@hyroot & @PSUAGRO, circling back to a conversation we had back on page 2/3 of this thread. Just saw an interesting, if not more confusing follow-up email from Ceramatek. Went back to him to provide some documentation to backup what he's saying and clarify which ballast they support @120v, looks like the 375W is still not supported, will see what he has to say...Still not clear, he's saying they support the 315W ballast @120, but that wouldn't run the 315W bulbs, he may be referencing running the 375W ballast @ 220/240v against the Philips ballast, which still does nothing to support use of the Ceramatek ballasts/315W Elite Agro's @120v.
Quoting his email, removed the headers for privacy:
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From:
Subject: Global follow-up
Date: August 22, 2014 at 7:21:35 PM EDT
To:
Hello,
It has been a couple of months since we communicated via email. Please allow me to give you an update and clarify some of the statements which I made in the past, which may have seemed inconsistent.
Since our focus has been commercial lighting, where 120v is very rarely used, we had never focused on supporting 120v. We do see there is considerable interest in other markets to have a wide voltage ballast that does go down to 120v. I received some mixed signals out of engineering when we were communicating earlier. We have had a few commercial customers that required 120v and needed to hand select ballasts that would operate at this voltage. With these particular installations we didn’t provide a warranty since we hadn’t performed thorough testing and our customer was accepting of this.
The basic problem with running at 120v is that there is the potential to exceed the maximum current limitations of specific parts used in our ballasts. At 120v you have double the amperage/current compared to 240v. With the hand-selected ballasts, as referenced above, we would find ballasts which had parts that could safely exceed the tolerances. With our latest ballasts we are using parts that are now able to safely work at 315W @ 120v. Therefore, we now have a fully warrantied, 120v-277v 315W ballast.
With our 375W solution, the current is still too high, and that product will remain 200v – 277v.
We have done extensive testing using the 315W Philips Agro lamp with our ballast with very positive results. The benefits of running the Philips lamp at high-frequency is that performance is quite a bit better, from lumen retention, to lamp life, and lamp efficacy. On a head-to-head test between the Philips ballast and ours, we were able to measure 5% more light output at the same wattage. These tests were done using an integrating sphere and spectro-radiometer, so properly done with consistent results.
Please let me know if I can answer any other questions for you.
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