Supplemental winter lights
Steve Marak via pbs (Thu, 03 Mar 2022 08:44:33 PST)
Ken & Mike,
My friend looked at both the ballast-bypass and straight replacement HO
LED tubes for his fixtures. For him the advantages of the bypass type -
uses a little less power, since you're not driving the fluorescent power
supplies as well as the LED driver modules, and eliminates the ballasts
as points of future failure (and they will fail!) - outweighed the pain
of having to open the fixtures and wire around the ballast. Depends a
bit on whether you're comfortable doing the wiring yourself or not, and
he was. It's not hard, as long as the fixtures aren't difficult to open
up, but obviously any wiring work involving direct household power has
safety implications.
Steve
On 3/3/2022 2:49 AM, Mike Rummerfield via pbs wrote:
Steve,
Thanks for the info on socket-compatible HO LED tubes, ballast-bypass type.
I was unaware of their existence.
I'll give them a try. Maybe not HO, but rather plug-and-play LED tubes of
5000K. (Not really sure what I'm talking about here, but further research
should remedy that.) I checked - a big box store here carries them.
Regards,
Mike
On 3/3/2022 9:52 AM, Kenneth Preteroti wrote:
Steve I was considering led replacement for HO fluorescent bulbs. I
didn’t want to wire the bypass of the ballast so I was looking at
straight replacements. Outside of longer life the straight
replacements did not impress me. I will give the ballast bypass type
another look.
Ken P
New Jersey, USA
Zone 7a
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
George Orwell, 1984 <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5470.1984>
On Mar 3, 2022, at 3:01 AM, Steve Marak via pbs
<pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote:
Ken,
One more short note on this. A friend who is a basement grower began
with a dozen or so T5HO fixtures to get the rather high light levels
he needed - expensive both initially and when replacing the
fluorescent tubes (all 4 tube or more fixtures). He's been replacing
the tubes with socket-compatible HO LED tubes that he found online,
ballast-bypass type, one fixture at a time and after a couple of
years seems pleased - cheaper and more light. Among the orchids he
grows are a number of the geophytic European terrestrials like Ophrys
and Himantoglossum, and he has no trouble flowering them.
Steve
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