loud,

Very good questions this time. My guess is that you can vegg with the flouro setup you have. Your plants will probably grow faster under the 400MH light because of the higher lumen output and more watts with that setup. But, I am growing (veg) with a flouro and seem to be doing OK with it.

Once you have decided your plants have seen enough "vegg time" (my guess is about 5 to 7 weeks) you will put them under the 1000HPS lighting for the flower cycle (12on/12off) After maybe 4 to 14 days you will start to see the parts of the plant that will tell you what the "sex" is for each particular plant. Do a search on this board for sex and you will find many examples with pictures that will help you indentify the sex.

As far as the tin foil in your fixtures, most flouro fixtures already are painted white on the inside as a reflector. The gains you might see by switching to a very shiny reflector as opposed to the white you have now will be very small and probably not worth the effort/expense to change at this point.

The two "reflector" materials of choice are the "polished or chrome" or just plain old "flat white" which you can paint on yourself. The tin foil approach is sort of a third rate lesser choice. If your setup already had the white in there for reflection then get rid of the tin foil you put in and stick with the white.

Sorry for being somewhat hard on you in previous posts. Hope you will continue searching and learning on this subject as it is great fun. Try to be patient, you cannot grow absolutely perfectly on the first try but you will get results. Good luck and keep posting pics about once a week as things progress.

Max Blast