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Re: Running NOs on a VHO ballast
Rob wrote:
I was surfing the WEB this morning and was looking thru Icecaps WEB site,
and came across a reprinted FAMA article that suggests NO bulbs running on
an Icecap ballast give off the same amount of brightness as a VHO bulb! Is
there any truth to this? It doesnt seem to make much sense to me, and I was
wondering if any of the light gurus here could pick this apart?
I reply:
I can't pick this apart because they provide no data to support the claim.
Maybe that's because I am not a light guru. How long do the bulbs last
before they fail? How many watts does the ballast consume with this lamp.
Does the spectrum degrade over time? Is the spectrum consistant with what it
is supposed to be? How is the lumen maintainance? What is the ballast factor
with this lamp/ballast combination. If this actually worked why make VHO
lamps at all?
There is extreme competition between the large manufacturers of lamps and
ballasts. Hardly a month goes by without one of the big guys announcing some
small breakthrough in lamp/ballast design that increases efficiency by some
small percentage. If it were that simple I believe it would have been done
long ago. I also emailed Icecap and asked them to send the ballast factors
for different lamp/ballast combinations and recieved no reply. So, when you
consider the almost complete lack of information published by Icecap
compared with the full disclosure of information by Philips for example, I
have to think (unfortunately) that it is the big guys who have the better
systems as they are not afraid to have their systems scrutinized. Who knows
though, maybe the big guys know that Icecap ballasts are far superior and
they just forgot to reverse engineer the ballast so they could offer the
same product too and make millions of dollars.
Wayne