enviro-gro-lites - Stuff 2: Un-Branded CFL's

www.ENVIRO-gro-LITES.co.uk

We would just like to say a few words about cheap unbranded CFL lamps.

There have been many different unbranded lamps that have come and gone on eBay in the past couple of years, different sizes, shapes and prices but they all have one thing in common - they are rubbish.

Grow Lamps are our business and we buy in sample lamps as they appear on the market to evaluate and test them. We have constructed this page because at the moment there are some particularly poor examples being offered for sale which are not only of the usual poor quality but also badly constructed and dangerous. These lamps, like most others, are rip off copies of leading brand products and are usually very old technology constructed using poor quality components.

The seller is using an eBay identity created just to sell these lamps and you may be surprised to learn they also sell a full range of lighting (including Envirolites) as well as many other related products under another eBay id - ask yourself why this company does everything it can to remain anonymous when selling these unbranded lamps !

The answer is simple - Profit. They describe these lamps as "higher output than comparable CFLs." but we can tell you that testing has proved this to be far from the truth. They are smaller, emitting far fewer PAR Amps than their Envirolite equivalents. They were also found, because of their old technology, to consume nearly twice as much power as the Envirolites. They are bought from Chinese counterfeiting factories for pennies and sold at a large profit.

You may think the fact that they offer a free Envirolite Lamp Hanger with the lamps is generous, not at all its just a copyright scam. They started selling these lamps using the word "Envirolite" in their title in order to show up in searches when customers were looking for the real thing, this continued until the manufacturer of the Envirolites invoked their eBay VERO (eBay's verified rights program) and had the sales removed for violation of copyright. The only way they could continue to operate this way was to give away the Envirolite Lamp Hanger giving them the excuse to keep the Envirolite name in their titles.

We have included some photographs below of these lamps so you can see for yourself.

Stay safe in your grow room, faulty and inferior electrical products cause fires every day.

The lamp arrived in damaged packaging, it's thin card box having a knife cut along most of it's length. The polystyrene liner, which is intended to protect the lamp during transit was very light and ill fitting.

Both the 125w and the 250w lamps we purchased arrived with tube spacers missing and loose in the packaging.

All CFL's are constructed in the same way with muliples of U shaped tubes, usually either 4, 6 or 8. For the lamp to remain stable and safe all of the tube spacers must be in place.

These spacers are present so that the lamp maintains its integrity with the tubes in a rigid assembly. If they are missing it is possible for individual tubes to move in relation to the others, this is very dangerous.

If you have purchased a lamp with this problem then you should return it immediately to the supplier and ask for a full refund because it is dangerously faulty.

Far from being bigger and better than other CFL's this picture shows that the unbranded lamps have a bit of growing to do before they can catch up with the Envirolite Lamps.

Shown is the 250w Unbranded Lamp and the new 250w Envirolite Super Grow Lamp

The 125w lamp was similarly poorly packaged.

The 125w lamp also had two tube spaces missing but only one was found in the packaging.

The two spaces missing from this lamp were on opposite sides of the tube array splitting the lamp into two independent parts. This is particularly dangerous and lamps with this fault should not be used.

Do yourself a favour and buy quality lamps from the start.