proposed cfl setup...

first of all, i'm new here... so hi

I'm looking to start my first grow soon but i don't want to go out and buy lighting without figuring out what i need first.

So, here goes:
I'm gonna be growing three plants, scrog, in a stealth cabinet. I'm doing CFL because i hope it'll be cheaper than MH or HPS and I want to switch over to LED for the next grow

anyway, I was thinking about using one 150w, 5000k full-spectrum CFL per plant, for a total of three. Now, that's $120. Would i be better off with more, smaller bulbs? What's an ideal wattage? How much light per plant?

Just a thought, to get 150W you could use 4 42W bulbs (that's actually 168W, but whatever) and depending on what fixtures you use, you'll have more options as far as placement is concerned -- side lighting, etc. This is a pro, in my opinion, on using the smaller bulbs.

But you are on the right track, my personal rule-of-thumb number is 150W per plant.

OK, so 150 watts a plant is four 42w bulbs. I need to pack 12 42 watt bulbs into a cab?! Unfortunately, going with 42w bulbs over 150w bulbs won't save me money... regardless, i'm looking at $120ish of lights...

If you look at the lumen output though, the higher wattage bulbs are more efficient (produce more lumens/watt)... Let's see if i can do 450w at under $100 with a reasonable number of sockets...each socket costs $3 for estimation's sake. So... using 15 x 30w CFLs plus 15 sockets totals 450w and $90 tops.

What about the air-purifying CLFs? Do they work to eliminate odor?

hey bud, this can be complicated at first, but look in to hard wiring your own custom circuit.. about two hours ago i didnt even know what that meant, but now im pretty confident that i can rig up my own circuit with CFLs in parallel for my clones/seedies, and this will eliminate the need for sockets, make the size of the bulbs smaller (in addition to completely removing the sockets) and allow me to make easy mopdifications to the system if i feel it necessary.

heres a bomb link:
Automotive Online Instruction

i posted it somewhere else as well

good luck nyukka

Thanks for the link man... I'm an electrical engineer, so I'm familiar with circuits and the like, haha. You still need a socket to screw the bulb into though...

i was actually taking off part of the ballast housing to expose the wires, then connecting all of them to a lamp cord... i sent you a PM with details, let me know what you think

mdg no you dont, one option is to buy the cheap cfl's (wal fart 3 for$7) cut out the bottom to expose two wires and hook as many up as u like. so for 28 bucks you can have 312 cfl watts.