Well I'm far from an expert here but I want to throw in some thoughts to clarify what's been said so far on this thread. The orignal question was "can I use lights from Home Depot instead of buying them at my LFS?" the answer is a very simple yes. Now, there are several things to keep in mind here. The lights you're buying from HD are Normal Output (NO), assuming that the lights you're comparing them to at the LFS are also NO lights than you're comparing apples to apples and you can certainly save a lot of money building your own hood and installing HD lights. IF you're looking at either Very High Output (VHO) or Compact Flourescent lights at the LFS then you're not going to find them at HD (although you can sometimes find VHO ballasts there). In greatly oversimplified terms, the major difference is the number of watts of light you can fit in a given amount of space. A 48" NO bulb puts out 40 watts of light, a 36" compact flourescent puts out 95 watts using "roughly" the same amount of space and a 48" VHO puts out 110 watts of light, lastly although not discussed here yet, you could fit 2 - 3 Metal Halide lights in the same space and get up to 3,000 watts of light in that space.
With all that being said, most people agree that, in this day and age, NO lights are not a cost effective way to light anything except a FO tank, and a fairly small tank at that.
All of the above just reflect my observations of many discussions on this subject and I'm sure there are many who will disagree. I only jumped in here because I didn't want a newbie to jump to the mistaken opinion that a $25 strip light from Home Depot would yield the same results as a $500 Mh / Power Compact hood from XYZ.com.
Just my babbling on a boring Monday morning,
Paul
