Well this was originally going to be my “look at my awesome new grow light” post. But there won’t be any pictures because I don’t want any speed reader out there to look at the picture, not read what I write, and mistake that for an endorsement of what I’m beginning to think is one of the worst-built lighting products available.
I’ll admit it, I got taken.
I want to go big this winter on growing some veggies inside, and that means I need some big light. Fluoro’s will handle lettuce and such okay, but if I’m going to get any serious tomatoes I need some serious light, right? So I head out (virtually) to a retailer and I start browsing through lights, ballasts, etc. I wanted to be able to run HPS and MH both, so I could blast my plants with blue-spectrum and encourage a lot of leafy growth without much height, and HPS for when I start getting some tomatoes (the redder spectrum is better for ripening.) I’m there, weighing my options, going cheaper on the one hand or paying more for quality, and being who I am I like to opt for the spot on the curve where you can maximize your quality per dollar. Unfortunately, I left off the part about researching and just went by stats and price.
Don’t do that. Always do your homework.
If I’d done my homework, as I have now, I’d have avoided buying this POS Nextgen ballast. It looked like a great deal. Not the cheapest of course, but it was digital, would run 400 or 600w bulbs, HPS or MH… it had it all. Including what looked like a nice warranty. I got a 400w HPS and a 400w MH bulb for it, and set everything up for a test run to see how much heat each one made. Everything seemed great at first. It fired up fast, was obscenely bright, everything you could want. I was running the lights 18 hours a day to see how hot the grow room got so I’d know how much, if any, additional ventilation I’d need and on the third day I heard a loud “wham” from the next room and went in to find the bulb shattered all over the floor.
Now tradition required the cat be blamed. That she had been napping on the couch when the explosion rudely woke her, and that the door to that room had been fully closed at the time were inconsequential details. Clearly, the cat was at fault. She always is. Unbeknownst to her, I conducted an actual investigation into the cause while maintaining the Official House Policy of Scape-catting. I couldn’t find any reason the bulb might have burst so I figured it was probably just a bad bulb or something. I replaced it (carefully) with the HPS bulb and restarted the test. Two days later when I wasn’t at home, that bulb blew as well. Officially, this was another criminal act by the Scape-cat, but unofficially I was beginning to suspect the ballast was bad.
So I did some research. Sure enough, this wasn’t an isolated incident.
The next step was to invoke the warranty. The retailer I bought it from informed me to contact the manufacturer, “Amerinada” (Ameri-nothing? Weird name. Anyway…) Okay, not their problem, so I shoot them an email. And wait. And wait. Nada. So I call. They ask me if I’m a retailer, I say “no”, and they hang up. I figure I just got disconnected or something so I try back.
How can I put this nicely? I would rather try, under penalty of death by scrubbing with iodine-soaked steel wool, teach advanced multi-dimensional physics to a retarded june bug, than try to have any kind of actual conversation with anyone at Amerinada. As near as I can tell their company policy is to ignore, transfer into oblivion, or simply disconnect any customer that calls in. And I’m not the first person to have that problem either, it seems.
Now that I have done my research I realize I didn’t even get to check for the other common “features” of the Nextgen ballast – namely incredible heat levels and RF interference. I thought the ballasts were kind of hot but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it and I wouldn’t have known how hot was too hot at that time anyway. And with no bulbs I can’t really turn the damn thing on anyway.
Lessons Learned (again)
1. Always do your homework. Find out what other people have to say about it before you buy it, especially when you’re laying out a few hundred bucks.
2. Warranties only imply that the manufacturer stands behind their product if the manufacturer actually intends to honor the warranty.
3. There’s no good way to explain to your wife that you blew a couple hundred dollars for something that doesn’t work that has a warranty no one backs up, all because you were in too big a hurry to check up on the product or the company that makes it.
Now let me be abundantly clear here – is it their fault that this ballast is a piece of crap and is a more effective bludgeoning weapon than lighting component? Absolutely. Is it their fault I got suckered? No. That’s all on me. It’s their fault they suck, and my fault I fell for it.
What’s really sad is that not 12 hours later I spent more than an hour checking, double-checking, and triple-checking the customer reviews on an SD card I bought for my wife. Yeah, I didn’t want to waste 8 bucks on an SD card that had a bad track record…
