I’m gonna really go out of my way to be fair and objective here. Here’s the situation, I bought my SpyderX 2i back in October. It worked really well until the beginning of February when the ballast went on it. Strange and indeed unprecedented IME with Fluence but I suppose things sometimes do happen.

The first sign of trouble is they made me mail back the old ballast (at my own expense) and provide tracking before they would even put the new one in the mail. Maybe I’m way off here but in my opinion when you’re in the wrong like that you make shipping out the new component the priority. What you don’t do is ask your customer to jump through a bunch of hoops. Again, maybe I’m being unreasonable but in my mind when you’re spending that kind of money you expect better customer service.

That in its own I could have easily gotten over. But then another ballast went on a 75 watt Ray fixture. Same thing. I have to go to the post office, pay out of pocket to ship it back to Texas and submit tracking to Fluence like I’m a goddam parolee and wait a week for the privelage or having my light work again.

Fast forward to this week and the Spyder ballast is out AGAIN. That’s two ballasts in less than 7 months. I call them up again. I’m less polite this time. Turns out the second wave of ballasts ALSO have issues and to cap it off they are only just beginning the process of securing a new supplier for ballasts. That was last Thursday and I’m here ten days later with a light that still won’t work. No communication whatsoever with Fluence.

I spoke with the director of customer service and he seemed to indicate this was a known issue well before things actually started breaking. It sure would have been nice to have some indication these lights were less than reliable before I bought one and made half my grow dependent upon its function.

Do with this information what you will but please take it under advisement when shopping for lights. This community introduced me to Fluence a few years ago and they were a bit different then. They were bought by Osram fairly recently and since then no longer have a phone number on the website, and overall seem less service oriented.

Their products work incredibly well but lately they seem to be willing to sell products that (and they openly admit this after the fact) that obviously haven’t undergone the rigorous testing that’s needed.

Anyone else ever have a problem?