Quote Originally Posted by stickyinsalem
how did i pass false info?
i simply said they WILL do good for a grow....dont kick me in the face and call me a retard when it is proven that cfls do work....
Nobody 'kicked you in the face and called you a retard.' It was the CFLs critiqued, not the messenger. BTW, you're quite right that putting CFLs in the rest of the house will drop the household consumption and mask the grow usage. Good idea. We did the CFLs and solar water heat. The solar water heat reduced our bill by the same amount that my 2.5kW SoG op raises it.

onequickmove's comment that there's a particular romance on in the cannabis growing community in general with CFLs at the moment is true. They're cheap and available, leading them to be used in a lot of 1st time grow situations. Some new growers think more of CFLs than they really should. They're not 'the future' or even 'the next big thing' as some think. CFLs produce low-intensity light, just like tubular fluoros; if you need foliar penetration and high bud density, you need the high-intensity discharge of HPS lighting for flowering.

CFLs are great for lots of purposes in every grow, particularly for seedlings, clones and slow vegging mums. In a grow space that can't be ventilated well enough to keep temps down with an HPS, CFLs might be used to flower at the expense of yield and densty. However, there's small HPS lights out there these days (60, 75, 150, 250W etc) which are well suited to micro grows and will produce the density of the big mothers, but won't support many plants owing to their low output.

In terms of attracting attention to your op, the 1kW/bedroom + 1kw/house rough guide sounds pretty reasonable. I've been running a pair of 1000 HPS and a 400 as well as a few fluoros for 7-8 years now with no quibble or query. I DO pay the elec bill on time, every time, though. I reckon the power co just thinks I'm a good customer.