MH Ballast Power Draws

[Mrfish55]

I just upgraded to the 400w Vertex electronic ballasts and am happy so far, no noticible interference with anything. I plugged it into my fancy new electronic energy meter and I am only drawing 10 amps running 3 ballasts, estimated consumption is $0.64 per 8hr day which is quite a bit less than the 250w tar ballasts I was running. By my calculations the electronics will pay for themselves within 1 year of operation.

[spreerider]

Electronic ballasts should have less interference as they operate on higher frequencys in order to be more efficient, mag ballasts create way larger mag fields that can affect other electronics, but they have to be fairly close.

You would know if the capacitor went, the circuit would not work anymore, and it will probably smell horrible,
I work on MH lights at work, we make ones for fish farms that go underwater with remote ballasts, sometimes the caps go and fill the enclosure with the capacitor material and it smells so bad it hurts the eyes and lungs.
The ballasts we use are isolated secondary so slightly less efficient but we draw 500W on a 400W Fixture and 1200W on a 1000W fixture. They are coil and core non autotransformer type.

[Slick Fork]

The bulb fires right up, the fuse that was blown was in the powerbar. Thanks for the info on the 400 watt vertex Mrfish55, for me though upgrading the wattage and bulb type like would mean a brand new fixture.... tempting though I am very interested to hear from people who upgraded their 250w HQI ballasts to 250w E-ballasts as well.