Space Bucket Yields – Average Harvests and How To Increase Your Yields!
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Space Buckets are one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get started growing marijuana at home.
Thanks to their discreet look and simple material list, you can get up and growing for less than $100.
But due to their restrictive sizes, the amount of weed you can grow in a Space Bucket will be limited compared to what you’d get in a grow tent.
The average yield from a Space Bucket is about 1-2 oz per plant.
Obviously yield depends on a lot of factors such as genetics, fertilizer, feeding schedule, amount of light and size of the Space Bucket.
The 2 main factors that determine your yield in a Space Bucket will be your lighting and the size of the Space Bucket. Let’s take a look at both of these.
What Affects Your Yield in a Space Bucket?
There are 2 main things to look at when figuring out your yield in a space bucket.
How much light do you have and how much space do you have.
How Light Impacts Your Space Bucket Yields
Like all weed grow operations, the more light you have, the more yield you’ll get.
The issue with growing in a space bucket is that you have very little room to fit lights in it. Because of this lack of space, you need to make the most out of the space you do have which means spending more money on higher power lights. You want to pack as much power in the lights as you possibly can. Usually this means going with something like an LED.
If you can’t afford a high end LED then you can use the classic CFL design but beware that you’re giving up some potential yield.
How Space Impacts your Space Bucket Yields
The other limiting factor on cannabis growth is the amount of space the plant has to grow.
A typical space bucket setup will only allow a plant to be 1-2 feet tall.
If you add additional buckets to your set up, you can increase the room for the plant to grow up to 3-4 feet tall.
If your plant has twice as much room to grow, you should get twice as much yield when you go to harvest.
How to Increase Your Space Bucket Yields
We covered the two factors that influence yield, so now let’s look at how to max those out and increase your yields.
First off, the lights.
Since a space bucket is round, having a round LED that perfectly fits in the bucket is the best way to max out your yields.
My pick for this would be the Apollo UFO light. It claims 180 W but due to efficiency losses during transfer, it measures 109 W from the wall.
A rough approximiation for yields is 1 gram per watt in a perfect set up. That means you’d yield 109 grams which is just over 3 ounces.
Generally that’s under perfect conditions so I’d expect about 50-75% of that for newer growers which means you can expect to harvest 1.5-2 ounces of weed per space bucket with this light.
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Another popular tactic is to use LED rope lighting to line the inside of the space bucket.
While this does give the lower parts of your plant more light, the amount is pretty negligible.
For example, these LEDs only use 12 watts which isn’t going to make much of a difference for your plant when they’re spread out across the entire height of the bucket.
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Next up, let’s talk space.
The more room for the plant to grow, the bigger it will be and the more cannabis you’ll be able to grow.
Maximizing this part is pretty easy, just get more buckets.
You can continue to stack buckets as your plant grows so there really isn’t a limit to how high you can grow your plants.
There’s no limit to how high you can stack your buckets but as you increase the height, you’ll be decreasing the amount of light that reaches leaves lower on your plant.
So while you can stack your bucket up to the ceiling, you won’t want to since you get minimal gains past a certain point. That point will depend on the strength of your lights and the diameter of your buckets but for a normal 5 gallon bucket build, anything past 4 feet tall won’t help you out much.
Wrap Up
Increasing your space bucket yields is pretty straight forward.
Put as much light in your bucket as possible and give it as much room as possible.
The other factor is time but that’s not specific to space buckets. The longer you let your plant grow in vegetative mode, the larger it will be and the larger your yields will be.
So be patient and grow on!
Professor Cannabis
Yo, my name is Chad. I grow dope weed (haha) and want to help you do it too. I started growing a few years ago when it was legalized in my state and now I can help you avoid all of the mistakes I made!
