Lighting Question

I wanted to try to clear something up. I have been searching around and have read about lighting and such and still didnt find 1 thing Iwas looking to figure out. I hear that for a clf grow you should have about 100 actual watts per plant or square foot? Now regardless to this statement being true or not here is my actual questionbased on if it is true.

Is there a cost difference in electricity running 400 actual watts of clf oposed to a 400 watt MH or HPS?

well, keep in mind that you should be more worried about the bulbs output (lumens), overall, the wattage is the wrong number to stress about when it comes to growing, at least in my experience, I started out growing with 3 42w 27K bulbs from the Depot, but I was paying more attention to total watts as opposed to what is real important, lumens/ sq. ft, for example, if you have a grow room 2 x 2, 4 sq ft, you'll cover a good amount with a certain amount of lights, lumens/sq ft, but take the same lights, in a bigger area, you'll end up with overall less lumens per sq. ft. Of course I don't have any real scientific numbers to back me up, just from my own personal observations with CFLs, honestly it's worth the experiment. Try to find yourself a copy of Buds For Less, which details growing with strictly a setup of 8 High Wattage (lumens) CFL bulbs, I think he ends up with like 7 or 8 thousand lumens/sq ft, don't quote me on that, but it's worth the read to at least get an idea of the efficiency of CFLs, vs. H.I.Ds, To answer your question, I'd like to imagine that 400ws of CFLs vs. 400ws of HiDs would at least be more efficient @ a lumens per watt ratio, but never ran HiDs...

Thanks for the reply. I understand what you are saying about lumens. I was just always curious to the whole watt per watt from clf to hid only because I hear people do cfl to save koney in ther eelectric bill but they end up using the same amount of watts if not more in cfls than just 1 say 400 watt or 250 watt mh or hps.

Another lighting question I have would be when you have your lights hanging over top of your plants do you want a reflector on them through whole process or during veg not flower or not during veg but during flower etc. Are reflectors always good to have or sometimes bad is what im looknig to find out.

From what I've read, in most cases people using HiDs don't always get a chance to utilize all of that great output anyway, because they have to place their lamps farther and farther away, which consequently lowers their yield overall because the light can't penetrate as far. With CFLs, because you can get the lights so close to the plants, I've got mine like inches away, you get to utilize every last lumen you have available. Try to find a copy of Buds for less, that guy grows like 3 oz. off of 6 I think he says 42 watt CFLs, and from what I see it didn't even look like he topped them, and the top cola weighed a hulking 15g's, it really opened my eyes to what CFLs were capable of accomplishing. I'm currently making plans to build a 4 CFL system with 420 watts. I estimate I'll get about 7k lumens/sq ft., The most expensive part being the bulbs most likely. Once I get to that point I'll post the journal on this sub forum, worth the research IMO. I imagine that it costs at the very least LESS expensive to run than a 400w HiD, couldn't tell you though, never had the pleasure. Everything I'm calculating is based off of estimates, I have no way of proving this, but even @ 420watts the load is about 3.5 amps? Not sure, per kilowatt hour I'm still willing to bet it's cheaper to run.