Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 10:33AM :
In Reply to: Re: OT: Fluorescent Lighting - HO vs Electronic Balast posted by Willy-N on Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 10:17AM :
Mark, you probably know more about this than I do, but I've found basically two kinds of electronic ballast. There's a little cheap plastic module that clips onto the wires inside the housing, and there's a larger black box that looks more or less like a normal ballast and screws onto the housing. The clip-on ones are terrible -- lots of buzzing and flickering and poor performance in cool (not even cold) temperatures. The bigger ones seem better than a normal ballast as far as cold-weather operation, lack of flicker, and working with many kinds of bulbs.
I haven't had enough experience to judge whether the electronic ballasts (of any kind) last as long as the conventional kind. I've seen some conventional ballasts that sure didn't last very long. When I tore them apart, I saw they were wound with aluminum wire! They also seem to design them so they run a lot hotter than older ballasts of the same rating. I recently had to replace two old ballasts in fixtures in my commercial building. They were twice the size and weight of the new replacement ballasts. They had date codes from the 1940s stamped on them, and they'd been in pretty much continual use for that whole time, from what people tell me. I'd be amazed if any new ballast would keep working for 60 years of constant commercial usage.
One problem I'm always having these days is the new "environmentally-safe" (low-mercury) tubes do not light reliably in many fixtures, both older and new. It's getting had to find "regular" tubes with enough mercury to ensure reliable starting. The "green" ones tend to flicker with annoying bands of light moving up and down the tube until they get extremely well warmed up, which doesn't happen at all in my basement or in cool weather. I once bought 12 fixtures for my shop and had to take them all back and get more expensive ones because the cheap ones wouldn't light the "green" tubes at all. Even the expensive ones are marginal with them.
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