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RE: SHO lights
> Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 20:36:47 EST
> From: AVukich at aol_com
> Subject: SHO lights
>
> Just a note of some personal experience here....
> I just received a shipment from That Pet Place of a 24" SHO
> striplight as well as Perfecto's 36" unit.....while Ive learned
> to sneak things into the house when making new purchases for my
> tanks from online lists(thank God its winter ...amazing what you
> can hide under a jacket) these I simply stuck away for future
> use....
> Given my past experiences with regular 48" double fourescents from
> Perfecto I guess I should've known better...the 24" unit was completely
> seperated from its housing..the 2 areas which attach the two pieces were
> broken....the 36" unit seems much better although a nut came sliding out
> of the box before the rest of the unit did...something tells me this isn't
> a spare part....That Fish Place made good on it for me...they promised
even
> to send me a UPS sticker so I wont have to pay to send it back...
Anton,
I know your pain. :) As I posted in an earlier APD, I had to return two 24"
SHOlights to That Pet Place. They were both broken in exactly the way you
describe. I finally gave up and ordered one from Pet Warehouse. That one
arrived with a screw rattling around in the box. I probably should've sent
it back, but, since I had been trying to get one of these lights since
mid-December, I just had to do what I could to try to keep it. I decided to
disassemble it to figure out where the screw came from. It turned out to be
one of two machine screws holding down the ballast. The accompanying nut
was nowhere to be found (but the washer was rattling around inside), so I
made a quick trip to the hardware store, where I found an 8-32 nut that fit
perfectly. Also, one of the wires had pulled loose from the G11 lamp
holder, so I pushed it back in to its little plastic hole in the socket
(there's some kind of self-grabbing mechanism inside the hole that catches
the wire and holds it. I hope it doesn't come loose again.) So after all
that I *finally* have this beast on my tank and working beautifully. My
conclusion is that this striplight has high quality parts (Sylvania
Quicktronic electronic ballast, Osram Dulux L bulb) inside a cheap, shoddily
assembled enclosure that is shipped from the factory without proper quality
assurance tests. That's what you get for $90, I guess.
The nut you found is either from the ballast or from the two machine screws
that attach the G11 socket to the reflector. Everything else is put
together with cheap sheet metal screws.
> Afetr a long talk with my LFS plant guy(OK..I'm lucky) he
> said he bought all his compact flourescent fixtures from what I heard as
> AGA....I think thats what he said..he didn't want the owner of the store
> to hear as well as my ears were still stuffed from the flu.....I looked
> through all my monthly magazines and didn't find any place of business
called
> AGA...any clues?
Never heard of them. The only compact flourescent striplights I know of are
made by Perfecto, Custom Sealife, Hamilton, and a place called "US Aquarium"
which has shown up in the That Fish Place catalog recently (don't know
anything about them).
Good luck,
Paul