AND so I stand by the fact that if the grower is new, wanting to grow for personal use, [...] the Spiral CFLS, and Bubbleponic System will be PERFECT !
Oh, I don't dispute that there's good reasons to use CFLs- the most important being your situation- now able to do a grow in a space that can be ventilated enough to get sufficient fresh air to the plants but can't support moving enough air to cool a big HPS.
However, there ARE small HPS lights in this world. A converted 150-250W HPS security light wouldn't make much more heat than you are making now but WOULD give you high-intensity light.
SoG is fairly dependent on the high-intensity of HPS. To use CFLs in a SoG configuration means you need a lot of them because they have to be fairly close to each plant- as you found in the pursuit of the one really big cola.
The SoG technique uses a relatively large number of short plants which have had all their lower branching growth removed. This makes SoG more light efficient than growing traditionally vegged then flowered and unpruned "tall" plants, but organises the plants into something of a thick plane of buds. Short plants match artificial lighting better; even HPS only can penetrate foliage so deeply.
You pretty much would have to have a bunch of CFLs each spaced 4" from one another, hung right above SoG type plants to be effective. Still, even with that arrangement, it'd be hard to get lights ALSO within 2" of the lower parts of the SoG style plant colas.
ScrOG might work better for CFLs; it can make the plane of buds much flatter by conforming the plants to a screen. No method is more light efficient than a well done ScrOG. Timing the vegging right and winding the stems on the screen takes practise.
I find ScrOG time consuming and fiddly, but if you have the time and patience, doing ScrOG well is a true art. I think it'd improve the yields from CFLs quite a lot.
