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Old 10-22-2014, 07:43 PM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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oTOMMYo
Absolutely, Florescent lighting is great for starting plants and seedlings. As well as even economical for non fruiting plants like different varieties of lettuce, as well as herbs if done right. You still don't want to skimp, you still want to have a good healthy amount of light. But fruiting plants have much higher light requirements/needs because they are also taking on the load of producing the fruit. Non fruiting plants don't have that load. Plants like cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, strawberry's, peppers, etc. are continuously fruiting plants. They don't have separate veg/flowering stages. They do both at the same time, and it's quite common for them to begin fruiting when their no more than 4-6 inches tall, and would want to upgrade their lighting by then.

As an example of using florescent lighting economically for growing lettuce. You could grow up to 18 butter lettuce heads (if spaced right in 3 rows) with two 4 foot long twin bulb T5 lights (212 watts). At 35 cents a day for 18 hours of light, times 30 days, that comes out to $10.50 a month. If you rotated the crop and harvested three heads a week, that would give you 6 weeks (standard for lettuce) to go from seedling to harvest. Essentially costing $0.58 per head of lettuce for electricity. You can even use three twin bulb T8 fixtures. That would equal about the same light output as the two twin T5 fixtures, and at 32 watts a bulb (x6) be close to the same wattage (192) as the 4 T5 bulbs. But the three fixtures may give more even coverage over three rows of plants. Either way would cost basically the same to run ($0.32 a day for 6 T8's- or $0.35 a day for 4 T5's).
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