Relying solely on lights - advice for my next setup?

[calvin_orchidL]

Hi everyone,

I made the plunge to artificial lighting about 5 months ago and since then, my plants have loved it!

I'm attempting another grow shelf, and this one is in an area that gets very little ambient light. I would love to grow slightly higher light orchids (If I recall, higher light is considered 2000fc +?), and am looking at lighting options. I recently bought a 125W CFL impulsively, but have come to the conclusion since buying it that it may not be the best option. The reason is that in my original setup, I have a 65W, along with 4 23Ws, and I can only get sufficient light with the plants less than an inch away from the bulbs...if you can imagine, that makes for very little growing space! I'm hoping the 125W CFL will provide decent light at 4" away, but realistically the number of plants I can crowd underneath is miniscule....so I'm starting to think that CFLs are much better suited for spot lighting to supplement natural light rather than as the only source of light. To add to the mix, I'm growing on a rather thin, long shelf. T5s seem like the BEST option for this kind of setup....but then I started reading threads here, and it seems that the maximum FCs you can get with T5s at a reasonable distance from the bulbs are 1500FCs, which is good for blooming phals at best.






Here is my first setup (one with a different exposure so you can see where the lights are). As you can see the leaves are practically up against the lights! Actually to be honest the color temperatures are all wrong but it was my first setup so I didn't really bother checking them....I should really put the plants I want to bloom/grow closer to their appropriate lights, but right now the governing factor in where a plant goes is it's size rather than what it needs...and I'm not too happy about that.



Here is my little phal shelf, with a crappy T12 fixture...but the phals don't seem to mind. It's likely because this area gets pretty good ambient sunlight.

So - I want to get maximum oomf for the minimum buck without having to stuff my plants right up to the light (makes it terrible when they try to bloom!). As a result, I've started thinking about 100W MH (which I have shied away from because I'm scared of electronics and wiring and I have no idea how ballasts work)...I saw some really nice threads here about how to setup 100W-150W MHs, which I perused briefly. How good would something like that be for a shelf setup?

My new pine shelf is 2 tiered, and is roughly 2.5ft by 1ft. It's really shallow, I know, but I'm going to be sticking mainly with minis, and I will also mount some plants at the back to some mesh wiring I hope to acquire. Any advice? I plan to mount my 125 W + 80W CFLs (one at 2700, one at 6500K) on one tier, and hope to get enough light to bloom orchids bordering on high light but still in the intermediate range.

Thoughts? Sorry for the long post, and if I wasn't too clear in what I'm asking! In essence I just want some reassurance/advice from you guys before shelling out the money to buy the lights.