Vertex 250W ballasts blew up my fixture!!!

[Red Coral Aquariums]

It is SUCH A RELIEF to see your lighting is back up and running. (I'm sure I added more gray hairs to my white mop.) Your patience, diligence, and understanding played a major roll in returning your lighting back to it's original output but then those 3 attributes are mainstay in keeping a successful reef.
I will rewire the my spare corallife fixture to bypass the igniter using the vertex ballast and let you know the results.
Thanks
Kevin

[Delphinus]

The ignitors are in the fixture itself and not an external ballast box? Ohhhh. Well, ok then. "Whoops" ... Guess that makes sense. For pulse start ballasts, the old cap-n-coil style, there are 3 components: the transformer, a capacitor, and the ignitor (sort of a specialized capacitor). Most of the ballasts requires that the "ignitor to lamp" distance be a fairly short distance, unless using special "long range" ignitors. I guess Coralife got around this issue by keeping the ignitors close to the lamp ... regardless if whether the other two components are remotely mounted or not.

The Vertex as an electronic ballast doesn't have an ignitor but as an electronic ballast doesn't need one. Anyhow hooking it up with the ignitor still in line will certainly have bizarre results.

Just take out the ignitors and wire the new ballast leads directly the lamp sockets. What I would do is go to Home Depot or whatever, and get a pair of female and male replacement extension cord plugs so that you can disconnect the ballast easily from the fixture. (Unless the new ballast already comes with quick disconnects.) So basically you have a slight DIY project on your hand to upgrade your fixture's ballast but it's not that bad, a screwdriver, wire strippers and mmmmaybe a crimper with some crimps is all you're going to need.

I'd be happy to help if you wanted an extra set of hands and/or tools.

[Mrfish55]

Is your fixture running SE or DE bulbs? I have a 6' coralife with SE bulbs and never had problems, I upgraded to 400w

[Delphinus]

I'm going to guess double-ended because your single ended lamps would likely have been running probe-start ballasts which are just the two components (transformer and capacitor) which are usually together and there's no ignitor (well there is, it's just "in" the lamp itself). Thus a ballast replacement on a single ended fixture is as simple as 'take the old ballast off' and 'replace it with the new one'.

Although it's just a guess on my part based on what little knowledge I have about how ballasts work (which I'm just compelled to share even if nobody's listening to me, because I may not know a lot of a lot of things, but I know a little about a little, and darn tootin' I'm going to pad my post count with stuff that on the surface looks helpful but when you get right down to it nobody's really listening to that Delphinus guy anyhow because he's just a nerd.)

[albert_dao]

Shouldn't the thread title be:

POS Coralife unit blew up on me after I upgraded the ballasts?

LOL

[globaldesigns]

The bulbs are double ended.

Kevin is going to test things on removing the ignitor, the problem is I think that the fan is also using the ignitor module, so how do we remove, what wires to where and what about the fan.

Kevin, perform your magic.

[Delphinus]

The fan can't be using the ignitor for anything useful, it could just be that it's running off the voltage though, but even that is a bit weird to me.

Can you post a picture of the innards?