Quote Originally Posted by Johnnycannaseed
Hello just read your post and I can see what you are saying with regards to the issue of CFLs, I have used CFls for vegging and found they worked brilliantly so I scrapped my HID lamps, I also switched from HID on the flowers to flourescent tubes I used Phillips MASTER TL-D Reflex 36W/840 tubes (warm red tubes) built into an array of 8 tubes per light I used 2 light arrays (16 x 36w) for a total of 576w Best yield I had was with Ak 47 @ 732g.

The beauty with these tubes is that you can have the array positioned to the point that it is touching the plants, when you factor in the inverse square law and how far you have to position a HID lamp away from the plant plus the fact that those Master Reflex tubes are in a better suited spectrum to plant growth (hardly any yellow lots of red per se HID) then maybe you can understand why they work.

I always found that the tubes need a run in, on new tubes 2nd crops tended to be better than 1st ones, and tubes should be replaced every 6 crops, but as they are cheap enough to buy, produce very little heat (no detection worries) and yield very well on that basis I would never use HIDs again.
I'm glad to see that you mentioned the inverse square law as this is indeed the law that governs the decrease in intensity of EM radiation such as light. This includes light from HPS and from CFL. As per the poster above you, there seems to be a strange view going around that photons from CFLs are somehow weedier and less well-travelled than identical photons from HPS. I'd like to see the evidence for the view that light intensity drops off quicker for CFL than HPS as this would have to mean that one of them was violating the inverse square law.

Anyways, you're probably having more success because you're using good quality name branded CFLs which actually produce the amount of light they're supposed to. I was thinking maybe a lot of people made the same mistake as me and bought from one of the many cheaper grow light makers which, it now seems, produce far less light than they are supposed to.

Maybe CFL is getting a bad name because of this - a lot of people seem to be against it or say it is for 'noobs' or whatever. But I've a feeling that if you get good quality CFLs it should be as good as any other source.