What Size Should it be?

A Friend of A Friend (afof) loves this forum and has been trolling it for a while but this is the first post.

Afof has grown about 6 rounds from some bag seed with a soil/cfl setup. The first few grows were shaky, at best, but now they have gotten allot better. They have invested in a 1k lighting system, which is switchable (mh/hps) and dimmable to 500 or 750w, and some good seed genetics.

They have not set up the new lighting but do have a few seedlings popping up already.
The delima is grow spaces. They have already invested in 1 area that is 2.5 x 3.2 feet (8ft tall), which has an attic exhaust, outer locking door, inner panda door, and a 16clf system (26 bulbs: 13 hot and 13 cold). They have done 1 to 6 plants at a time in it and it seems to work well.
They want to flower 6 at a time while having 6 in the cloning/veg cycle. They are going to get another grow area but the question is.

Should they keep the 2.5 x 3.2 as the flowing area or make it the clone/veg area? Follow up question: Ideally what size should the second area be and what should be in there? Thanks and sorry for the long post.

IMO if you try to setup a 1000w in that small a space it would be a waste. As a rule of thumb use 50watt per square foot. so with 1000w you could do up to 20 square feet. I would use the current space for veg and make a new, larger space for flower. as usual ymmv.

The current thinking is: Shift the cfls to the new tent and put the hid in the current room and dim it to 500w. The reasoning is the new area will not have a good heat exhaust system, it will be a free standing tent in a room. But then they just answered their own question unless there is something they didn't think about.

I run 2 flower rooms each with a 1000w HPS in them. they are 3X4X6.5 tall. Your friend is close to my size and I do 6 plants in 7 gallon buckets and they barely fit in there, you can check out my grow under my multi strain thread that I started. What they need to do is go down and get 6 planters, I wouldn't go smaller than 5 gallon buckets to grow in and lay them out to see if they will fit in that space. You should be able to get 2-3 oz's off each plant deppending on genetics and growing experiance.

They use 8 gallon rectangular trash bins that just barely squeeze in there. They got 3 oz per plant with the cfl/bag seed setup, shouldn't they get more with an hid and genetics?