... additionally you need to keep the plants farther from those lamps for that reason as well so you loose about 2-3 more feet of space on top. With fluorescent lights there is not much of heat issue and you need to keep the lights close 1-3 inches therefore you could have several lights stacked up vertically increasing your grow area. Secondly, your choice also will depend on what type of vegetables you will grow. Leafy plants such as lettuce, herbs etc. need light for vegging. Fruiting plants such as tomatoes, peppers need light for vegging and flowering. For vegging stage plants mostly use blue spectrum of light(apparently 430nm range is best for chlorophyll production) MH and Fluorescent bulbs are great for that. For flowering stage you apparently need mostly red spectrum of light(610-700nm range where 660nm is ideal) HPS lights are great for that purpose because most of their spectrum is in red with very little blue. As far as flowering with Fluorescent bulbs I see that most people say that it doesn't work efficiently to get higher yields. That might be because the red bulbs that you get in hydrophonic stores are triphosphorus bulbs that are in the range of 610nm of the color spectrum and not higher. However, there are bulbs available in the aquarium stores called "Red Sun" which put out 633nm. Those who use it swear by it but I can't say that they do work since I haven't tried them yet myself. Another con that Fluorescent bulbs have is penetration of light through the canopy to the lower leaves. That's where you Lumens units come in. An MH bulb is much more powerful than Fluorescent lamp therefore you get bigger penetration. You could however improve the performance of Fluorescents by having light fixtures with reflectors and having reflective wall material in your grow area so the light bounces of and reaches lower parts of the plant. You could use flat white paint, reflective films such as mylar, poly film or orca film(apparently it diffuses light best, doesn't create hot spots like mylar and has great reflective ability) Hopefully I was able to help. If I'm wrong on something I'm sure the pros on this forum will point it out

I agree that lumens are what matters (along with light temperature, etc.), that's why I'm looking at equivalent lumens...the 90W halogens produce a very white light that is hot, and is most likely overkill for the use. I think that 75 Watt halogens would have been enough, perhaps even 60W or 50W so I need to look at their lumens, not the 90W halogen lumens. What I might do is to buy a couple of halogen lights that I know the lumens of and try them out to see which one is "enough", then I'll have a guide as to how many lumens to look for. The ceiling over the couches is probably about 8 feet, pretty average at that point (the ceiling slopes). However, I'm still not getting much about the most reliable brands. The reason I ask is that you can buy the same bulbs from many different sources, so if I know what I'm looking for I stand a better chance of not paying top price *smile*. And not having to do the purchase part more than once. Thanks. -Roger

My guess is you have a Casablanca fan with the wall switch that controls the brightness of the light and the speed of the fan. The CFL bulbs are not dimmable with the system you have. Also, I have been told that CFLs do not do well in fans as the fan motion tends to wear on these bulbs.

The 40W Halogena is not quite as bright as the 65W regular bulb by Philips own admission (though the various alternative technologies CFL/Halogen/LED all play fast and furious with "equivalence"). Running halogen bulbs dimmed down for extended period will drastically shorten their life. As for STINKY and BRYAN: No consumer dimmer has ever used (and no professional dimming designed in 50 years uses) resistors to handle the load. First off it would be way larger than you could fit in a standard box and there are tons of operational problems (I've worked with and have done repair work on just about every stage lighting technology including resistance, autotransformers, magnetic amplifiers, and many flavors of semiconductor dimmers). With any technology your risk burning things up by exceeding the load rating. There are operational problems with two little load (but it's down around 40W) and problems with whether the dimmer and the ballast are compatible for CFL's and the fact that even when everything is right, CFL's don't dim like an incandescent. They tend to go down to about 25% brightness and cut off. Whether that's an issue to you or not is up to you. I use regular bulbs in the bedroom (because I like to turn them on very dim at times) and CFL's everywhere else (and rarely dim them at all).