Here’s a question I’ve gotten many times and have been pondering about myself.
Let’'s discuss how we can get a successful high yielding CFL grow room.
Build a grid that fits in the ceiling space, and add 1 40-45 watt cfl every square foot.
Put vertical receptacles down the wall every 2 feet. This will light your plants from top to bottom.
You could probably use less cfl lamps if you can afford the 125-200 watt models. And you could hang them all over the room; Just like vertical Metal Halide’s.
amazon has 250 watt cfls with mogul base and reflector for 56 dollars good deal plants love them
Yes, the system Latewood describes will work pretty well but as you can see it is a whole lot of lights and you won’t save yourself much in money buying all those lights over another system, you won’t even save much in heat, if any, with that many lights over a HID system and likely will use about the same, or maybe even more in electricity costs, not to mention all the cost of having the place wired up safely, that is one place no one should skimp on price, it could mean the difference of losing the whole grow and maybe much more with an electrical fire.
All that being said, fluorescent lights can work very well in in small SOG “lolly pop/ice cream on a stick” clone grow. In this fashion you can have numerous nearly identical cuttings; each growing one well pruned and trained central mega cola. With this technique you can grow amazing grams/oz/ per square foot/square meter in a very small space even without HID or specialty LED lights. HID and LEDs are just hard to beat on prices in just about every department, especially large scale grows.
BTW, that is nine 45 watt lights per square meter approximately, for our friends that are more used to the metric system.
Yes sir, I posted this exact idea a few weeks ago. MacG hit it on the head.
1 45w cfl every sf’ on top, vertical line of lights from top to bottom of all 4 corners. I would not try to do this in anything bigger than a 4’x4’ tent; Unless you have the big bucks for 125-200 watt cfl’s 
Nice to know people are paying attention :mrgreen:
I have no idea who’s picture this is originally but this shows, yes, even with fluorescents you can grow some pretty nice plants.
Nice picture. there is no doubt; If you can fabricate your own systems, whether it be lights or hydro; you can achive maximum results over time with guidance and patience.