It’s a simple re wire. My plants seem to like the spectrum better.less heat, less electricity.
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I have t12s in my shop and the bulbs were gradually going out after years of service so I bought an LED bulb from wally world and installed it. The package said no ballast change necessary. It went out in a month. Not sure why.
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@Joker
I am no fan of the LED it seems counterintuitive to add more heat to my tent then try like hell to pull it back out with fans etc.
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The LEDs generate less heat than the traditional T5 bulbs.
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Could this be the issue? We always called it wal mart fall apart.
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Wait, what? I have a 10 year old 48" t5 I’d love to turn into an led array. So your saying I could mount those directly to the fixture, switch out the ballast for an led driver and basically use the whole fixture as my heatsink?
I tried the led upgrade bulbs and wasn’t super impressed, but it was also when they first were released to market
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You can either use a direct conversion bulb, or rewire the t5 to bypass the ballast and use that type of bulb.
I believe the bypass is more efficient, and the bulbs are much cheaper also. The rewire is pretty simple.
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It does look like prices came way down. When I tried them the conversion bulbs were like $35 each. $140 to not get better light turned me off of the conversion bulbs.
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The bypass version is closer to 10 or 12 bucks.
Make sure what you are getting. There are single and double ended versions. From what I understand the double ended is what you need for the older fixtures. It is the route I went.
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There are drop in models like mentioned that can run off your ballast or direct bypass, yes. Then the step up would be LED retro fit, which means a bit of fiddling but eventually yeah- you get a big heatsink with reflectors and all.
But you have the headache of things like, does the strip fit? Immediately behind my bulbs are a wedge shaped reflector- so I can’t just pop it in. I measured, turns out there’s enough space on either side of the wedge, so I can mount 2 strips, on either side, and hope that works. We’ll see, I have to order some still. You get better efficiency than the drop in replacements and better density, but you get to be your own engineer.
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