CFL lighting ballast

I was at Lowes yesterday, thinking about all the designs I've seen for top light ballasts using banks of CFLs, and was considering building one. Had the wood, plexiglass, fans, lights, extension cords, light fixtures. The whole 9. Then I walked by a 400 W HPS light and reality hit me. These home made ballasts make no sense. If you're going to use CFLs, you need to be surrounding the plant with light. That's their advantage: Getting the most out of a small space, and getting just as much growth out of the bottom half of the plant as you get from the top. If you find yourself needing to build a super ballast for CFL lights, you're probably better off just opting for HID lighting. I can't remember the exact numbers, but had a 65 W CFL (not equivalent, 300W equivalent) and the lumens on it were 4700 if I remember right. The 70 W HPS? 6500 Lumens. It doesn't make sense to make a super ballast and spend all this money and time to save 5 watts of electricity and lost THAT MUCH LIGHT!!! Now if you take the same concept, and use 3 X 23W CFLs, you lose even more in lumens, BUT you get much more growth out of the bottom of the plant, which still isn't going to yield what a properly ventilated HPS system will get you, but better than a single CFL from the top consuming comparable Watts of electricity. Obviously, this is just an example, I'd never grow with just 3 23W CFLs, but you get the picture I'm trying to paint here.

Use CFLs in a way that gives you an advantage. If you are going through the effort of building that ballast for your CFLs for your SOG garden, you're probably killing your yield by not switching over to an equivalent HID. Your first harvest using the HID will more than make up for the initial cost of the HID bulb and ballast. And you can even use all those CFLs you've got to make a decent side lighting rig.