Grow light is turning off randomly.

Hello everyone and than you for reading,

I have a 315w cmh light and lately it has been turning on 15mins late, then I plug the ballast in/out and it turns on again for the rest of the night. This is very strange so I a curious if anyone has a fix? Is it the ballast, bulb?

Thanks for any help!

Probably bulb issue. If you had a backup, would be interesting to see what happens with that one. I remember at one point I had an issue with my HPS bulb. Went out and bought a brand new one and everything was good 2 go.

BucketGrower said:

Probably bulb issue. If you had a backup, would be interesting to see what happens with that one. I remember at one point I had an issue with my HPS bulb. Went out and bought a brand new one and everything was good 2 go.

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Why would it go on and off like that tho. Like the bulb has little energy?

Can only imagine defect of some sort. Maybe you had the power go out a few times on the ballast without letting it cool down long enough? I'm not that familiar with CMH tbh. I'm not sure what that does to either HPS or CMH in the long run.

BucketGrower said:

Can only imagine defect of some sort. Maybe you had the power go out a few times on the ballast without letting it cool down long enough? I'm not that familiar with CMH tbh. I'm not sure what that does to either HPS or CMH in the long run.

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Yea we just had the power go out a few hours the other day.

But how long has this bulb issue been happening for?

BucketGrower said:

But how long has this bulb issue been happening for?

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When the power went out so about 2 days so far. It’s on right now and hasn’t died. But everytime it’s time to turn on it is late then turns off. Then I replug it and it’s on rest the time. So that’s why it’s so strange to me. Maybe the bulb needs to charge up more after the outrage? Idk I’m just guessing it’s hard to know for sure.

SoberBro22 said:

Hello everyone and than you for reading,

I have a 315w cmh light and lately it has been turning on 15mins late, then I plug the ballast in/out and it turns on again for the rest of the night. This is very strange so I a curious if anyone has a fix? Is it the ballast, bulb?

Thanks for any help!

Click to expand...

how old is your timer or power strip, could be one of those going out.. i had a power strip get overloaded a few too many times and it caused this... other times it was the bulb going bad.. but sounds more like timer/power strip-outlet.. had it happen many times.

could be the starter / ignighter in the bulb or in your power supply is on its last legs, gave you got a second bulb to try??

What brand is the ballast and bulb?

Have you just plugged it into the wall?
It sounds like a timer issue.

I had 2 bad Phillips lamps I changed to par pro lamps and haven’t had any issues

The lights are plugged into a controller. I just bought the ballast and lights around 4 months ago. I don’t think it would be the timer because I control it from my phone and nothing seems off. The bulb is a Phillips 3100k.

When I bought mine all I had to do was bump the reflector barely and it shut off, I talked to sunlight supply and they sent me a new one, maybe 2 months in it stopped turning on, I called him again and they didn’t want to replace it so I had to talk to management and they replaced it and it’s been good for several years. There’s a post somewhere saying that the Phillips lamps are designed for sunlight supplies light and it can fail with different brands