What’s the best light schedule for autos can I r...

18 hours of light and 6 hours of darkness for the whole life cycle will give you optimal results with auto flowering plants. Any more light than 18 hours is basically a waste of electricity, as cannabis can only grow so much during any 24 hour period and this growth tops out at around 18 hours. Torturing any plant with continuous 24 hour light for weeks or months will result in sickly plants with a severely malfunctioning metabolism due to not having a proper cycle of light and "sleep". Cannabis needs its 6 hours of rest for a normally functioning metabolism and to undertake certain metabolic processes that it can not do during the "lights on" time. Everything on planet Earth survives with a personal circadian rhythm and to deprive anything of sleep for weeks or months is going to lead to major issues quickly. Most people who try and grow with 24 hours of light for the whole cycle only ever do it once and I have seen numerous horrible photos on this forum of plants that were subjected to this totally unnatural and torturous method that looked like the most demented cannabis plants that I have ever seen in over 35 years of cultivation! I like to think of the six hours of sleep as 2 hours to recover from the day, 2 hours to rest and 2 hours to get ready for the day ahead, and this is basically what occurs during the dark cycle. If you need further proof of why plants need sleep, google "photosynthesis" and you will quickly discover why sleep is a vital part of a plants well being and health. 18/6 is not a random number and has been derived at through 80+ years of research into cannabis and to what is the most effective cycle. You can of course grow your plants at 12/12, however the plants will be dwarfs and with correspondingly dwarfish yields. If you are concerned with electricity costs, growing normal feminised photoperiod plants can save you a lot of hours of "lights on time" and therefore money. How so?? Using a typical 14 week cycle, - (as I am yet to see any auto that finishes as fast as any breeder claims) Autos = 14 weeks at 18 hours = 1764 hours of lights on time. Photoperiod = 6 weeks at 18 hours = 756 hours, plus 8 weeks at 12 hours = 672 hours for a total of 1428 hours of lights on time. So, by growing photoperiod plants over the same 14 week cycle, you would save 336 hours of lights on time. I know which electricity bill I would prefer and whose "carbon footprint" is smaller too. If you have grown photoperiod plants previously, I would say stick with them, you are not missing out on anything. Personally I don't see auto flowering plants as offering anything over the traditional photoperiod plants and can not see any advantages in growing them, only disadvantages, like unstable genetics, fussy plants to grow, higher indoor costs, poor performance outdoors and generally much smaller yields due to them flowering automatically at around 3-5 weeks of age regardless of size. At least with photoperiod plants you can control when flowering occurs and maximise your yields. Hope this helps, Organoman. (and enemy of autoflowers!)

Automatic/Ruderalis plants grow independently from your light cycle so you can technically do whatever you want, as long as you let them see some light for at least a couple of hours a day. Best practice is to use a 18/6 light cycle because this way you won't stress out your plants to much. But still many growers swear for 20/4 because that way your plant will grow much faster (also you will pay more for the power used running the lights almost 24/7). But you'd actually use a 24 hour light and i'd would still work - just gets very expensive with every watt used. Good luck and happy harvesting! 🙂