LED or CFL

1000W double ended gavita, $450 covers a 5X5 flowering Cannabis but requires quite a lot of vertical height and heavy duty ventilation. You can get much better results with LED but the up front cost would be much higher.

As far as vegging goes, fluoro is OK but very inefficient due to low conversion efficiency and very significant reflector losses so it creates a lot more heat than necessary and electrical cost. Vegging is what LED does best, you can get the job done with astonishingly low wattage, especially if you DIY. Screw in LED bulbs are better than fluoro, but the complexity and cost of installing a bunch of bulbs and sockets is a good portion of the work of DIY anyway.

Screw in LED option, I recommend COB spotlight style
The 15W cool white, 4W actual, $3 ea


DiY LED vegging example:
5000K Vero10 COB $4.37 ea
280mA LED drivers 89% efficient, $2.69 ea (drivers 3 Vero10s)
Heatsink for passive cooling, 8" for each Vero 10 $2.50

Good luck!

You should definitely go LED over cfl. I would suggest to buy the Apollo 300's amazon offers. Most of the LEDs in the 300w size pull 170 true watts and cover about a 3x2 area. I would buy whatever you can afford grow under it and expand your grow area as budget allows.

smowstack said:

$250 to run a 1000 watt? Maybe in some underprivileged countries like Europe or Canada, but not in the good old USA I would put the over/under at $38, and if you are conservative, I would take the under

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at about $0.13 per kwh it adds up to about $95 to run a 1000 watt 24/7 for 30 days... Add in fans and you're lookin at about $120 per light per month... Reasonably 3 600 watt hps could cover your area to start...Science says 600's are more efficient for plant growth than 1000's.... (heat vs lumens vs inverse square law)

You want to go from zero to 10 or 15 plants on a budget of $350? You can't even go from zero to growing one plant for $350 without cobbling together a bunch of outdated inefficient equipment. Grow one or two plants at a time for a while then go big once you have your game figured out.

http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Horticulture-GLK600CT24E-Digital-Dimmable/dp/B00521B894/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1423480808&sr=8-3&keywords=600+watt+apollo

Two of these will be enough for 10-15 plants. All you will need is ducting, a fan and a carbon filter. I run a 600 12/12, a 400 18/6, and about 200w of cfl for seedlings and clones. Along with all my fans, it adds around 80 dollars to my electric bill each month.

ThinHermit said:

http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Horticulture-GLK600CT24E-Digital-Dimmable/dp/B00521B894/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1423480808&sr=8-3&keywords=600 watt apollo

Two of these will be enough for 10-15 plants. All you will need is ducting, a fan and a carbon filter. I run a 600 12/12, a 400 18/6, and about 200w of cfl for seedlings and clones. Along with all my fans, it adds around 80 dollars to my electric bill each month.

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Very good Info..exactly what I was looking for, be able to veg and bloom with them. Right on the money! Hopefully the light works well.

So many options

I have that exact light for a while now. The bulb that comes with it isn't the best quality, but the rest is quality. It takes both hps and mh and is dimmable. I am happy with it.

Hmmm..I could grt a different bulb then huh? I could even just get one mainly for flowering Nd make due veg with cfl or whatever.

That'd work out for now ya think?

The bulb that came with mine only worked for a few days. Maybe it got damaged in shipping. The metal halide that came with it worked well until my replacement bulb came, but I haven't used it since.

BigEasy1 said:

Grow one or two plants at a time for a while then go big once you have your game figured out.

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I think the best thing a newbie could do is a perpetual grow (12/12 from seed if no separate veg/flower spaces). Having plants that are 3-4 weeks behind each other is a great way to apply new techniques without waiting for an entire tent to harvest.

SupraSPL said:

Screw in LED option, I recommend COB spotlight style
The 15W cool white, 4W actual, $3 ea

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This sounds like @mauricem00's 3-4w SMD lightbulbs. I think the strength of the bulb has to be sized to the space. In a micro grow (like a PC) 3-4w would be great. But, in a more typical(?) 2x2x4' space the labor involved with that many lights (to get 30-35w/sq ft in flower) would be huge.

That's what I like about the Cree lightbulbs sold at Home Depot. 9.5w works well as sidelight in a small space like that. 12 and 18w work well for top lighting in a small space, or sidelighting in a larger space. The PAR 38 spots and floods (18w) work well for toplight in a larger space.

Here's one I'm flowering under 5 PAR38 spots, 1 PAR 38 flood, and six 9.5w lightbulbs as sidelight. That's 108w in PAR38 and 57w sidelight. The plant is about 3' diameter. Not sure how to calculate the w/sq ft for that irregular space. I'm certainly not burning a lot of watts for that space (it's 18-25w/sq ft?). I probably need to add 1-2 lights soon. So far it's doing well.





This plant is a little large for what I'd like to do with this style of lighting. I wish it had been more in the 2x2 size, less bushy.

Great info I truly appreciate your time.

That sounds really good to me, as I want to get atleast one grow before I buy hps lights..

I was curious..isn't it possible to use those splitters and have like E.G 20, 42 watt cfls granted ventilation is sufficient, and you could have a lot of lumens. Or better yet, why not have double thr amount of lights you have now?