We have gone through and tested every bulb ballast and hood combo we carry. I have tested brand new bulbs right out of the box, then bulbs with a 200 hour burn in, along with bulbs a year old that are all from the same manufacture to see how they hold up over time. Take for instance the hortilux eye 1000 watt hps. Right out of the box it tested 1600 par, burn in was 1780 par and the 1 year old bulb tested 1796 par. I was blown away! I was always told by hydroponic retailers as a customer that a bulb was good for 2 maybe 3 runs then its shot. How many bulbs have been thrown away prematurely just so some store owner can make a buck on a myth? Lamp manufactures have a lamp mortality chart for a reason and for the most part they are pretty accurate in their life expectancy.
After the bulb tests, all of which were done on quantum and lumatek ballasts, we decided to test magnetic against digital to see if the digital claims were well founded. What we found was the digitals outperformed the magnetics on average of 24%. That’s a huge difference! And the ballast tested was a copper core ballast. We did not test any aluminum core ballasts as I refuse to carry them. I would imagine a 30% difference at least. Now if you take into account a couple of other factors, you will never consider magnetic ballast again.
The 1st factor to know when buying magnetic ballast is that they will lose about 20% of their output after about 3 years, due to the heat stress on the unit. Digital ballast will never lose their output.
The 2nd factor to consider is automatic voltage regulation. Up until a few months ago I had never taken that into account, until I plugged a magnetic ballast in about 75 ft from the electrical panel. (Not on an extension cord, it was into a wall socket) That’s where I set the testing station up in the back of the store. I plug it in, test the lumens and it had dropped almost 10000 lumens from my previous tests. My first reaction was maybe a bad ballast I grab another same results. So I get a different manufactures ballast and bam once again a substantial drop. I talked to our onsite electrician and he mentions a voltage drop as a suspected cause .So he grabs a volt meter and sure enough a 11 volt drop to the socket caused a 10000 lumen drop off. Now without a meter and charts of data the normal grower is not going to know he is getting ripped off by his own equipment.
Now, had he purchased a digital ballast with automatic voltage regulation the ballast would have sensed a voltage drop and pulled more amps to compensate. So he would have had about a 10% yield gain. Now if you add the 24% gain due to the digital ballast, right out of the box your at 34%.
The 3rd factor is lamp life. The digital ballasts today have a soft start feature that allows the bulb to warm up gradually instead of all the power being thrown at it at once. This makes the bulbs last a lot longer. Hey maybe the myth of the bad bulbs after 2-3 runs wasn’t a myth at all but a problem avoided had you bought digital ballasts.
Finally we tested hoods and again I was very shocked. One of the hood tests we did was with a yield master classic against yield master supreme. What we found using the exact same bulb and ballast was nearly a 30,000 lumen difference. The size and shape of the hood are identical the reflective material looks identical but it’s not. The classic has the cheap Chinese knock off reflective were the supreme has the 95% European reflective material. So before you buy another hood make sure you do your home work.
Another interesting tid bit is that we tested digital 1000 to digital 600. And again I was blown away. The digital ballasts are so efficient at producing light that with a 1000 watt it is almost too much! Now, if you have ballast with a super lumen setting you are burning way more power then what is necessary. In order to have the proper amount of lumens on the canopy, our tests show that the 1000 watt digitals need to be 20+ inches above the canopy. Now, you can receive the same amount of lumens by keeping the 600 digital closer because it runs much cooler than its counterpart. By lowering the hood you do make the foot print that the hood creates slightly smaller. How you counter this is by running 2 600’s. Normally a 1000 watt covers a 4x4 16 sq ft area. You can run 2 600’s over 3x6 18sq ft area with a more even distribution of light with no crazy hot spots. We got a peak hot spot of 113,000 lumens and 9800 lumens in the corners on 1000 watt digitals which in my opinion is going to lead to some light bleaching in the middle and some airy flowers on the sides and corners. With the 2 600’s you can have an even 70,000 lumens across the entire canopy.
To get down to brass tacks at Miramar Hydroponics we test every product we carry and never take any ones word for it. There have been many products sold to growers over the years that were simply snake oil or do not come close to the performance that is claimed by the manufactures. We pride ourselves in truth, facts and experience. Our success is dependent on your success. We are not the greedy sort here at Miramar and go beyond the normal retail stores to help our customers succeed in an industry we love.
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