Question on halide light bulbs

[bigfishtoo]

Hi, Has anyone used metal halide bulbs from Plusrite or Blueline.

A to T Lamps company has 175 Watt - 14,000 kelvin - t15 bulb shape - E39 Mogul Base - Runs on an M57 Ballast (Probe Start) rated at 7500 hours for $24.99 each. Is this a good bulb for the price.

Blueline sells there bulb for $54.90 same rating as Plusrite.

Please let me know what you think, I need to change out my old ones.

Thanks Bigfishtoo..

[ccCapt]

Checking Sanjays Lighting site, he didn't test Plus 14K bulbs, but did test their 10K. The 10K's test OK. With an M57 ballast, Plus 10K = 53 PPFD compared to an Ushio 10K = 75 PPFD, Hamilton 10K = 71 PPFD or XM 10K = 62 PPFD. Keep in mind, 10K bulbs typically put out more PPFD than 14k or 15k bulbs. The 10k Plus bulbs are very yellowish looking according to their spectral plot.
I don't see any 175w Blueline bulbs tested.
I use 175w Iwasaki 15k bulbs. Using the same M57 ballast, they put out 71 PPFD.

I've found with metal halide bulbs, you get what you pay for.

[TheChad]

No To hijack this thread, but It's sort of related..


What is PPFD?

I just changed my stock Coralife 150w 10k HQI's out for Ushio 150w 14k HQI's and the 14k's look brighter than the 10k's did. I don't know if this is because of the brand of bulb, or because of the color temp. The 14k is a little less yellow than the 10k, but not ALOT. As a matter of fact I was thinking of going to 20k because I was hoping for a bit more blue..

-TheChad

[ccCapt]

If you clicked on the link to Sanjay's site you would find the FAQ's.

What is PPFD?
PPFD stands for Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density, and is the technically correct term when PAR (Photosynthetically Available Radiation) is measured as the number of photons of light falling on a given area in a given amount of time.. The units are micromoles per meter square per second. 1 micro mole is = 6.023X1017. So for example, when you see a value for PPFD=200 it means that there are 206.023X1017 photons falling on a 1 meter square area in one second.