Papa, the problem isnt with the bulbs, its with the ballast...
Ofcourse they're going to tell you it works...or else they wouldnt sell....that makes sense, right?
You should call Lumatek and get there opinion. I know I have...
Old thread, but I figure I'll post up that I cannot run the Lumatek bulbs on my digital ballast (Quantum), they just won't fire up right, sometimes not at all and do this really cool Tesla-coil kind of thing. Fun to watch, not so good for the girls. I went to a hydro shop out in Carmichael and lo and behold, it's a known problem! Lumatek is not a brand I'll be putting any more money into, not for bulbs, not for ballasts. I also flat out refuse to drop as much money as an entire new light rig costs on a single fucking bulb--Hortilux. Not without proper side-by-sides, not without verifiable PAR/PUR comparisons, not without knowing factually that it will indeed give me that much more bang for my buck. $40 for a bulb is outrageous to me, let alone $140.
Same here, and add to that the horror stories about Hortilux coupled with their pricing structure? No way I'm gonna drop $$$ for a light, especially when it's not even designed to work with the fixtures more and more people are moving toward using.I noticed newer hortilux bulbs will have a label on the box that says its been redesigned for digital ballasts. Maybe you'll have better luck with these? I've only seen these in a couple shops. Either way though, I've heard plenty of horror stories about lumateks.
Welll..there's an article in HT about this. It turns out that there are almost no bulbs designed to run with e ballasts. They're designed for the mag ballasts which run at 60Hz. the e ballasts run on 20,000Hz. this causes the gas in the arctube to be unstable and will usually fuck-up...eventually...sometimes...sooner than normal...blah blah..
They say that the only bulb currently designed to run with e ballasts is the Sun Pulse.