Power factor
Watts
Re-ignite time Bulbs
Electronics
Magnetic
Lumens
life span of ballast magnetic versus electronic
Power grid and RFI & EMI
How about some Electrical Engineering information?
Power Factor PF is simply the output energy divided by the input energy. If you remember science Energy must be conserved, its a Physical law of the universe that means, initial energy must equal final energy. In Electricity there is always losses due to heat regardless of temperature of the component. Thus input energy is always higher than output energy and when calculating power factor Output over input (O/I < 1) That is Output divided by Input is less than 1, in every case. It is a fact that can be proven in lab and real life conditions. There is no such thing as 100% efficiency in any thing. You would be lucky to get 95% using the highest quality materials in an extremely well designed circuit.
Watts input versus output, you pay for your input watts not the output for anything that runs on electricity. PF has to do with what you get for the watts you pay for.
Ignite or Re-ignite Time is the time it takes gases designed into the bulb to get to their stable state (which is a never completely stable as the gas begins to break down due to electron losses as soon as it is manufactured) And this is the reason lights have a limited lifetime. Electronic ballasts may re-ignite faster but this is due to an increase in the current allowed for a short period of time to heat the gases to a stable state faster - this costs lifespan losses in the bulb - which may help explain why bulbs go out more often in an electronic ballast circuit. The bulb is designed with its own ignition time natural to the gas used and given the circuitry to make this happen in a natural way - the electronic ballast tries to beat nature - you can't do that without some kind of penalty in the Energy Conservation equation. Always allow a bulb to cool down, cool to the touch, before re-igniting or you may burn out your bulb. The bulb is designed to have a slow start. Its kind of like glow plugs in a diesel first they have to get hot then the fuel can begin to burn and ignite, as it gets warmer the light bulb emits more photons. The difference of it being hot started is the metal wires inside the electrical circuit in the bulb can burn to an open circuit even if the gas inside the arc tube is still good. The gas needs time to heat up and create an arc of gas plasma to complete its stable state circuit - or ping goes the darkness. Exploding bulbs? Maybe you put a 400w into a 1000w magnetic socket or you splashed water on it while it was hot.
Electronics a term used in this post liberally and generally. Generally these are components, capacitors, resistors, inductor coils, transistors, diodes, Op amps, oscillators, flip flops, many others and in many sizes types and uses. All of these have curves and spikes and even clocked timing sequences and many have signals generated that can be tuned into like a radio - also known as RFI radio frequency interference or EMI electromagnetic interference. In reality both of these terms are the same as any electric field comes with a magnetic field. Radio waves are electromagnetic and was invented before any real understanding of light - which is also an electromagnetic wave - so the term stuck around. Simply put, the more electronics you have in a circuit the more complex the design must be to provide all the circuit control and the more EMI you will have. It is also simple to understand that with many electronics in a circuit the over all less efficient it will be when adding the PF of each component together for a circuit of the same power output of the same frequency Hz. If you look up the specs of these electronic ballasts it will show you that a 1000w output requires a 1060w input depending on brand. An Electronic ballast runs at a different frequency than a Magnetic ballast. Therefore you can get some PF losses back by creating a higher frequency for the circuit to run. But from the bulb's perspective it is similar to running at DC or a higher output which can get more lumens from the bulb. Again you have that Energy Conserved law. The Bulb will operate at higher than designed lumen output due to gases being excited at faster than designed rates which reduces the lifespan of the bulb - there is a finite half life of gas molecules bombarding each other causing electron loss and photon output. Dimmer controls on MH or HPS? You cannot dim a MH or HPS this feature is actually a switch so you can run several different wattage rated bulbs. You cannot dim a 1000w HPS to 600w the bulb is not designed that way. These so called dimmers also feature a super light that increases the lumen output by providing more voltage or higher frequency to increase the speed of the gas molecules. Again this reduces the lifespan of the bulb as the gas is used up faster.
Magnetic coils have a natural ability to hold current and actually save it, its a reactive circuit. If the gas in the bulb gets a bit more excited - probability states that at times the molecules will bombard each other more often than stable state and also sometimes less than stable state - the reactive nature of the magnetic coil will inversely react to these natural occurrences. When the bulb wishes to take more energy, due to more excited gas, the coil will hold back current and when the bulb gases take less energy the coil will release more current keeping the bulb at a even output. This is something an average electronic ballast cannot due naturally and it would have to be an extremely sensitive and well designed electronic ballast with expensive quality materials to do it - doubtful for commercial products. Of course magnetic ballasts have considerations of quality of materials. In general the PF of the magnetic ballast should be in the specs however the quality of the bulb or its PF also must be considered. A poor bulb in an excellent ballast or vice versa can make the overall PF lower than spec. Magnetic ballasts can also react with the input energy from the power grid making it another good choice over an electronic ballast. There are switchable magnetic ballasts, I have one that switch from MH 1000w to HPS 1000w the difference in the circuit is an ignitor and cap for the HPS and the MH just uses the Cap - I may have that backwards its late - anyway it is just a bypass of part of the circuit to accommodate the other. The cool thing is I can run 1000w MH for veg and then switch to 1000w HPS for bloom in one lamp/ballast. This brings question to why digital ballasts have a dimmer (really a switch that is just a knob) to a lower wattage bulb but not different type for wavelength changes - no you have buy the upgraded one or two different ballasts at quite a high price.
Lumens per watt and lifespan of bulb. In most cases the more lumens output per watt is the most efficient, not including light spectrum or wavelength as some wavelengths are not in all bulbs and there is a cost for certain hard to get wavelengths. In flourescent, MH, or HPS you get different lumens and wavelengths. In the case of MH and HPS, as stated before running the currents higher or exciting the gases more will reduce bulb life. CFLs have their own electronic ballast built into them and until recently you could not dim them but these use low watts and and a high frequency to excite the mercury which hits the phosphor coated glass. The phosphor is what emits photons.
Lifespan of Ballasts this is simple, electronic digital ballasts will burn out or fail much faster than magnetic ballasts for the simple reason there are more components to cause a cascading failure. Magnetic coils last for ages with negligible losses over time. I know this from education of materials used in manufacturing as well as experience of building guitar tube amplifiers which use transformers - basically Magnetic coils - and inductors which are the same thing as a magnetic ballast - magnetic material with a copper winding wrapped around it. I have tube amps that are forty and fifty years old. If you add lifespan as a part of power factor (since a burnt component can cause the failure of the product)...electronic digital ballasts lose every time.
Power grid the power grid is something I rarely see in these conversations. It is obvious a spike, either over or under is a regular occurrence in the power supplying your grow room. If you put a volt meter to your power socket and watched it at 12 am and then 6 am, 12pm, 5pm etc on a hot day you will see your voltage go from 120VAC to 110VAC. At that point you can see it spike up and down as dinner and air conditioning kicks in from you and your neighbors. You would have to have a large battery bank with power conditioners, rectifiers, inverters and even independent power generators to prepare for a worse case scenario for your grow in bloom stage. Most growers can't afford it and with most growers having some instances of power failures or light leaks etc. with still a nice yield that was not very affected, that conversation becomes moot. However spikes and dips will cause premature failures of components in electronic digital ballasts as well as bulbs where as magnetic ballasts will absorb the spike or dip naturally and react without any harm to the ballast or bulb. Further, loss of ground or a rise in the ground floor from a near miss lightning strike or a ground loop can make electronics fail early. Losing ground lifts the ground to the voltage of the supply which can reverse the direction of current in polarized circuits, burning out or causing a loss and re-ignite of the bulb or even damaged circuits. This can happen with solar flares, or heavy EMI. Magnetic ballasts can be affected by these too, will not fail but, a bulb re-ignite or burnout could happen as the solar flare can cause a current surge in the ballast via induced current from the positive ions from the solar flare even if the breaker or fuse blows out first. A magnetic field moving in an electronic field induces current and the inverse also causes induced current.
Bottom line There is no more efficient, robust, or longer lasting circuit than a magnetic coil. I suspect that electronic digital ballast users are only now beginning to see and understand, metaphorically speaking, what the performers in the audio industry know, nothing beats analog and the sound and robustness of tube amplifiers due to their natural sound in recording and live performance. They are similar in gas tubes in circuits with reactance matched magnetic transformers as are gas bulbs in circuits with reactance matched magnetic ballasts - both are magnetic coils that push and pull, give and take, as the performance of the gas tubes changes as necessary. You just can't get that from digital performance equipment. I have a pile of Digital signal processors DSPs, Computers, Phones, touchpad controlled Dishwashers, DVD players, CD players, iPods that are burnt in some way. And in the other room I have all my tube amps I practice and perform on continually changing only a tube once a year or so. The marketing for the new electronic digital ballasts is bogus and trying to get you to buy things you don't need for twice the price or higher.
The truth about Magnetic Ballasts power wastage is that there is no power wastage. Magnetic ballasts are the most efficient.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helps grow some cannabis.
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