T5 lighting questions

[Delphinus]

Originally Posted by banditpowdercoat

As far as wiring them, I do belive you will not be able to series the bulbs. The balasts won't drive across the 2 gaps, basically. You parralel the tubes up. As long as the tube wattage does not exceed the ballast rating, you should be fine. So, if the ballast was rated for 4 48" bulbs, you can parralel 8 24" in their place.

When I was doing some reading last night I came across an older thread on Canreef where I apparently asked the same questions, it was about a year and a half ago. Apparently I already knew that the WH7 was not meant to drive 24" lamps.

Which is weird because the only reason I have the WH7 in the first place is that I used it to drive 4 24" VHO lamps over a 20g I had running a few years ago. For the life of me I cannot remember how I wired those up, ie., whether it was in series or parallel or one-lamp-per-lead.

For giggles last night I did try to see if one lead could fire two 24" T5's in series. It did not. I will try rewiring the lamps parallel tonight and see if that works. If not then I'm back to the drawing board anyhow. The ballast has sat for a few years unused now so I suppose yet another possibility is that the ballast itself no longer functions. I'm not sure how I can verify this easily as I have no other fluorescents I can test with other than a few old 24" lamps I had with a prewired fixture. I might need to see if someone has a DIY lighting job over their tank that uses a WH7 and asking them if they'd mind seeing if we could replace the ballast for a little while and seeing the lamps light up or not.

I got so frustrated last night I started looking at 2x80w fixtures that I could just hang under my light rack. The annoying thing about this is there are these "Ready Fit" T5 fixtures by Sunlight Supply that would fit the bill perfectly but the cost jump from 48" to 60" is extreme. It's a small step up from 24" to 36", and a small step up from 36" to 48", but it's a huge leap from 48" to 60" ($150 vs $225 and this is I assume wholesale price as that's what was listed on Sunlight Supply's website). That means to have 4 80w T5's, with a set of 2 flanking the halides front and back, is a MINIMUM $500 investment before the lamps are even purchased. That's a lot of money for "gee, all I wanted was a half hour dusk and dawn and maybe a little coral fluorescing on the side" effect. At that point indeed I wonder if a guy is just further ahead just to say "screw it", and start saving up for some LED strips down the road.

Whomever said that T5's were an economical alternative to halides is, IMHO, rather mistaken !!!!