Darn Tube Type CFLS

I bought 2 new tube type 105 watt CFLs, from SH, and then found two from growwurks much cheaper. NONE OF THE 4 WORK! Two were Sunlight and two were Lone Star manufactuers, all 4 from China.
I bought two new 200 watt tube type CFLS and on one of them, ONLY HLAF of it lights up.

I already had 4 tube type 105s, from SunLight, that do work, but it takes them ten to 15 minutes to light up, after I plug them up.

I discovered this while hooking up my lights last night over my new sprouts.

Over the past year or two, I have seen several new threads here with the same complaint, "my CFL will not work in my clamp reflector".

Any suggestions?

The spiral CFLs work fine, but I'll never use or reccomend a Tube type CFL .

thanks for the heads up know not to buy tube cfls now

The spirals are too good as a watts per dollar value anyway.

Once again, Im going to have to agree with Illegal. I figured if I ever used those tubes Id just put them in the corners of my grow area to add some addition light, nothing really helpful except maybe for clones needing low lighting.

Hmmm...i was considering getting those at one point. Glad I didn't :/ Sry man.

dude if your gonna go tube flourescent, might as well go with t5 shoplights, they WORK, and imho work much better than cfls, and you can easily do an sog with them....i would never mess with tube cfls unless i had them laying around the house, and i deny buying online, you dont know what your getting, specially something so fragile... i was getting a 42 watt cfl the other day and they had one with barely any coating over the glass, and im like "im not buying that shit, it looks like its dead" and i chose a very good and nicely coated one, online you dont know what your getting, and if you get stuck with a peice of shit, well, your out the money and your out the success. unless you ship it back (1 week) then get a new one (2weeks) and now your 3 weeks behind becuz somebody fucked up your order, if your buying a ballast fixture yea, go for it, dont buy bulbs lol ....

I got one of these and got my 105s to work in the clamp reflectors. They were just not screwing in far enough.


Nothing would fix the 200 watt bulb, only HALF of it lit up.