Someone help!

I'm starting some new babies and I went and bought a new cfl...I went to the grow faq to make sure I got something with enough lumens to support them and it wont work....or I'm just dumb. Either way can someone help cause I already starting the germinations process and need to know soon. thanks guys Peace

you want to shoot for 75 watts per square ft of growing area

so what do the lumens mean? Im not sure about the wattage...

The bulb that's in the fixture I bought is 18 watts i think and produces 1360 lumens and I checked some bulbs at home depot that were like 20 watts and only 850 and 600 lumens...Doesnt the light output have a factor?

you can use watts or lumens to determine the right amount of light, there is a conversion for each type of light. 75 watts total (you can use multiple lights) is the recommended amount for 1 square ft

whats the conversion?

sorry, i think its in growfaq which is down right now

According to wikipedia, the lumen (symbol: lm) is the SI unit of luminous flux, a measure of the perceived power of light...luminous flux is adjusted to reflect the varying sensitivity of the human eye to different wavelengths of light.

Plants work off different spectra than the human eye so the lumen isn't really a very useful unit of measurement. I would suggest you browse the cfl growing forum to see what other people with a grow space similar in size to your own are doing. The trick is to get as much light as possible in there without heating up the space too much.

One 18W bulb isn't very much light, even for seedlings. You might want to think about 23W or 42W bulbs, two to four for each plant. "Daylight White" (6500K) are good for vegtative growth. "Warm White" (2700K) are good for flowering.

Generally you would want around 5000-6000 lumens per square foot, but the more the better. The sun creates around 10,000 lumens per square foot, but has a way better light spectrum than artificial. Check the Kelvin scale, you want high spectrum for veg phase and low spectrum for flowering phase.

does anyone know if incandescent light bulbs work? I know they are much higher wattage..

incandescent dont work at all. seedlings dont need as much light as bigger plants.. i use 26 watt bulbs with a 2 way Y connector so 52 watts plus i also have some 42 watts. of course my plants are big but when starting out depending on how many seedlings you got i would go with some 26 or 42 watters. GL and hope you find your answers