First off, let me quantify what I'm about to say. I am not heavily concerned with the quantity of cannabis that I produced, but the quality! On the girls that I train, I focus on developing main colas and eliminate branching that won't produce the quality of cannabis that I want. This eliminates/reduces larf and allows the plant to direct the energy to developing the main colas.quickest flip? dependent on the strain and speed of growth, but as a general rule, once they hit 4-5 nodes... imho, if you SoG them,
personally I like 4 pots in my 70x70, and to train them flat and out from the 5th node, remove the 1st node branchlets, topped, then top the 8 branches, give them a week or so too grow out, flip, train to fill the horizontal plane and then let them grow vertically, 16 mains per plant, 64 in total. takes longer than autos and uses more leccy though, this is my main reason to try autos, i expect to save 30% costs on a full grow of autos over photo's.
To be honest with you, using your method on photos will probably get you slightly better quality and more cannabis than with autos.
With autos, I top once, Spread out the branches and hope the hormones do their work on the side branches. That usually gives me a satisfactory amount of Branches that could develop into main colas. In Regular Earthboxes, I've planted to one end of the box and just took a pull on the main cola towards the empty end. The pulling over of the main cola gives the other branches time to catch up and it seems to break the main cola dominance, so the hormones get more evenly distributed. Best used with your larger sized auto girls. I think ya do have to pick winners and losers more with this method, but you get more mains as the end result. I think this method would work really well with photos.
And there are some autos that just do not care for training! In some it might be minor and then others you see quite a drastic reaction. I have one currently in this run that absolutely did not care for the training I gave her. I have never had one with quite the reaction I saw from her, definitely not the norm!
I'm definitely not trying to discourage you! I'm just trying to be a bit realistic. I really don't think you're gonna save 30% on your expenses. You do have a shorter daily light cycle with photos. With modern led lighting, The expense to operate them has declined. Now you still have to maintain your grow room environment. While I haven't set it down to paper and actually calculated the expenses, I would assume though, that controlling and maintaining the environment is a larger expense than operating the lights. So you could save some money if your entire grow period is shorter.
Now, the bottom line is this. Which method has the least expensive gram per monitary unit.
Given my preface, I really don't think you're going to see that much of a savings going to autos........ If any at all
The Earthbox laying over method Is definitely something I want to explore with photos.