Aquatic life T5 hybrid nightmare!

[Ling_Thing]

Well I decided to bite the bullet and finally go with the aquatic life T5 hybrid for my reefer 450 along with the hydra 26’s it came with. First hiccup in the road I noticed it did not come with the hardware to attach the hydras to the brackets aquatic life gives you. Ok hardware missing, things happen I understand, now I go to test the fixture before hanging and sure enough I have one bad ballast from the factory! I’m a licensed electrician in MA so I’m very familiar with T5 lighting and ballasts. It gets better...aquatic life won’t return my call as they only have an answering machine for product support, what a joke. I called marine depot and they said they could only offer me a new ballast, I said nope I want a whole new fixture this thing is broken and missing parts I want nothing to do with it. So here I wait out $600 for a T5 fixture and some bulbs and I can’t even use it or return it at this point. Extremely disappointed with aquatic life’s quality control, customer service and general quality of their components (ballast). Hope you guys don’t go through this same nightmare.

 

[gcarroll]

IMO, your only complaint is the ballast. It's faulty

As for the screws... The supplied brackets are for any tablet light that fits, not a Hydra 26 specifically. It's not their job to know what type of screws all these different companies use to mount their fixtures. You supply the LED, you supply the screws.

 

[Ling_Thing]

Update, aquatic life reached out offered to send me new ballast and I was unaware the screws were not included with this light. No biggie hopefully

 

[JMetaxas]

Well, alrighty then !!! Kudos to Aquatic Life.

 

[AquaticLifeProducts]

Well I decided to bite the bullet and finally go with the aquatic life T5 hybrid for my reefer 450 along with the hydra 26’s it came with. First hiccup in the road I noticed it did not come with the hardware to attach the hydras to the brackets aquatic life gives you. Ok hardware missing, things happen I understand, now I go to test the fixture before hanging and sure enough I have one bad ballast from the factory! I’m a licensed electrician in MA so I’m very familiar with T5 lighting and ballasts. It gets better...aquatic life won’t return my call as they only have an answering machine for product support, what a joke. I called marine depot and they said they could only offer me a new ballast, I said nope I want a whole new fixture this thing is broken and missing parts I want nothing to do with it. So here I wait out $600 for a T5 fixture and some bulbs and I can’t even use it or return it at this point. Extremely disappointed with aquatic life’s quality control, customer service and general quality of their components (ballast). Hope you guys don’t go through this same nightmare.

I think we emailed and spoke on the phone Thursday afternoon. Did the ballast fire up after swapping the lamps between fixtures? I have not heard back, just wanted to check in since I saw the post.

 

[JMetaxas]

IMO, the OP should change the title of this thread. Quite frankly, it's ridiculous he calls it a "nightmare".

 

[Retro Reefer]

I agree on the title change and one of the big reasons I went with the fixture is the stellar customer service I have repeatedly seen Dave at Aquatic Life provide here on R2R.

 

[Ling_Thing]

Please delete this thread