electrical help?

[blueboy]

please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is it possible to run 2 PC's off the same ballast, but switch them seperately? i was hoping to scavenge a ballast and endcaps out of an old coralife 4X65W fixture that is now on a fresh tank(so, no need for all that light anyway). my intent is to just remove one "retro" from the fixture to mount in my new canopy for the new 60 cube. i was hoping to run one actinic and one daylight in addition to my MH, so that i wouldn't have to run the MH's as much, and to have a better dawn/dusk "fade". the halides come on slowly, but when they turn off, it's kind of shocking. so, let me know what ya'll think.

[caferacermike]

Yes but not with tank equipment. You'd need a relay and a low voltage source to operate the relay. In short you'd need a relay that only shunts the voltage from the ballast and not mix the voltages like a timer would. You'd hook up the ballast voltage to one set of contacts and then wire the low voltage, 12 or 24, to the other set of contacts. That power transformer for the low voltage could then be plugged into a regular timer.

In the end you'd be interrupting the circuit and it would operate independently via the timer.

[blueboy]

so, can this be done practically? or would i be better off just looking for some other source of actinic?

[caferacermike]

I think if you only want it to soften the blow when your lights start, you might be better off just getting a cheap fixture that you don't include with your actual lighting demands. A cheap Odyssea T5 unit from The Hobby Palace (a sponsor). For about $50 you could get a full length tube and run it on a seperate timer. You could build your own relay set up at Fry's but I'll bet in the end it will cost more then you expect and take return trips for parts you forgot. It's like a hobby, if you enjoy tinkering and the pleasure of making it yourself, that won't matter.

[blueboy]

thanks mike, i was just looking on ebay, and stumbled across hobby palace. didn't realize they were a sponsor.

[caferacermike]

Matt is a good friend of mine.