Odyssea Ballasts

[darkdruid]

I have an Odyssea 250 watt HQI fixture and as usual. I'm having to replace the crappy stock electronic ballast. On a good watt meter, it's putting out 174 watts. Instead of throwing it away, does anyone know of a reason it couldn't be used with a 175 watt bulb and work just fine? I kinda hate to just trash it.

 

[phorge]

Try replacing one of the MOSFETs in the ballast or applying thermal grease between the MOSFET and heatsink. Apparently that is the weak spot in these ballasts and doing either one of these fixes will begin outputting very close to 250W and cost less than $15.

Go check out the big Odyssea MH thread. It's been split several times, but I just read about this fix in that thread earlier today.

 

[darkdruid]

I did check out the thread and found it was easier to just buy another ballast locally than ordering parts and waiting and having to tear the ballast apart. I did the thermal grease and it went to 195. The bulbs still looked green. I've gone back and cleaned off the thermal grease and dropped it back to 175 watts. It now runs a 175 watt SE bulb perfectly.