first safety

T5 lights are hooked up to electricity like any other electronic device, which means that it requires a certain amount of safety measures to be considered. Not only that, in addition T5 fixtures are lights, that have bulbs and other parts that break quite easily, making them delicate and vulnerable to any outside factors, such as vibration for example.  So to make your life easier and to keep your lights safe and intact, here are a couple of key  things that you should note and keep in mind.

  1. One of seemingly self explanatory safety measures that quite regularly aren’t taken into account is not to touch the light after it has been turned on for a while. Despite what manufacturers say about the heat emission of the light and how it doesn’t get hot, the truth is that if your lamp will have run for more that couple of hours, it will be hot if you put your hand on it. So be careful and stay clear of touching the bulbs or the balasts directly, because otherwise you can even get burns that are one of the nastiest injuries to heal.
  2. While we are on the topic of heat, another heat related problem that can arise even after the fist hours of using the light is the amount of heat it emits and how that heat affects the plants that are under your light. Here you really should monitor how the heat is dissipated from your grow room and how your plants are reacting to the fixture being close to them. If their canopies are turning dry or brown even, then the lights are defiantly too close to your plan’s canopies and you simply need to raise the lights higher. But if you see that all of the plants look dehydrated or that the soil becomes dry short time after you water the plants, then your problem probably is too hot of a grow room. For this matter the solution is a bit harder, because either you need to find a way to eliminate the excess heat from your grow space or you need to decrease the amount of lights you have in your grow room, which in return will lead to reduction in plant numbers.
  3. For T5 fixtures one of the most fragile parts, besides the bulbs of course, is the ballast. But the lifespan of ballasts widely depends on how you treat the light. Ballasts usually break very quickly if you frequently turn the light on and off. This kind of stress will result in you buying new ballast or even new light. The same goes for electricity flow unevenness or for something like a constant power outages. So you should make sure that the lights get even amount of power and aren’t turned on and off 20 times a day.
  4. And of course then there are outside factors that can affect the life of your T5 light. Any big vibrations can not only break the ballast and the bulbs, but crack the housing or damage any other part of your light. Moreover, unsuitable conditions such as environments that are too hot or too cold or weather that the light isn’t meant to be exposed to like snow or rain can damage the light, cut its lifespan short or worse – damage the light all together to a point that it doesn’t turn on. So you really should read the instructions of the light to see what conditions are suitable for your specific light, because only that way you will be able to enjoy your light for a long time and benefit from it with big plants and huge yields.