Help with ballast wiring

[RkyRickstr]

Guys i took out a ballast from.a 48" nova.. the thing powers two 54 w bulbs.. so im hoping to power 4 24" bulbs..

How do i wire it?..

[kotlec]

Not abig expert, but i thing it is not a very good idea

[SantaMonica]

Not sure you can do that.

[Ace25]

Correct.. ballast are made to run a certain amount of feet worth of bulbs. A ballast for 2x 54w is made to run 8' worth of bulbs. If you run less than 8' you will overdrive the bulb and pop it. At most, it may be possible to run 4x 24" bulbs instead of 2x 48" bulbs but it depends on the ballast if you can wire it up for that. I learned all that stuff when I bought an Icecap660 ballast (which can do multiple configurations, but has a minimum and maximum bulb feet you have to stay within). Same with LED drivers, there is a minimum and maximum amount of LEDs required per driver, and varies between different drivers. A meanwell requires 8 minimum and 14 maximum. Anything less than 8 will overdrive the LEDs, but there is built in protection to turn the driver off it this happens, not so with T5 ballast.

[Doompie]

That's not going to work... That has to do with the start-up voltage to ignite the atoms in the bulb..
You can put 2 24watts serial, and then connect them to the single output from the ballast.
But they probably will NOT light up...
Dual bulbs usually ignite with 500V, single bulbs (1 output from the balast) gets half of that. So you should have double the out-put voltage per output that it gives..

The balast can handle the current for both tubes, but will not deliver the start voltage...

For LED's it's a whole different story.. you can work with resistors in case of les LED's, or change the way you wire the LED's (parallel to serial fe.) in case of more LED's..Thats all about the u=i*r rule

[MorganAtlanta]

See if you can find a wiring diagram for the ballast model online. Many ballasts can handle multiple different bulb lengths and numbers, but you have to wire them differently.