[GulfCoastAquarian]

On that forum on reefcentral's site, on the second page (I believe), someone tried connecting two seperate ballasts and fried the ballasts. The ballasts have circuitry to prevent feedback of some sort that prevents being able to connect more than one ballast to one bulb.

What you do is buy a ballast designed to drive more than one bulb - such as a 4-F32T8 ballast or a 2-F32T8 ballast. And that's exactly what you do - connect one ballast, designed to run several bulbs, to one bulb.

The reason they mention four ballasts on the reefburnaby post is because they are actually driving four seperate bulbs, each with their own 4-F32T8 ballast. That's a LOT of light, but that's what SPS corals need. If each F32T8 bulb being driven by its own 4-F32T8 bllast (with all four outputs connected to the one bulb) makes 6500 lumens, we're talking 26,000 lumens here! In the standard watts per gallon convention - this translates to well over 500 watts of light!

For a planted tank - you can consider each F32T8 bulb to be the equivalent of 125 watts - enough to grow most plants in a 55gallon tank. Two of these bulbs (each with their own ballast) would be enough light on even a 75 gallon to grow intense light plants.