Very happy to help dude :)
Yeah, that's probably one of the most common problems people run into when they first try growing autoflowers and for obvious reason's, this then puts them off growing them again in the future. One thing to realise is autoflowers and regular cannabis are two completely different plants to grow, although they are technically the same species, they have to be treated completely differently from one another to achieve the same results. Any type o where you can successfully transplant your girls but that window is very, very short. Get it wrong and you'll mess up your whole grow and you'll have to start again. Easiest way to avoid this is to just not do it in the first place:)
Actually no, LED's are far more powerful than CFL's and will be much more productive than CFL's can be too. Autoflowers will flower at a certain age (roughly anywhere between the 2nd-5th weeks) regardless of the lighting they're under. I have some growing outdoors atm which are getting zero direct lighting and they're flowering perfectly well. I don't know the exact numbers but LED's put out a huge amount of lumens, certainly not less than CFL's or any other type of lighting.
I use my one single 125W (90W actual) LED to both veg and 4 the plants in the tent. In fact, here's one of my Girl Scout Cookies which is beginning to flower under said LED, this isn't an auto but you can see what LED's can do for a plant. This btw has been fed purely on plain water, no nutrients at all apart from what's in the soil.
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And as you can see, the LED does a pretty damn good job lol.
I can understand why people would think that about LED's but when set up correctly, the gentle balance of red, blue, white and UV bulbs will out perform almost any other type of lighting you could use, certainly any that I've tried so far. They're a lot more well suited to growing plants than many people give them credit for. I mean there's a reason NASA uses LED's to grow plants on the space station lol.
Keeping the small CFL's in the tent sat with the lower level branches and installing an LED as the main light will sort that problem out. Another great thing about LED's is they have huge range and will penetrate through the canopy even when sat at what seems like a far distance away from the plants.
The Girl Scout Cookie you can see above has had the LED sat around half a metre away from the top of the canopy and you can see there has been very little stretching so buying an LED will remove the ballache that is constantly adjusting the height of the lamps. I just sit mine 3/4's of the way up the tent and then just allow my plants to grow towards the light and then I only really need to move the lamp once late in flower to avoid any bleaching on the top colas. I honestly cannot praise LED's enough, they've been the best investment I've made so far, they improved my grows no end and have made life so easy for me. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't bought one already :)
