Xtreme Nano 1000w Digital Dimmable Ballast Unboxing Review
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Video Transcript:
"Hey everyone it's Nate from GrowersHouse and today we just got in the Xtreme Nano 1000w Dimmable ballast from C.A.P. (Custom Automated Products). This guy is really small. It's the smallest ballast on the market that we know of at this point in time. It comes in a pretty nifty little box that kind of smells like a box of new shoes. Let's open this guy and take a look at it.
Now this ballast is pretty tiny compared to just about every other ballast on the market. You can see here that it has a black powder-coated finish. It's about 9" long by 4" wide and only about 2" high. You can see that it's basically just a little bit taller than the standard size cord-set it comes with here.
This ballast is switchable between MH (metal halide) and HPS (high pressure sodium), and it's dimmable between 100, 75, and 50%. And there is a status LED that will tell you what the status of the ballast is. It has a few different modes to tell you whether there's something wrong with your bulb, too much heat, or whether it's actually a ballast malfunction. So that's a pretty cool feature there.
Another feature is that this one has dual fans--one on each side along with cooling vents here that are almost like gills on the side. We are pretty interested in how this ballast will cool itself because it doesn't have a heat-sink on it, but supposedly it's supposed to operate cooler than just about every other ballast on the market, so we're pretty excited to plug it in and verify those claims.
It comes with built-in wall mount brackets because I would imagine that most people using this ballast will wall-mount it because it's so small and really light--this only weighs 2.9 lbs. This box is very deceiving--when you pick it up you think there's no ballast inside of it.
I just wanted to bring out another ballast that's very popular in this industry, the Lumatek 1000w so that you can compare the size of the two and you can really see the difference. You can see from a few different perspectives how much smaller this ballast is. This ballast weighs about 15 lbs (Lumatek) or so. It's pretty interesting that the ballast market will be evolving for us to have ballasts that are a lot more ergonomically and easier to use in the grow room.
This ballast also has a unique feature that I only know they do in Solis-Tek ballasts in that it has Independent Ignition Timing, which means once you plug this ballast into the wall, between 0 and 15 seconds it will fire. Each ballast has a different time built into it, and we're talking millisecond differences on some of these. If you buy multiple of these ballasts and you have your timer go on at the same time they'll each fire your bulbs at different times, not illuminating them all at the same time to keep you from having any surges or spikes in your power that can blow out a fuse-box. That's another really cool feature in this relatively small package.
This ballast just came out and it looks like it will be leading the industry for a little bit. We'll see, we'll do some test runs on this and hopefully some comparison tests in the future. Definitely check it out on our website and that's it for today. This is Nate from GrowersHouse. Have a good one."