You start off with a little 10kw furnace that you power with the small nuclear reactor you brought with you and bootstrap your way from there. Obviously you're not going to start out with a honking big anything; that gets built later, using the materials produced by your initial hobbyist-scale gear.

On the topic of taking CFLs apart, I've used the electronic ballasts in them to power 24", 18w straight fluorescent tubes. A bit of work with a hacksaw, wire cutters, terminal strip, screwdriver and electrical tape and it makes a pretty useful semi-portable light source (just a naked tube with a cable running to it). The tubes run cool enough to hold in your hand.

If you want serious light output in a standard fixture, there are plenty of high-wattage CFLs out there. Take this one for instance, which uses 65 watts and puts out 4300 lumens:

link

I have 30w daylight CLFs in the hall and in various rooms, and they're really bright (1500 lumens/125w equivalent). I also have 5ft, 58w, T8 fluorescent fixtures in places where I want very bright, evenly distributed light so that I can see what I'm doing when I'm working. They have electronic ballasts, so no flickering, the tubes are high quality daylight tubes (4900 lumens, 8,000K colour temperature) so the light from them is very pleasant and they're more efficient and last longer than CFLs (also, 5ft tubes are more efficient and last longer than 4ft tubes, which are more efficient and last longer than 3ft tubes and so on).

Here's a dimmable CFL that puts out 900 lumens, if you really need one.

There are plenty of shitty CFLs out there that are unreliable and put out tiny amounts of horrible light (I have a whole bunch of them that have been handed out free to get people to switch to them), but don't judge all CFLs on the basis of those ones. Pay a bit more for the good stuff.

Not a great idea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond/

We've been able to grow diamonds (real diamonds, not substitute materials) since 1954.

I've been looking at high-power LEDs for a DIY lighting project, and I was wondering if you had any advice on what's good and what should be avoided. Rapidonline.com is selling '10w High Power LED White 850lm', Manufacturer Part #: OSW4XAHAE1E from TruOpto for £6.95, and dividing the advertised lumens by the advertised wattage gives 85 lumens/watt, which about as good as I've been able to find for LEDs that are for sale online. Is there anything better out there, that I could get my hands on as a consumer? Is there anything misleading in the specs that I should watch out for?