New Alchimia video tutorial in which we show you step-by-step how to connect a basic Reflector with lamp holder, to work with low energy bulbs, or with a ballast and HPS or MH bulbs. A practical guide explaining simply how to wire up this type of reflector for indoor home-growing.
More information: Reflector with Lamp Holder
Alchimia Growing Happiness
I’m going to show you how to install a Basic Smooth Reflector like this one, with a 50cm lamp holder, with energy-saving bulbs and with a ballast.
When you buy the Smooth Reflector with Lamp Holder, you get the reflector itself, and the Plug & Play cable, that has a Male connection at one end to connect to the ballast and the three terminals to connect to the reflector on the other end.
This is always for use with a ballast and HPS or MH bulbs. If we want it to work with energy-saving bulbs, instead of the Plug & Play cable, we’ll connect to a similar cable but directly to the 220v mains. The 3 terminals are the same ones as we’re going to see connected to the reflector now. Let’s go.
On one side of the reflector we’ve got the connection strip, that’s where we’re going to connect the wires to connect to the ballast. This is the Plug & Play cable, we can see there are 3 terminals, identified by their colour. In the black one we’re going to connect our brown cable, which is the Live wire. Take a screwdriver and simply tighten. The 2nd will be the Earth cable and the 3rd the Neutral, the blue. Let’s get to it…
Once tightened, we’re going to turn the reflector around and now we can connect the bulb, in this case a High Pressure Sodium bulb. Careful with the bulb, don’t touch it directly with your fingers as this damages it, and we screw it into the bulb holder of our reflector.
Once we have the bulb installed, we can then connect the Male Plug & Play to the Female socket on the ballast, and simply by connecting it to the mains supply it’ll start to work in about 5-10 seconds, the time it takes for the electronic ballast to warm up. And that’s how we wire this reflector to a ballast.
What I’ve just done in these few moments is remove the Plug & Play cable and replace it with a cable using a normal plug, to connect to the mains supply, in the same position as we had the terminals for the Plug & Play. Now, we simply take the energy-saving bulb and screw it into the smooth reflector, and in this case, being a low-energy bulb, it connects directly to the 220v mains current, and now the reflector is working perfectly.
