Lighting schedule?

18 hour light schedules are typical when growing auto flowering plants, for as the name suggests, they flower regardless of how many hours of light they are getting and 18 hours is about how much any cannabis plant can grow in any 24 hour period. Photo period or short day length plants such as normal cannabis, requires a reduction in light/day length to initiate flowering, as this simulates that autumn/fall is approaching and stimulates the female plant to flower. In indoor cultivation, people go from 18 hours back to 12 hours to trick their plants into "thinking" autumn/fall has arrived and they better start flowering before winter arrives. Some people will go from 18 hours to 16 hours, to 14 hours and then 12 hours, to be kinder to their plants and more accurately simulate what occurs in nature and this, anecdotally, can help with preventing accelerated "stretching" occurring when the light cycle is changed from 18 hours back to 12 hours, especially with sativa or sativa heavy (genetic) strains. So depending on which type of cannabis you are growing, auto flowers need their whole life cycle at 18 hours, using a lot of electricity, or you can grow normal photo period plants (or "fems" as some people refer to them as), which will require 4-6 weeks at 18 hours of light for the "vegetative" cycle, before switching to a 12 hours lights on and 12 hours light off schedule for 8-10 weeks while they are flowering and using vastly less electricity. If you are new to growing, starting with normal photo period plants may be your best option, while figuring out some of the tricks associated with indoor growing. Normal photoperiod plants are far more forgiving of any little mistakes and are more easily "controlled" by you, rather than auto flowers who will dictate the terms and are far more finicky to grow properly. Normal photo period plants will also provide larger yields and are generally more potent than their auto flowering counterparts. For example, a particular strain may have 22-24% THC and the same strain in the auto flowering version may only produce 16-18% THC, due to the wild auto flowering Cannabis Ruderalis genes, (with almost zero THC), that are introduced to Cannabis Sativa and Cannabis Indica plants to cause the automatic flowering response. Cannabis Ruderalis comes from the Russian Steppe/outer Mongolia region which has extremely short summers. In response to the short summers, Cannabis Ruderalis has developed a trait of flowering as soon as possible so that it can ripen seeds before the cold and frost return and does not require any reduction in day lengths to initiate flowering, hence the name "auto flowering". Hope this helps,.... Organoman. (and sworn enemy of auto flowers!)