Can Electronic ballasts combine with Grounded Digital Programmable Timer?

In plant lighting, the popular electronic ballasts are of three dimming as 50%, 75% and 100%.
Timer switches socket controls ON or OFF of the electronic ballasts,
then how about set a digital programmable Timer on the shell of the electronic ballasts to realize automatic control functions of it,
which including gradual dimming, cycle dimming, and switch Timer control?
How about three manual dimming changes into dimming of user programmable setting?
Does it have practical value?

solis-tek ballast

Dono..

I lower the wattage of my center cool tube to 600 in the last quarter of flowering maybe the last third.

I have 250 MH on the outside cool tubes and a 1000 watt Galaxy 400/600/1000/1000+ in the center.

I experienced a hindu kush male going into flower with changes to the number of hours of blue (MH) being reduced to 12 hours a day while total hours of light (MH + HPS) was constant at 15.

So practical? With strains having so much diversity of breeding environments I would think what can be good for one may cause problems for another.

Still what exposes sexual behaviour before we use the stock to breed isn't a bad idea..

If growing for produce anything that works is okay. When growing for seeds what we force on the parents will be recorded in the offspring over generations I do believe. Take a shift in the amount of Blue Spectrum triggering flowering and not the number of hours in the day for the plant for example.

It's complex.. but you can't go wrong with enough light of the right spectrum(s) to do the job for a goodly amount of time.

Around here I veg on 14 hour days.. 14/10 Works fine for some and not so much for Sativa.

So yeah dimming is good at times but hardly something I think needs to be controlled beyond switches one can turn when ready to change things.

That's my opinion.

jamie520 said:

In plant lighting, the popular electronic ballasts are of three dimming as 50%, 75% and 100%.
Timer switches socket controls ON or OFF of the electronic ballasts,
then how about set a digital programmable Timer on the shell of the electronic ballasts to realize automatic control functions of it,
which including gradual dimming, cycle dimming, and switch Timer control?
How about three manual dimming changes into dimming of user programmable setting?
Does it have practical value?

Click to expand...

I don't think so.

Couple reasons. First, the only reason I like dimmable ballasts is so I can use them with 600 or 1000 watt bulbs - I can't think of a reason why you would want to dim manually.

Second, if you are growing with several ballasts, you would have to set each timer individually, and make sure they were synchronized. It is a lot easier to just connect a programmable timer to 4 or 5 relays, then manually control the outlets.

And third, timers periodically fail, and I would rather a ballast not have something I wasn't going to use than it be there and create problems or break. Also, since you can wire up as many relays as you want for ~$30 worth of wire/relays, I certainly wouldn't pay more to have a built in timer.