But if you want t invest more into YIELD and POTENCY, I would go with CFLS, taht you can put two inches away from a bud to increase it's size, growth rate and potency. You can't do that with more sodium bulbs.
Rosey, sorry, but HPS makes high-intensity light- they don't need to be 2" from the leaves. CFLs make low-intensity light. It's that light intensity that makes the bud weight and density. If one needs to cover a larger area, one doesn't usually add more HPS lights, rather one normally uses a bigger HPS.
I know you love your CFLs, but a high-output grow requires HPS- and the ventilation to cool it.
Yep, it is a matter of opinion. Some of us drive Nissan Altimas, some of us drive Lincoln Navigator SUVs, some ride Harley bikes, some of us are in Kias, some in big cars, some in small.............we could argue it all day long, ......and we all ride, but we ride differently.
No, Rosey, this one is not a matter of opinion. HPS lighting will always outperform CFLs due to the light intensity issue.
There's plenty of good applications for fluoros and CFLs and good reasons to use them (of course, I use fluoros in my clonebox), but it's a
serious compromise compared to HPS, particularly in flowering.
If you have constraints on ventilation, where you have enough air motion to provide the plants with fresh CO2 but not enough to cool an HPS, flowering with CFLs may be the difference between being able to grow in that space or not at all. However, the tradeoff is a
MUCH reduced yield and density.
There
are small HPS lights out there- 60, 100, 150, 250W. Any one of them will outperform CFLs on a watt-for-watt basis. Small HPS lights will produce the same density as their bigger cousins because they still produce high-intensity light- but lower power output means less area coverage. However, even small HPS lights make a fair amount of heat- nothing like the big ones- but they may be a better compromise between a big CFL and a monster HPS for certain small spaces with limited ability to be ventilated..
