Hey guys I got bored and a little ambitious today so I decided to make a nice fixture for my cfls rather than using those haggard clip on lights. This is 3 pieces of polished aluminum sheet, some 1/4" hardware, some goofy metal brackets I bent to hold the angled sides and 3 basement light fixtures with a Y splitter in each, wired it up with 14 gauge wire. To hand it I attached 4 eyelets and then I have 2 15' pieces of chain with 4 caribeaners so I can just push the clip and adjust the height. It's amazing the difference it made over having the clip on lights with no shield.
This is my first indoor grow, I used to just throw seeds in the woods and get a bunch of seedy midis. I plan to use CFL's the whole way through. I have 2 6-band led panels and 3 more light fixtures to add as supplemental when it gets bigger, and I have like 10-12 2700K bulbs for flowering.. I don't want to deal with HID lighting because I can't hack up my closet to get the proper ventillation with one.
my special girls 2 of em run under a 250 HPS let me know how ur crop turns out and what ur cumltative bill runs for those cfls I crop every 9 or 10 weeks that's seed to flower using autoflower seed heat is always a issue watch those cfls they do put off a little heat kept burning leaves and had to keep rotating when I tried em but I only vegged with em and now I just use HPS got a 600 or 800 Watt cfl for clones
Yeah I have a window fan with two 6" fans on high blowin on them and I keep them about 3" away and no burning so far. We'll see how it goes I may get a tent and switch to HPS but I would like to grow at least one successful plant before I invest that much though because I'm still a beginner and have to get my nutes ad everything figured out. I can get an HPS setup for $30 and modify my reflector to work with it so it's an option if these cfls don't workout but I read a bunch of info on them and studied a few people's successful grows with them. As far as energy costs, from my math if they ran 24 hours a day all month it would be like $8. I'm not sure how that compares to HID lighting costs. My electricity rate is $.08, if you wanted to make a comparison.
Cost me bout 12.50 a Month to run my little 250 HPS but I think I'm gonna get 2 more soon found a couple second hand HPS low bay shop lights cheap with bulbs but I got a 5x3 room I'm gonna use, got two high volume horticulture fans for it when I get the new lights set up I'll mount them to
Check out ebay you can get the 400watt shop fixtures for next to nothing. you just have to separate the ballast and extend the wiring and make a new reflector, if you copy mine but modify it for the hps bulb holder than you could make that for about $25-$30. Craigslist as well, that's where I found the light set-up I was looking at the guy has about 20 of the shop lights with bulbs and he's asking $30 each.
Can you re-up those pic's here mate? Photobucket has kicked them... Pun intended. Would like to see how they turned out.
I don't have any there may be some floating around my grow thread. I broke it down for lighting fixtures in my garage. I ended up switching to LED's because I realized CFL's would not yield me what I needed to have enough smoke for myself between grows. The CFL's were a quick decision which I didn't research enough first because they aren't efficient enough for anything other than micro grows.
I am in the same boat Fixxer. I was all set to do a CFL-only grow, but I have decided to add some LED's to the mix. I can't afford much LED power (2x 50w) but if anything I will get a bit more light penetration and a wider coverage of the light spectrum.
.08 cents per KW ??..damm my base rate is .13 for the 1st 327 KW..then it goes up,,and up .. and it hits .36 cents a kw..no way i can run a huge amp load in either HID or CFL .. it all adds up..and fast..i gotta stick with outside grows..sunlights cheap..heh