I highly recommend looking into how you can incorporate this setup into your rooms or cabinets or whatever. It really is so much more efficient for soil or hydro either way. Even if you don't have lots of room like myself (I grow in a 6 foot long by 2.5 foot wide cabinet) you can do a 180 degree or half moon vertical set up instead of growing 360 degrees around the light. It works so well with a cooltube, you get so muhc under and side canopy penetration, and can fit about 3 times more plants under the same bulb. Try it out!
The ideal of a vertical set up sounds good and have tried it a few years ago the buds dank and a good yeild for me back then The main problems, don't forget your sun glasses or you go blind for about 5 mins not good lol The risk of a fire is high if you are not carefull the plants lean toward the light if one falls over on the hps bulb its not good, use a cool tube to stop the risk or a cage round the bulb you need min of 8 plants to forum a circle round the bulb in a 6ft x 6ft room with a 600w hps to get a very large yeild, 20oz's+ easy problem is you could have 4x 600w horizontal lights and get over double the yeild in the same space
I came across an interesting article about vertical growing today and thought I would share. The comments written about the article alone will entertain you a while..... http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/21/185758529/vertical-pinkhouses-the-future-of-urban-farming
You could also hang more than one 600 vertically and get more yield, to say that hanging more lights= more yield isn't a good comparison to vertical compared to horizontal, more light always means higher yield regardless of orientation. I did a 4'x4' coco bed with a 400 and 600 hanging vertically. 8 clones with about a 4 week (I think) veg. I used cool tubes and had a screen around to try and keep the plants from leaning in towards the light. I remember yielding over a pound but I don't remember the exact number. http://forum.grasscity.com/coco-coir/923016-4x4-coco-bed-grow.html/page-4 edit: You're right about the glasses, a pair of grow room glasses are cheaper than fucking your vision up.
Just looked at your grow with the 600w, 400w bulb. you did a great job and I like the cage. the bulb was very close to the plants so you would have lots of dank bud but say I tryed vertical grow again (600w) and grow a indica strain the cage could be 2ft in diameter and a few Plants round the outside, will the buds still be good ? the canopy will be very large, thinking this will give me a monster crop with one 600w light its now the summer in the uk and I can only run one light.