HID Digital Ballasts

Eclipse LED digital ballasts are more efficient, quieter, cooler, and softer on the bulb. Digital ballasts do not have any of the usual transformers, capacitors or igniters; instead these ballasts have electronic circuitry to do the same job, more efficiently. What might take a standard coil/magnetic ballast 680-700 watts to fire a standard 600 watt bulb, may only take a digital ballast only 600-620 watts to fire the same bulb to the same brightness. The old coil type ballasts are hard starting ballasts; when the ballast fires the bulb it sends full power to the cold bulb. Over time, this shortens the bulb life and reduces the PAR output of the bulb. Digital ballasts start by sending a low amount of power to the bulb and steadily increases the power over the next few minutes until the bulb has reached full brightness. This is also known as soft starting, which minimizes the damage to the bulb and increases its PAR life (PAR represents the plant usable light; it’s what plants “see” and use, versus lumens which are what people see). 

After one year of use the plant usable light coming from bulbs that are run on digital ballasts has decreased only by 20-25% where as the same bulb being used in the coil type ballast would have lost 50-60% of its plant usable light over the same period of time. 

Magnetic coil type ballasts are also known to cause the bulb to flicker or strobe. This takes place so quickly that the neither human eye nor light meter can pick it up. Eclipse LED digital ballasts provide a uniform power supply to the bulb, thus eliminating the flickering from the bulb and saving you money with fewer bulb replacements.