Flourescent Only Cabinet Grow Questions

[southflorida]

For one plant, in a LARGE speaker box (30"L16.5"W17.5"D) with a large rectangle ventilation port at top which will have fans mounted to obtain adequate air flow, my questions are as follows; I want to use four 2ft flourescents, as I have the fixtures/ballast and just need lights(which I also need to know which to use), can this setup be used from start to harvest? The ballast in the fixture has a list of lamp types and watts, the max is 20w so I wanted to run this by you all before I got my hopes up! Thanks.

 

[Respect]

these are the long tube floro's right?

 

[southflorida]

2 footers

 

[Respect]

each one is 20 watts? Do they have the lumen output on them by any chance?

 

[southflorida]

I dont have the lights like I said in the first post, just read that off the ballast

 

[Respect]

oh yeah, my bad. I haven't looked into using those tube fluorescents yet, even though I want too. It seems like the max watts your gonna get is 80. I'm using 120 right now but am going to double that for a better yield. If you check out my journal it would seem that some combination of our setup's would be ideal. I'm getting 2 64watt CFL's that are slightly larger than the bulbs I have now. They were 15 bucks each from Home Depot. I want put tube lights like yours on the sides of my box, running top to bottom, with those two lights at the top. The tube lights would be best for getting light to the lower parts of the plant.

 

[southflorida]

Well, I have an instructional guide to grow with fluorescents but he uses 2 4 fts not 4 2fts and also a "household" light and "aquarium" light. The 4's wouldnt fit in my grow cabinet so I went with the 2's and bring you all this question.

 

[MOTAvation]

My first grow was with florecent lights, i used 3 florecent lights each 25w, white light. Didnt get much out of the plant and i even put the lights about 2 to 3 in. away from the plant i got about 2 grams at the most, but it was pretty good bud, nice high.I wouldnt recomend growing with florecents, their good for veg. though

 

[southflorida]

okay ill upgrade for flowering, but i read u just nead a dif spectrum or w/e fluoro maybe u didnt do that?

 

[RooRman]

Look for Agrosun 2ft. tubes on the internet. They are the best flouro. tubes of this type that money can buy. I really feel that they are best used for veg. growth only though. Even these just can't stand up to an HPS of any wattage. You will be disappointed with the results if you flower using just these tubes.

 

[HHGreenHand]

If you're trying to keep the cost down and the heat, which im sure is a bitch with a speakerbox, mostly due to the fact that im growing in a speakerbox, I would shoot for CFLs. You will be able to fit more in the area and get a much higher lumen/watt ratio.
It is true about the diffrent spectrum for flowering and vegging. Simply returning one set of lights to home depot allowed me to switch back for no charge with the CFLs.

 

[HHGreenHand]

strangely enough, im growing in a speaker box with CFLs and in the same county as you, i believe. Weird?

 

[southflorida]

Haha

 

[mistergreen60]

I know you said that you'd like to stick with Flouros, but have you considered using a small HPS for flower. I have a similar setup (a 15"x24"x60" grow cabinet), and all that I did was install a removable shelf that I rigged my lights to. When they are in veg, I use a shelf that has CFL's on it, and when they are in flower, I swap out that shelf with one that has two 50 watt HPS security lights mounted to it. Belive it or not, I can have plants as close as 4 inches from the security lights without burn because they are such low wattage. I picked up the HPS security lights at Home Depot for about $30 each. I found that the plants exploded with growth when I switched over to the HPS lights.