Cool whites are cheap, readily available, and ... did I mention cheap?

Use one cheap.. uh, I mean, cool white and one warm white in each fixture for a mix.

I have an old acquarium bulb I tried recently over the plants and it burned them. Too much UV.

You want a mix of some blue and some red. Let the expensive bulbs go hang.

As for growing under lights all the way, I tried some lettuce this Spring.

For this to work, you need lots of light. Fluorescents have to be within two inches of the leaves or no go.

Bigger, hotter HID bulbs allow for growing vegetables that can't be grown flat like lettuce.

The expense in electricity leads me to conclude that only tomatoes are worth it.

I will be planting some tomatoes in 7 gallon buckets and try to bring them in this Fall.

It will require making a vertical light wall of overdriven tubes and maybe a mirrored plastic curtain to re-capture the light and bounce it back at the leaves.

If I could keep just a FEW tomato plants through the winter, maybe I could avoid the withdrawl symptoms...

The advice from before I was born is to mix warm white (~3000K) and cool white (~4100K) tubes and that works OK. Now we have so much more choice. I mix 2700K (very warm white) and 6500K (daylight) tubes, the basic idea is still the same. I have also used just the 2700K and that works fine too. Some people use just cool whites. I don't think there is a lot to be gained by using expensive specialist tubes, but it might be worth considering if you need very high light levels. Lettuce, for example, grow very well under HPS light which is far from an ideal spectrum.

Vegetables and most flowering annuals need very high light levels. Seedlings are fairly easy just by putting the tubes close to the plants. Mature plants need a more intense light to light both the top and bottom of the plant. The 32W tubes might not be able to do it, but you could try mounting some at the side of the plants instead of above, even mounting them vertically for tall plants. You will definitely want reflectors to use with larger plants.

Hi
i have a mixture of four 6500 and four 3500 lamps it almost looks like the sun. i have been growing tomatoes for 2 months from seed and they are 14 inches high

cool white and warm white is the way to go, as mentioned above. The only thing the special lights, such as grow-lux lamps, are good for is germintaing seedlings. These special lamps produce light high in the infrared spectrum, which is what seedlings need. When it comes to HID, metal halide is your blue spectrum, high pressure sodium is your red spectrum. Blue spectrum promotes leaf and stem growth, where red spectrum promotes fruit and flowering. Metal halide is good foor green plants, like lettuce and such, where a fruiting plant like tomatoes benefits from sodiums. The winning ticket is using both HID types, which is basically cool white and warm white fluorescents on steroids.