How does the digital ballast work?
What Ballasts Do to Make Light of bulb?
Most people know that without a ballast a light won’t fire, but they’re not exactly sure what that means. To understand what a ballast does, it’s important to know how a bulb works. Grow light bulbs use essentially two components to give you light: an electrical arc and gas (usually in a solid-state like sodium). The bulb gets enough voltage to start that electrical arc in order to melt the solid into a gas. However, once that solid turns to gas the bulb doesn’t need as much electricity to keep itself lit. In that case, you need to back off the electricity that the bulb’s getting- that’s what your ballast does. Ballasts are what help regulate the electrical arc in a bulb so that it doesn’t blow.
A ballast regulates how much electricity your bulb gets so that it can operate the way it needs to. If you didn’t have a ballast you’d either give your bulb too much electricity and blow it, or it wouldn’t be strong enough to turn that solid material into gas that’ll give you light. What sets one ballast apart from another is its ability to provide and regulate the electricity your bulbs need, so be sure to look into reviews to make sure you can give your bulbs the power they need to run the way you need them.
Can you use regular ballast with a ceramic-based bulb?
This is a great question because lots of growers ask whether one type of light- say, a CMH or CHPS light- will work with another type of ballast- say, a ballast used with standard HID or double-ended HID’s. The short answer: yes you can, but here’s the thing about ceramic bulbs: The ceramic-based lights we’ve seen are either 315w, 630w, and others, which are tricky to pair up with a ballast that’s not made specifically for one of those wattages. Ceramic lights sit right outside standard grow light wattages, which makes finding a ballast a little hard. Give that bulb too much power and it’ll blow, don’t give it enough and it may not fire- see how a 400w ballast may not be compatible w/ a 315w bulb, or how a 600w ballast may not give a 630w bulb all it needs?
That said if the ceramic HPS bulb you’re interested in matches the wattage of the ballast you’re using there shouldn’t be a problem. For example, if you have a 600w electronic ballast (dimmable or otherwise), you shouldn’t have a problem using it with your CHPS bulb. However, if you have a 630w CHPS/CMH bulb and a 600w ballast there’s a good chance that the bulb will either not work or it will perform poorly. As long as you’re not over-or under-powering your bulbs you’ll be fine. We would, however, suggest going with a digital ballast over a magnetic ballast for that CHPS bulb. With indoor growing booming all over the place these days. we think it’s important to head back to the basics and go over .what a grow room ballast is what it does?
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