Quote Originally Posted by fmacanthaya
Thanks brother. That helped a lot. One last question, if i want to connect the light bulb to a socket what appliance do i need? and how much does is the average cost?
About to take a bong hit! Happy tokin' :jointsmile:
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. If you are using fluorescents, they have their own ballast, and you just plug them into a regular electrical outlet, or string up some power strips. If you have HID lighting, you must buy a ballast, bulb and hood, which normally has it's own socket to screw the bulb into. Some hoods have the ballast mounted on them, but this will add extra heat into your grow room. One advantage of a separate ballast is that you can keep the heat caused by it, out of the grow area. I recommend a cool tube or enclosed hood, with plenty o' ventilation.

Cost? that depends on a lot of stuff. A nice 400W digital ballast is about $250. A cool tube or enclosed hood is about $100. A 400W bulb is about $100 at a hydro store, but you can buy much cheaper ones for as little as $8. I'm not sure how well the cheap bulbs work, but someone here (sorry for the bad memory) says they haven't noticed a difference.

23W CFL's (100W incandescent equivalent) are about $4 each for the blue ones (vegging), $2 each for red ones (budding). 65W CFL's (300W equivalent) are about $16 each, but I haven't seen these in a blue spectrum except on line.