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Re:Ballast test





At 03:48 AM 6/30/00 -0400, Robert Paul H wrote:
>Would anyone who is technically competent, be willing to help me do a test
>study on this...documenting test results over a given period of time. I
>would send you the ballast on the condition you return it to me after a
>specified period of time. ...  No freebees!

Dave Gomberg wrote:
You mean you want someone technically competent to do a few thousand
dollars of research and BTW please return my $100 ballast?  Seems strange
to me.<<

Robert Paul H wrote:


As far as asking someone to spend the equavalent time to "thousands" of
dollars, well I dont know what you are smoking Dave, but thats not what I
had in mind. There seems to be many people in this forum who take great
pleasure in such projects, and I thought I would take advantage of this
opportunity that Icecap gave me, and anyone who wants to help. If nobody
wants to do this, thats fine too. I will hook them up myself and have a
grand old time! I dont have any commercial interest in this, I dont
currently sell any type of lighting equipment. My only other concern was
that I didnt want to simply give the ballast away and never hear from the
person again. Does this make more sense now Dave?

I reply:

I think this would be a lot of fun too but to do it even half right is not a
trivial matter. The thing I would like to know from these tests is how
efficient NO and VHO lamps are with these ballasts, how bright are the
lamps, how well they stack up against much less expensive electronic
ballasts and how well lumens are maintained. To do this, lamps would have to
be purchased and preferably tested to failure or at least until the lumens
has dropped by 40%. I also think that you would need a high frequency
voltage/current tester to determine the power consumption of the lamp and
ballast and a quality lux meter. It would also be a good idea to have some
sort of NO reference ballast so that the data could be compared to known
values. I don't think it would be necessary to obtain a proper reference
ballast, I think any quality ballast with a known ballast factor would do.

There are so many possible lamp/ballast combinations with this system that
all this could run into some serious time and money. Maybe it would be
better to limit the testing to 4' lamps. To make lumen comparisons simple
all lamps should have the same spectra. I would go with cool white lamps
because they are the cheapest but most people probably don't want to run all
cool white lamps on their systems.

I would like to set up two separate but identical fixtures on a 12 hour
timer with identical NO lamps one running a regular electronic ballast and
one running an Icecap VHO electronic ballast. I would like to test for
ballast power consumption, lamp power consumption and lumen output once a
week until the lumen output on one of the systems drops by more than 50%. My
guess (and I hope I am wrong) is that the Icecap ballast will cost a lot
more to operate per lumen than a conventional ballast.

Wayne