bubblegoogles
Member
Here is a set i have. I used a quantum PAR and lux meter to read output and it is pretty even through out the four foot length of my fixture. My fixture is using 4 X "250" watt 8U CFL's. I say "250" watt because when i take an current reading it only draws 4 amps @ 115 volts or 460 watts not 1000! It seems the cfl's are drawing far less power than what they are advertised as. When you look at a 8U bulb , the tubes are actually T5 tubes and if you measure these tubes, it would stretch out to almost 15 feet of tubing all in a compact package. T5 simply means 5/8 in diam tube. 15 ft of standard T5 not HO works out to about the same wattage as one of these 8U's.And is that a complete setup or do you still need 2 110v to E27 lamp plugs and 2 Y's? Does that include a reflector? To reach 40,000 lumens you would need 5 bulbs, plus 5 reflectors, plus the adapter plugs etc.. Performance can't be compared unless as I said before, your using a very small grow area. (Like 2' x 2' or less)
The reason performance can't be compared is because although your small little CFL may put out 8,000 lumens, it's only doing so from a very small source point, which means light intensity will drop off and the CFL will cover a much smaller area compared to the 4' T5 which is throwing 5,000 lumens accross 4 feet.
Best advice is to get a light meter which 99% of CFL growers fail to do. If you looked at a side by side comparison of a 4' 8 bulb T5 HO lamp and 5 of those rosebud CFL's in a 2' x 4' area, you would find the light meter shows multiple pockets of significantly reduced light compared to the 4' T5's.
I hope that makes sense.
As for the readings im getting a consistent 600 uMol/s at 18" above over an entire 4X3 ft area. i'm going to do a comparison with 1000 watt HPS and see how it compares but 600uMol/s is very good for any kind of lighting.