Now That's Bright!

[wizardgus®]

It would be so easy just to keep quiet, I mean you'd never know. But I have to confess and share.

You may have seen my posts defending both the Radium and Sunburst bulbs. I have run them since starting with MH and have really liked them. I assumed my good luck was due to driving them with electronic HQI ballasts. Even my wife, the official arbiter of all things color related in my house, agreed that they were not blue.

Well, we are starting to get more into SPS, and color aside I knew that the Sunburst is low PAR so I replaced that one with a Ushio. OMG! Talk about brighter, and yes, this looks much more like sunlight, and boy does the Radium side ever look blue now.

So, now I'm adding a VHO actinic to the hood, and we'll see where that takes me. Wife doesn't want to get rid of the Radium, and truthfully I would miss watching it come up in the morning, that is so cool with all the color shifts and intensity changes. But I am sure wondering about trying an AB...:cool:

[JB NY]

Hey Jay,

I run Ushios, and I needed to swap out my bulbs last month. I change out one of the three over my tank a month before the others. So I went with the AB bulb, just to see what it looked like. When I put it on, both myself and the wife felt it was a bit more white than the ushio, right around the same brightness though. Anyway, I was going to just swap out all my lights to AB the next month just to see if the tank worked any better. When it came time to buy them, I couldn't find the AB bulbs anywhere, everyone was out. I had to swap out the bulbs, so I just bought two Ushios like I had before. I fired them up and right out of the box they were whiter, and brighter than the AB. I was pretty surprised. So now about a week later, I would say to go with the Ushio, I like it much better than the AB.

I am talking about the mogul based 250 Watt bulbs run on a PFO HQI ballast.

HTH