Quote Originally Posted by faithless
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Thanks a lot for all the answers. My head is swimming from technical terms like female/male/common etc...

I don't get how a single strand of wiring can be male/female?

What I want to do, is remove the whole ballast and use the pins that its secured with, to secure it to the removable metal lid instead.
That would give me an empty compartment within the hood to place a fan etc for the cool tube. Is this doable?

I'll upload a pic. The encircled two cords (it's hard to see that there are two, dodgy cam) is where I'd just like two extend those two wires - if I just chop 'em and extend them with some heavy duty wiring, will I be ok?

Thats exactly what I said when I posted - just disconnect, remove everything from the hood and extend the lamp leads (to the socket) w/ 14AWG wire. Then mount the ballast components to something.