Post a picture of the inside electronics.

dcarch

More and more fixtures are being produced with the electronics distributed inside. To overdrive you would need to separate out and combine the wires leading the each end cap. The separate capacitors (and inductors?) in the end caps could make this tricky.

I was afraid of that. Do the Walmart specials still have ballasts?

Thank you

I checked Walmart,and they had lights with what appeared to be ballasts but not sure if it is over-drivable? If it is, how would I fit the other ballast in the light?

Sorry to bring this up again :*)

It doesn't seem like any of the cheapo fixtures with reflectors have ballasts aside from the Walmart model.
Any suggestions ?

Thank You!

Walmart shop light comes with a circuit board inside a attached box to the lampholder sockets. The fixture does not seem to have room for another ballast.

dcarch

I've purchased close to 30 of the Walmart fixtures and recommend them. I check the power consumption of all my overdriven setups after I finish the wiring and all the Walmart setups consume 54 +/- 2 watts (per bulb) without exception which suggests to me the tolerance is fairly low for such a cheap unit. I trust them now to the point that I don't even bother running them normally after I pull them out of the box to ensure they work... which means if I ever got a bad unit I couldn't return it but that seems unlikely. Best $7 I've spent all winter.

Jason

Hi,
Would I move the circuit board from one unit and put it in the same plastic box as the other, or would I want to fit two of the plastic boxes on one fixture?

Thank you

Both circuit cards (ballasts) will not fit into one plastic housing so you need to move the entire plastic housing as well as the end cap with bulb sockets over to the new fixture. The whole assembly just pops in rather easily. This means the metal wire cover needs to be cut a bit shorter to snap on.

The thing that made the process much faster was a "3m self stripping wire splice which allows you to parallel to the two outputs of the ballast in seconds.

Sorry, I wrote up much more a minute ago but my browser crashed with the big obnoxious full screen video ad that popped up. There is a post from a few months ago that details the whole procedure pretty well and I think it may have had photos.

jason

Hi,
Thanks Jason for the info. I found the thread you referred to.

Andrew

Here is a link that might be useful: Walmart overdrive