Recently when I was away from my house and garden for almost two weeks, I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of a good ballast. The ballast is the box that cord set comes out of for HID lighting. Ballasts usually come with metal halide and high pressure sodium lighting systems so if you are using a high powered lighting system in your hydroponics garden, you most likely have a ballast. As a novice I didn’t realize the importance of a good ballast. I learned my lesson when a large crop of berries was wiped out because of a ballast failure.
I was using a cheap ballast that came with the kit and did not even have casing to cool the outside temperature of the device. It was an old fashioned magnetic ballast. The ballast died while I was gone on vacation and when I came back the berries had been sitting under darkness for days, like a three or four day solar eclipse. To make matters worse the berries weren’t using any energy because there was no sunlight, but the water pump for the nutrient reservoir was still running on schedule. The berries were being pumped with nutrients every day during their bloom phase while they were receiving no light! There was no way for the berries to use the nutrients being fed to them. They were just starting to bloom so they mostly died and there was no fruit for all the work I had put into them.
The lesson here is no matter if you get a magnetic or electronic digital ballast, make sure its GOOD QUALITY. Your crop may depend on the reliability of your ballasts. Hopefully indoor gardeners all over can read this tragic story of loss before they make the same mistake I made.