Tools / Planning

Cannabis yield estimator

Yield planning is the question that drives nearly every other indoor decision — tent footprint, fixture wattage, training regimen, and the budget that wraps around all three. The estimator below starts from the documented one-gram-per-watt industry baseline and adjusts that figure against three inputs that move the actual outcome materially: grower skill, strain genetic potential, and the canopy area the light has to cover. The numbers it returns are descriptive reference figures rather than promises about any individual cycle, drawn from grow-report aggregations and published commercial yield ranges. Use the output as a planning target alongside the strain's documented yield figures on its detail page rather than as a single source of truth.

How the calculation works

The baseline figure used is one gram of dry flower per watt of light power draw, a number documented across decades of indoor cannabis literature as the round target experienced growers aim for under modern fixtures. From that baseline the estimator multiplies by two adjustment factors: a grower skill multiplier covering the gap between a first-grow operator and a steady canopy-management veteran, and a strain genetic potential multiplier covering the gap between a novelty cross and a flagship commercial cut.

Skill multipliers are documented as roughly 0.6× for a beginner, 0.85× for an intermediate operator who has completed three to ten cycles, and 1.05× for an advanced grower fluent in training and environment tuning. Genetic potential multipliers run 0.7× for low-potential genetics, 1.0× for a typical modern hybrid, and 1.25× for high-potential commercial flagships. The grams-per-square-meter output divides the total by the tent area, and the grams-per-watt output divides by the configured wattage so the planning figures match the formats published in breeder catalogues.

Reference ranges

Documented commercial yields range from 0.5 to 1.2 grams per watt under sodium fixtures and 0.8 to 1.5 grams per watt under modern LED. Hobby tents commonly land toward the lower end of those bands because the canopy is smaller, the training is less intensive, and the environmental controls are coarser than what a commercial facility runs. The 600 g/m² mark is documented as the rough boundary between a typical home result and a top-tier cultivar expression at scale.

Reading the estimator's output as a planning ceiling rather than a forecast is the documented approach in cannabis horticulture references. Phenotype variation alone can move the final number twenty to forty percent in either direction; the estimator handles the systematic factors but not the stochastic ones.

Related references: Lighting · Flowering stage · Highest-yielding strains

Other tools: VPD · PPFD to DLI · Grow cost