AVR Freaks

LOL...

I think the point of the OP asking here is he probably lives in a country where there is no "High Times" boutique on the corner... ;)

The boys are telling me people use high-intensity discharge metal halide lamps for the green phase, and high-intensity discharge sodium vapour lamps for the flowering phase. But I wouldn't know.

Fluorescent tube might work but you would need a lot of them to get even lumen-wise.

Try Googling 'Grolux'. These lamps have been around for a long time and are used for plant growth and aquariums etc.

Forget Grolux fluorescent tubes for the specified plant, the light spectrum it emits is mostly unuseful to it. These are fine to provide some survival light to interior plants, but aren't intended as replacement for the Sun. Halides are THE most energy efficient for the light output for growing plants. They output more visible light and less heat per watt than fluorescent or incandescent lamps. Yes they heat up, and you have to deal with it, but in a well ventilated grow area this should be no problem. If you need to go fluorescent, you should stock in on "daylight deluxe" and "cool white" tubes. Again forget energy savers, the way these are made is by changing the spectrum of light emitted to be more visible white light, and they do not provide the lower red or higher blue portions of the spectrum the plant needs. Be prepared to dish out at least 1.5x the amount of energy using fluorescents for the same lumen output as a Halide though. Meaning that to replace a 400W Halide you will need about 600W of fluorescents.

For your application, fluorescent tubes seems the way to go. If it is just for survival over the winter, a mix of half "Daylight Deluxe" and half "Cool White" tubes should be fine through all cycles. If you are setting up with the intention to "power-grow" you will not get far with fluorescents though.

I don't think the LEDs will have any noticable effect in the long run, but I have never tried it. Considering 48" fluorescent tubes cost about 3$-4$ each over here, there is no reason to go the more expensive route with high brightness LED's. And if you had in mind of using just regular LED's, forget about it, the output intensity just isn't enough to work against the fluorescents.

And "Warm White" and "Cool White" are roughly the same, you can swap one with the other without a problem. Color temperature for Warm White is around 3000K, for Cool White around 4100K, and for Daylight Deluxe it is much deeper into the red spectrum, at 6500K.