You want FOUR foot lamps, NOT 8 feet!!! find out if you can purchase lithonia F40T12 four foot strip light fixture for 2 x F40T12 lamps per fixture online. You can get free shipping if you have a DoItBest store in your area. Now get yourself a Sasi ballast for an 8 foot T8 from ebay, $12 plus shipping, throw out the T12 ballast, and replace with the Sasi: it will overdrive your T8 lamp to make it give out the light of a T5, but at less than half price - and buy either an 850 or 865 series triphosphour T8 lamp - it will fit in the same fixture as for the T12, where the T5 will not. This has lots of blue, and all the spectrum you need for growing, plus they are CHEAP! Your full spectrum lamps are more expensive, but there is no added benefit for the cost. You will be getting 5000 lumens per T8 lamp, driven that way, with NO DANGERS - this method has been used for years with no problem. Make sure you are getting an EIGHT foot ballast to drive these four foot tubes - this technique is called overdriving. you can look it up on wikipedia, but in a nutshell, that is all there is to it. You must get the T12 fixture, because the 8 foot ballast is BIG, and needs the big case of the old F40T12 fixture! T8 fixtures are too tiny, and they have a tiny ballast, so that is the reason. That's what I do, any questions, email ptmozarowski@hotmail.com - I don't make any money in this deal, just giving out the best advice for the money - Paul Moz.

What Jon says was true years ago, but not any more. "Cool white" was often used (and still often is) to refer to the old halophosphate phosphor T12 lamps, which had low CRI (in the 60 range or less). These do yield rather unpleasant light and poor color rendering. "Warm white" also used to refer to modified halophosphate lamps. Often these had even lower CRI than the cool white lamps, in the 40s or 50s. These did an absolutely horrible job on colors. However, modern T8 lamps have a blend of 3 types of rare earth phosphors. This gives a much better light and a wide range of color temperature (CT) and color rendering index (CRI). You can get T8s in 4100K color temperature with high CRI (82 or so). These have a somewhat chilly light but it's much improved over the dreary light from the old T12s. They still feel like living under a perpetually cloudy sky, but at least the color rendering is better. They're incredibly bright, BTW. The 3000K T8 lamps with 82+ CRI produce a very pleasant warm light which blends well with incandescents. The pinkish cast of old warm whites is gone, and color look good and warm under them. They're so far ahead of the old warm white that there's no comparison. When buying T8 lamps, look at the product code on the lamp. It depends on the manufacturer, but most adhere to this convention. You'll usually see something like "F32T8/741" or "F32T8/830." There may be some other letters in there, but what you're concerned with is the last 3 digits (after the slash). The first digit designates the CRI, the last two stand for the color temperature. Thus an 830 lamp is 82CRI, 3000K and a 741 lamp is 74CRI and 4100K. You usually want the first digit to be as high as possible, and the last two are more a matter of taste. I use 830 lamps in living spaces, and 835 or 735 lamps for the cellar and garage. If you're fitting out an artist's studio or a laundry room, you might want 850 or 865 (bluish-tinged daylight). There are also a few very high (90+) CRI lamps available. Osram-Sylvania and/or Philips (sorry, don't recall which) make 930, 950, and 965 types. These are fairly expensive and usually have to be special ordered, but they should produce excellent color rendering. Hope this helps.

For what it is worth, I had the lights installed today. I opted to keep them toward the front raining, since this more or less placed them in the center of the counter. I stepped the lights back a bit from the rails about 1.5 inches so that I would not allow the rails to block some of the forward shining light. Rob

Wow, that's really interesting. I didn't know there were any fluorescent undercabinet lights that could be dimmed. I will definitely look into them. Unfortunately I may have to use some 1' fixtures though. Some of my upper cabinets are 36'' and some are 18'' wide. I will have a light rail under the cabinets though. I don't know if the undercabinet lights have to sit up in the recess under the cabinet, or if it's possible to build up the undercab space with a block or something so that the lights can be attached across 2 cabinets - so that I could avoid the 1' fixtures. I don't know if this would work or if it would end up making the lights visible or looking stupid? Are the 1' fixtures of both Alkco and Juno different from their other fixtures? Also, I'm assuming 3000k lamps would be best. Is this a correct assumption?