Ken & Mike, My friend looked at both the ballast-bypass and straight replacement HO LED tubes for his fixtures. For him the advantages of the bypass type - uses a little less power, since you're not driving the fluorescent power supplies as well as the LED driver modules, and eliminates the ballasts as points of future failure (and they will fail!) - outweighed the pain of having to open the fixtures and wire around the ballast. Depends a bit on whether you're comfortable doing the wiring yourself or not, and he was. It's not hard, as long as the fixtures aren't difficult to open up, but obviously any wiring work involving direct household power has safety implications. Steve On 3/3/2022 2:49 AM, Mike Rummerfield via pbs wrote: > Steve, > Thanks for the info on socket-compatible HO LED tubes, ballast-bypass type. > I was unaware of their existence. > I'll give them a try. Maybe not HO, but rather plug-and-play LED tubes of > 5000K. (Not really sure what I'm talking about here, but further research > should remedy that.) I checked - a big box store here carries them. > > Regards, > Mike On 3/3/2022 9:52 AM, Kenneth Preteroti wrote: > Steve I was considering led replacement for HO fluorescent bulbs. I > didn’t want to wire the bypass of the ballast so I was looking at > straight replacements. Outside of longer life the straight > replacements did not impress me. I will give the ballast bypass type > another look. > > Ken P > New Jersey, USA > Zone 7a > > The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. > > George Orwell, 1984 <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5470.1984> > > > >> On Mar 3, 2022, at 3:01 AM, Steve Marak via pbs >> <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote: >> >> Ken, >> >> One more short note on this. A friend who is a basement grower began >> with a dozen or so T5HO fixtures to get the rather high light levels >> he needed - expensive both initially and when replacing the >> fluorescent tubes (all 4 tube or more fixtures). He's been replacing >> the tubes with socket-compatible HO LED tubes that he found online, >> ballast-bypass type, one fixture at a time and after a couple of >> years seems pleased - cheaper and more light. Among the orchids he >> grows are a number of the geophytic European terrestrials like Ophrys >> and Himantoglossum, and he has no trouble flowering them. >> >> Steve _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net>