You WILL need at least 4 per plant for veg...don't listen to the guy that uses his MH...that doesn't really appy to this at all...no offence other guy. For some good growth you will want more CFL's, especially during flowering. I went with a total of 7 26W cfl's for 1 plant...never grew with cfl's before and wanted to try...so it was more of an experiment...that and i had never grown from seed always clones...but anyways...the amount of light i used deemed worthy, see my gallery to view the pics of it during it's almost 10 week life. I did top the plant at 3 weeks of age...not always a good thing..but it already had 8 nodes and was getting big, also i did do some trimming, but i know what i'm doing and i don't trim vital pieces away as you will see in the pictures. Also too having a mixture of warm white or cool white cfl's (2700K and 4100K) cfl's is actually a pretty good thing as well, i use the cool white bulbs to give a slightly less blue and a little bit of red...but make sure you concentrate on the blue side of the spectrum of max results. The way i had it was 7 lights total...5 being daylight (6500K) and the other 2 being cool white (4100K). I hope some of this helped...good luck with your grow.