'm in tune with these clones they are our staple crop. They are healthy and fine, just slow.

Thirdly, I somehow 'lost' a bean I was trying to germinate a few months ago and ended up with two solo cups full of dirt that never sprouted anything.I tried using the cup with soil for a clone so I watered it and stuck a cutting in it to see what would happen. Well.... a seedling emerged, what a surprise! So this seedling has been under the 12-1 lighting it's whole life. It's alive and growing.

-Everything is healthy and in veg mode
-Seems like a slow grow
-Not fast
-Will be happy to end the experiment soon

I've tried all the light cycles for veg so far and I think this is as low as you can go before bad things start to happen. These plants like 16-20 hours of light and that is where they grow the best. At least my photoperiod strains do, and I'll be happy when these ladies make it to the bloom room and I can revert my timer back to 18/6, I don't plan on messing with this again anytime soon.

[KingKush]

Chefbjy
Oh I would say it is working just fine, plants are still upright and taking water. Experiments like this help provide raw data that I can actually utilize to make better decisions. Too much mis-information out there. Here is a great example of "well it's not completely bogus but there are better ways"
Could still be too early to draw conclusions. When I need them in the Bloom Room I will have a better idea.

[Chefbjy]

That's it stay positive. I'm glad you are providing a contribution to the data. A side by side would have been ideal. But still would like to hear your thoughts and notes.

[Campesino]

I have to say that I'm not particularly surprised by this report. Well, a little surprised you got a volunteer!, But the Gas lamp method just didn't seem right... Less Light = Less Energy = less growth. I think it is difficult to avoid the laws of physics!
Thanks for doing it though! A feather in your cap for running the test

[DrPhoton]

I was worried about the interpretation of the results. Because of less overall light, they could stretch more. Which people can interpret as more growth. But a closer look at the dry mass would show the complete opposite.

There are also other variables which can indirectly affect the potential for growth. For example as you know from my articles, light quantity is more important than light quality in multispectrum light. However monochromatic light has poor efficacy to plants. Even at the same flux levels compared to multispectrum light. This has nothing to do with photosynthetic efficiency and this is key to interpretation of light quality and plants. Plants photosynthetic response to different wavelengths of light is practicaly the same and the differences are insignificant. However plants do thrive better with multispectrum light sources. This has to do with radiation capture. Multispectrum light facilitates healthy morphology that increases radiation capture by factors such as stem and petiole elongation and leaf area index. The photosynthetic efficiency is unchanged, however the plants ability to capture light because of favoured mophology is improved. This is basically a result from blue light and the shade avoidance response.

This is where this light cycle program could have worked. However less overall light means the overall DLI of blue is changed and depending on the light source, can be a negative or positive response. But the same result can still be obtained with standard light cycles with ideal DLI of blue. But with the advantage of more potential for growth with the increased DLI of light.

Let me really confuse the heck out of you. Ignore the following if you wish, im just rambling now. Theres actually much further complexities in the process of understanding what makes an efficient light source. It becomes easier to understand when you get to learn the biochemical reactions of photosynthesis in plants and light physics.
So lets break it down.

Electrical efficiency: Describes how much output energy is produced from input energy. Excess energy not produced for the wanted effect is a byproduct of inefficient conversion.

Photon efficiency: How efficiently a photon of light is emitted per unit of energy (usually joules or watts)

Energy efficiency: How efficiently energy is used to provide work or purpose.

Lets talk about LED for a second. Blue diodes are more electrically efficient than Red diodes. But Red diodes have a higher energy efficiency so it can be better to use more Red than Blue. You might be wondering how the heck does that work ?. Well as you might know, as the wavelength of light gets shorter, energy density gets higher. This is why ionizing radiation is bad, because it contains enough energy to knock an electron off an atom.

Because shorter wavelengths contain higher density of energy, it goes without saying that more energy is required to generate photons of shorter wavelength. Even though a light source could have equal electrical efficiency at all wavelengths.
Shorter wavelengths will produce fewer photons than longer wavelengths because they require more energy. For example with a LED light source, which for this example is 100% electrically efficient, a source producing light at 350nm at 100 watts produces 380umol of light. But a source at 650nm produces 550umol. Even though they are both 100% electrically efficient, they produce differing amounts of photons. This is because as previously said, shorter wavelengths require more energy to produce an equivalent photon of longer wavelengths

So you would be correct to assume, well why is blue still not better?, it has a higher energy desnity. The reason is from something called the stokes shift. So a 450nm photon of light contains about 2.7ev of energy compared to a 650nm photon of light of around 1.9ev. Plants can only absorb energy at a specific density. If you look at photosystems they have a special pair of chlorophyll at the center, where all light energy is concentrated to. P680 and p700. Which average to about 1.78ev of energy it can absorb. So when a Red photon of light at 650nm reaches this center, it looses 0.12ev of energy as heat through photochemical quenching. But when a blue photon at 450nm reaches the center it looses 0.92ev of energy. And as we have worked out, plants do not utilize this excess energy and goes to waste.

So although blue at 450nm can have identicle electrical efficiency, red at 650nm can be more energy efficient as it can produce more photons for the same amount of energy. So red at 650nm has a higher photon efficiency than blue at 450nm. Electrical effciency, Photon efficiency and energy efficiency.

Now you may remember in my articles that light quantitiy is more important than light quality. This is still the case when referring to light efficacy for plants. Again more complexities in the interpretation of the meanings of light efficacy. Light quality with respect to photosynthetic efficiency has been shown to have very little difference in plant growth. Indicating that the differences of the photosynthetic efficiency with different wavelengths of light is insignificant and more focus should be placed on light quantity rather than light quality. However. Plant morphology to light, changes the radiation capture efficiency, which earlier studies neglected when assesing plant photosynthetic efficiency. Plant morphology that increases radiation caputure by increasing aspects such as leaf area index, has increased photosynthetic capacity with the same photosynthetic efficiency. However the extent of this is again, insignificant with typical light sources.


So sorry for clogging your thread KingKush, im just verbally thinking haha. You say the word and il remove it if its too unrelated.

[Campesino]

I laughed when I got to

Let me really confuse the heck out of you.

Because you already had! But what came after that actually made sense.
I sense a new article...

[DrPhoton]

Hahaha i laughed. Na, this is what i could have placed in the morphology section on light technologies. But thats a whole lot of dribble for the same conclusion thats already on the current article. I would not want to make things more confusing for people. But its amazing how complex this subject is. Bruce bugbee is the leading scientist on this subject and practically provided the research for what i consider the bible of light interactions on plants.

[KingKush]

May 11
THE END

Well it's been 2 months since sprout and after an 8 week veg cycle I am unhappy with the performance. Seriously, after 8 weeks I coulda had an auto like D.A.A.S.69 or Canuck147 so this is myth busted. I switched back to 18/6 and the girls are singing again, melody & harmony. Ended up with a few minor observations worth sharing.
1) It keeps plants alive and seemingly healthy. My girls only spent a few weeks here but they were fine for the most part.
2) Slows things down, sorta like growing in too cold of temperatures.
3) Disregard all claims about it being "better"- the only advantage is that you could keep something from flowering without 18hours of lights



The whole time under the 12/1 lighting I would walk in, and the girls would be crying, singing off-key and without harmony. I know some of you growers out there can literally hear/smell/sense the "happiness" of your plants. I couldn't take it any longer and pulled the plug on the experiment. The girls literally said "Thank You" this morning, or at least that is what the new growth was saying. Sometimes they say nothing, lately they girls have been speaking to me saying they liked their lives living back on eighteen/six!

Growers Love

Happy Friday
Have a Stoned Sunny Weekend!

[DrPhoton]

Thanka for that KingKush, i actually know someone personally that uses this method. I have never seen his work but he claims it works well. His yields however show the complete opposite.

👍

[Campesino]

I am so happy that I am not the only one who listens to the song my plants are singing!

Myth busted! Thanks again for the test, I am totally confident in your analysis of the method. Perhaps for a long term mother, but who would want their mother singing off key?

Glad they are no longer pitchy and have found their harmonization on 18/6. Looks happy

[Chefbjy]

Looks like they're singing for sure now. Gotta listen to your plants.