CFL Lighting questions, Help ?

First off, CFLs are marketed according to what they call "equivalent" watts. Ignore those, go only by actual watts.

Use bulbs no less than 20w actual.

Minimum 100w per plant, more is better.

There are CFLs that go up to 500 actual watts, maybe even higher, and these work well for growing but are made for industrial applications and usually require a separate ballast, possibly a mogul socket.

Household replacement CFLs have low light intensity, so their usable light drops off within a few inches. Therefore, you need a lot of bulbs so that every part of the plant is close to a light.

As with all indoor grow lights, you want 6500k blue spectrum for vegging and 2700k red spectrum for flowering.

You would do well to look into LST and/or scrog techniques.

 

Do yourself a favor and forget about watts.

Watts don't make plants grow. Lumens make plants grow.

Watts is how much energy a lamp uses. Lumens is how much light it puts out.

When comparing CFL wattage to other lights, watts becomes completely meaningless.

700 watts of 2700K CFL has about the same lumens as 400 watts of HPS. So comparing watts is meaningless.

Additionally, different brands of CFL might have different lumens for the same wattage.


So before you get too far in planning a grow with watts bouncing around in your head, research lumens and the CFLs you are thinking about buying and figure out what makes the most sense from a lumen standpoint.

You might find that to match the lumens of HPS, you need so many CFLs that it just doesn't make sense to spend the money on CFL.

For instance, if you went with 68 watt (true) CFLs that Home Depot sells, you would need 10 of them to match the lumens of a 400 watt HPS. At $15 each, your $150 into lights just for your flowering bulbs.

If you look around, you might find a 400watt HPS setup for less than that.

And if you went with the little 100watt equivalent CFLs, you would need 28 of them to match the lumens of a 400 watt HPS.

Yeah, you can get those little CFLs cheap, might only cost you $40-$50 for 28 lights if you look around and get some coupons, but you need 28 sockets and a way to mount 28 lamps.


So do yourself a favor and ignore that wattage number. It doesn't tell you what you think it does.

 

CFLs make good supplemental lighting. I run 2 23w actual CFLs in each corner of my small grow space to fill in the dark spots furthest from my HID.

 

im running cfls as heat is an issue for me.

I use a 125w 6400k cfl as a main light source and use 23w dotted around. Atm on my two ryders i have the 125 and 2 23 watters. I hope in the new few weeks to add another 5 cfls to it. I think there a good grow light but hope to upgrade to a 150w hps and usee the 125w blue cfl as a supplement light.

The reason being is ill be using more W then a 150hps but not getting as many lumens or as good as a yeild. hps is the way forward

But with cfls, jus use 6500k for veg and 2700k for flower

 

Dude scrap buying loads of cfl's

Plants need lumen's not watts..... a small cfl bulb is outputting 2000 lumens...if you have 5 of these it does not equal = 10000 it just means 2000 is distributed over a bigger space.. they say you need 3000-5000 lumens per square foot... so one lowryder under ten of these will still only get 2000 lumens..fact... get yourself Maxibright CFL 250 watt... 19500 lumens.. then 4 autos will do well..... go with the red all the way

Had a freind who went all the way seed to harvest with red/red 2700.... seelings grow in any light... and once they pop up, they dont veg..they just grow...so just

 

Jay, that seems like a little overkill to me especially with lowryders. I plan on using my 125w CFL for at least 6 plants - bag seed variety.