400w CMH or 4ft 8bulb T5 for veg room?

Hi everyone,

Building my first grow room and wondering if i should get a 400w cmh setup or 400w T5 setup?? i think i can get a cooltube 6" with ballast and everything for 200.00, but it comes with regular mh bulb, so i plan on buying a cmh for it for about 50.00 bucks so that would be about 250. Or i could just got a sunblaze or some other 400 watt t5 setup for about the same price or cheaper depending on brand.

What i have at this point is a 1000w hps and and inline 8" can fan 737cfm...i think this fan might be overkill, but I was thinking of down the road and also that maybe i could get an 8" air cooled reflector for my veg and have them both runnning off this fan.


this will be a basement grow in a dry basement.


anyone know if its ok to gauge down a fan this size to a 4" dryer exaust vent>?

also if i go cmh, is it important to have an air cooled hood? Or can i just go with a bat wing or something.

unless you plan on having a big difference in plant height (like a foot or more), I'd get the T5's. When you get them within a few inches of the tops, plants just go nutz. Only drawback is they don't penetrate as well, but if everything is similar in height and you can keep it close it will veg better than hid's will.

how bout a 2 ft 4 bulb t5 for vegging the babies and small ones, then transferring them to 400cmh for a few weeks and then to 1000 hps. I figure I'm gonna need a small t5 setup for my babies, so maybe i could just use that for the few 3 or 4 weeks, then go to 400cmh for a few more weeks. I plan on slowly moving these into flower so i can get some nice yeilds because plant count is an issue.

really there are a lot of different combinations you could do. What you mention would work. I was just telling you what I did It really comes down to style, every type of light can be used effectively, however, to do so you have to use totally different styles of growing.

Id think it's probably overkill to go from t5 then to cmh why not just do both! more light is better, T5 up top throw some cfls in their for side lighting...