Got my Ebay MH Bulbs - Wow!!! I am happy

Parker · #1 11-11-2011, 01:42 PM

Bummer, doesn't look like they have 400W DE Bulbs. I'll have to mail him.

luvthereefer · #2 11-11-2011, 03:51 PM

does anyone have any expereince with hobby lightings t5 fixtures??

Lampshade · #3 12-03-2011, 04:11 AM

Another big +1 to this un-named vendor that sells lighting for my hobby.... haha, i hope that gives it away. I just got 2 bulbs I ordered on Monday night, the arc-tube in one was broken, so i sent an email and he quickly responded and is sending a new one. Great service, especially for being 1/4 the price of the bulb's i'm currently using. I installed the other bulb, i was expecting the corals to take time to get used to the change since i'm running XM 10K's that are apparently nearly double the PAR according to sanjay's. But everything's happy as can be, even my clam is happy as well... a clam. Seems these lights have a good spectrum for the corals.

Here's a pic of the 14K and 10K... never realised how yellow the 10K was...

cwatkins · #4 12-03-2011, 07:08 AM

One of mine died after a few weeks. He is sending out anew one.

globaldesigns · #5 01-19-2012, 05:00 AM

Still running them and still very happy. Great color and brightness, and the corals seem to like. I would still recommend

Parker · #6 01-20-2012, 11:53 PM

I picked up some 400w 14k. They are quite a bit bluer than my 14k Icecap bulbs, I like them, we'll see what happens in a few months.

cwatkins · #7 01-23-2012, 09:07 PM

I'm chalking my ebay bulb experience up to be a failure.

I bought two of the 250W DE bulbs. One died after a couple weeks (a piece inside the glass broke off and was loose in there). Then the replacement that arrived wasn't the same colour temperature, so both sides of the tank looked different. As for different burn in times, one bulb only had a few weeks on the other one. Even after a couple months they still didn't match colour.

Also around the same time as getting the new ebay bulbs my (dual) Galaxy ballast tripped my GFCI almost daily. It would only trip when the ebay bulbs were in the fixture. The Pheonix 14k's wouldn't trip it!! (The GFCI tripping then apparently toasted an IC inside my Apex controller the day before I went on vacation, requiring me to reconfigure it in a very short time to using the old school timers). Then when I got back from Hawaii I had to send in my controller for repair (thankfully under warranty). <-- Lesson #1, use a dedicated DC wall wart power supply for the Apex base module and ensure it's on a different power bar/circuit. This will prevent damage when the GFCI or breaker trips.

Eventually my ballast deteriorated to the point that one lamp wouldn't ignite (it was the ballast for sure because switching the power leads around would cause the opposite lamp to ignite). Bad luck?

So the ballast was under a 5 year warranty, so Jeff @ JL replaced it. (THANKS!!!) I decided at that time to just go with new bulbs, so I bought some Hamilton 14K's to use, and put this bad experience behind me.