may have purchased a completely inferior light. fixable?

I'd been reading some guides, etc, and was excited to see that with LST I could grow plants well enough in the relatively small place I have available to do so.

I wrote down all I would need from home depot (neglecting the proper wattage of the lamp I would need), then went out and got it all. Looking at the packaging for my florescent lights though, they each contain a measly 15 watt bulb.

here is the lamp in place:
http://i.imgur.com/082Rr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/e86d1.jpg

is it possible to just purchase a better bulb and put it in the same lamp, or do lamps not work that way?

I assume that it's going to be worthless to try and grow with this lamp because everyone else is mentioning wattages in the hundreds. Then again I'm growing 4 plants (2 plants per lamp), and this is my first grow. Is this lamp good enough for a "learning experience" grow, or is it time to start looking for the receipt?

hm, I think I get it now. A 15 watt standard florescent bulb will be OK for the very early stages, but I'm going to need something more like a 400 watt MH bulb per plant at the cheapest. Damn, that's gonna be expensive. In up front cost as well as electricity.

Assuming I don't have like $300 to drop up front on lighting, is there anything I can do, maybe with florescents? What kind of wattage would I need in order to get a good enough lumen count?

you could get a bunch of cfls. A lot of and what you want to look at is the lumen count on the package and the Kelvin temp which should be high. Like 6500 for babies. The lumens you want like 5000 a square foot but I would take your money and for a few plants and just buy a 250 hps light for about 120 dollars on eBay. Then you can use that fine for the whole grow. It would do fine for a plant or two lstd.

cfls like the regular sized light bulbs? That makes sense, maybe two bulbs per plant or something like that.

Do I need to be worried about the ranges that they cover in the light spectrum? I know there's reds and blues and UV and such, and that incandescent bulbs provide a mix that makes the plants grow too tall for their stems to support themselves... so I need to explicitly find full-spectrum cfls, or are they by default full-spectrum?

psylence said:

cfls like the regular sized light bulbs? That makes sense, maybe two bulbs per plant or something like that.

Do I need to be worried about the ranges that they cover in the light spectrum? I know there's reds and blues and UV and such, and that incandescent bulbs provide a mix that makes the plants grow too tall for their stems to support themselves... so I need to explicitly find full-spectrum cfls, or are they by default full-spectrum?

Click to expand...

CFL's are rated in Kelvin (K). For vegetative stage you want CFL's with a high K and for flowering you want CFL's with a lower Kelvin temperature. The lower the Kelvin rating the warmer (more red & orange) the cfl.

Hope it helps.

Meet the new light:

300 watt (equivalent) compact fluorescent bulb

4200 lumen output

"2700K" printed on the box. This appears to be a kelvin rating.

I considered getting a HPS light, but these CFL bulbs run about $15 a pop, and the fixtures are another $5, so for the price of a HPS lamp I could get 5 CFLs, or just save some cash. It may result in a slightly inferior grow, but again, this is just a practice grow; I don't feel it's necessary to drop hundreds to learn the basics.

Clearly I'll need a couple of these lights, right now I'm thinking 2 lights hanging over two sprouts (more are germinating). What I'm wondering though is if it's OK to put such bright lights directly above the plants. I've poked around and it seems that the lights are supposed to remain two inches above the highest leaf, does this apply even during the sprouting stage? These lights hurt my friggin eyes just to look at, and I want to make sure I'm not going to burn up my girls.