These ballasts are pretty quite....Rich since I am an electrician My company gets discounts at all electrical wholesalers.....I can get those ballasts for approx $52

Those are in wall digital timers that I got from Rona. Price wise they range from 25-35 dollars plus or minus 5 bucks.

-Rich

Great job there.

I don't mean to be the bad guy here, but a PFO 2 x 250w tar and coil is 224.00 at J&L and it's in a bullet proof casing with heatsinks. Add in the timers for 52 bucks and it comes to 276.00. You roughly paid 260.00 for your DIY and alot of labour. :confused:

I did a lot of shopping around before deciding to go DIY. Yes, I realize that the 2x250w tar ballast over at J&L is probably a better value, but I did it to see if I could actually do it. That and I wouldn't have the guts to take apart a pfo ballast to integrate two digital timers into it. As for the time spent... I DIYed my own 2x175watt setup awhile back... with that experience under my belt, doing a 2x250w with timers setup only took a couple hours to wire up and to test. I'm sure in the future, it wouldn't take as long for me to make another one.

-Rich

Wow, you have great patience! :smile:

Not surprisingly, the inside of a PFO ballast case is identical to the insides of yours! There's only 1 way to wire it. You'd probably have to dremel out the aluminum panel on the top to fit in the 2 timers, but nothing you couldn't have handled. There's a flat surface down the middle where there are no heat sinks, so that would make a perfect spot. Other than tapping the 110V with the timers, the rest is already wired up from factory.

But regardless, you've purposely gone out to learn so that deserves some cudos!

that's the right answer! DIY is always more fun that just "going out and buying one"..cuz anyone can do that.