Here is a little info about the lights.
My friend went and bought the odyssey lights not knowing any better. The ballast that come with the set are pure garbage no argument, they don’t push enough power to the bulb so yes a change of the ballast is a must.
If you look at the fixture itself, it’s a coralife fixture. Everything matches inside and out. Even the vent holes are cut to the same dimension and width. The wires, connectors, glass, moon lights, and bulb seat. The ballasts are completely different, I have no clue what they are or who makes them.
If you go to reef central they have tutorial on how to swap the ballast out (wish it was up before we did it, not that its hard)
We took apart my coralife fixture and compared parts. Some of the parts are a little shotty but no real concern.
We took down part numbers and looked around and found a few sites that sell replacment parts for the coralife fixture.
We hard wired an icecap 250 ballast to the fixture connectors and swapped out the internal cp ballast and fan with a coralife cp ballast and coralife fan.
The fixture for all intensive purposes is now a coralife fixture w/o the coralife sticker and price tag.
The odyssea fixture has been up and running now for a good 3-4 years w/o a single problem, no fires no blown bulbs no bad algae growth, corals are growing at a nice pace. So you decide, blow a wad of cash on a name brand fixture or mod one out and save the cash and know the inside of the fixture and having the know how.
1 x 36” 250 watt odyssea fixture $200.00 w/sh
1x ice cap 250 watt ballast 80.00 w/sh
1x coralife pc ballast 72.00 w/sh
1x coralife fan 12.00 w/ sh from pc web site
Total $364.00
Coralife 36” fixture 579.00 plus what ever shipping is?
Saving of 215.00 plus to blow on other equipment.
One of the big things I read about the odyssea fixture also is that the bulb are crap, not really. The bulbs get a grey/green color or a nasty yellow color, with the icecap ballast it was nice clear/ blue tint
Before anyone says anything about playing with wires and what not, I will tell you this. When it comes to being mechanically inclined if I was told to plug in a toaster and fix it in a tub of water I would do it.
The replacement parts that you can find very easily are pretty much plug and play, yeah a wire nut here and their but that’s it.
My disclaimer, I do not sell fixtures or repair them I do not take responsibility if you kill your self.
You can make these fixture name brand if you want to.
I am thinking of doing it again and taking pictures of everything and posting a dyi mod for the fixtures
