In need of wisdom

I currently have an all wood home made grow cabinet set up and I'm using a regular fluorescent 40 watt light. It's doing it's job but barely. I'd like to upgrade to something I can veg with and flower with if possible but I don't want it to raise my electric bill by a hugely noticeable amount. I'm only growing one tiny plant so I don't need a whole ton of light. I think I just need a little more. Any suggestions?

If I were you I would get an LED UFO, they retail under $300 and can easily grow a plant or two. They dont produce much heat, they have great color spectrum and will definitely yield more than your current setup.

I believe the UFO's are 90watts, which is nothing on the electric bill.

Good luck

Hmmmmm any cheaper alternatives? I have no issue getting two cheaper lights, one for veg and one for flower. Cash flow is tight so I gotta keep it a little on the cheap end for now

For one plant it is hard to beat CFLs, just get a few bulbs a few sockets and implement evenly around your plant. If you want to expand in the future it is worth while to implement HID at anything over 300-400 watts.

Your electricity bill is not being watched. Feel free and breathe easy til you have more then a 1000 watts.

You can combine 6500k spectrum & 2700k spectrum cfl's, but generally 6500k is for vegging & 2700k is for flowering. A LED UFO has a 7:1 ratio of red to blue light. That's best for flowering. If you want your plant to continue growing larger during flower use more blue (6500k) light but not more than 50%. Make sure you are using at least 100-150 watts or so for one nice plant. If you can get up above 300 watts that won't hurt either. You can also keep adding a bulb or two here & there as the plant gets bigger. Someone on this forum grew a 23 gram bud with 3 23 watt 2700k cfl's & another guy yielded 3 + oz's of white widow twice with 300+ watts of cfl. Try & keep them within 4 inches or so of the plant. Don't use any other spectrums of cfl. What spectrum is your fluoro tube? Hope this helps.

- Rom

Thank you rom. That was really helpful. The bulb I'm using now I found lying around my house and I just rigged it to work in my grow box so I'm not sure what it's spectrum is. It seems to be working to keep the plant going but I think I'm gonna replace it