Quote Originally Posted by jon420
you can do 9 plants comfortably in a 7.5x4.5ft area with 1200 watts of CFL's. Not to mention, the plants can easily be 3-4ft tall before flower and your results will blow your mind. I love CFL's because they work very well (when spaced and used properly) and there's hardly ever a heat issue. Many people will disagree with me but trust me when I say, CFL's work great.
Morning Jon,

Thanks for the reply my friend! Hmmm, 7.5x4.5... that seems like a reasonable space, however a bit larger than the 4x4 (by 5' tall) sketch I drew up today in my free time.

I was able to find a better cfl yesterday. It's made by GE and is 6500K, 1600 lumens, 26W (100 equivalent). Thats 1000K more than the "best" bulb I could find two days ago and I will tell you, even though 5/6 of my plants are less than a week old, you can tell they responded to the change in light intensity in just that short time! Currently though I just have the one light on. I read somewhere that you should use the same spectrum when you have multiple bulbs, so I didn't want to use the 5500K and the 6500K at once.

What do you use as far as sockets go? I bought a couple of those metal, clamp on 'work lamps' that they sell at HD/Lowes. Only thing is the actual socket piece is plastic (where as one you get at like a petstore for 2-3x the price is ceramic) seems like it gets a bit hot. Not sure if they are meant to run 24/7?

Also, anyone have any comments on using the koi pond water? I'm not a chemist, however I do know thats it's likely got a great deal of N. As thats one of the biggests chemical processes going on in the pond (the nitrite, nitrate, etc conversion process.) It's all dervied from well water though, which is then softened before hitting the pond. If any of that helps.

I'm on my way. Thanks for the help so far everyone.