@SussexEuroSOX — wow, sounds scrumptious!! Made me hungry!

I’m here to revive this thread: I just had a delicious cheese and ham Panini with a side of Belgian Frites (fries). And for dessert I just had a delicious lavender ice cream sundae… yum

Yeah I figured it had no negative impact on the life expectancy of the lamps.

Like was said before, a slight delay with ignition is good, as the tubes spend less time with the discharge on cold filaments, so less sputtering. Rapid start circuits balance on quite tight tolerance between no ignition at all and cold starts.

One issue is definitely grounding... I've had this issue in the past where there was slight delay before the lamps even began attempting to start,
but after properly grounding the fixture, this slight delay went away. I've also seen this delay with properly grounded fixtures though, when the tubes
are exposed to high humidity... especially with full power F40T12's, unfortunately... I've never seen this occur with the F34T12's, and it makes me wonder
whether that may have something to do with the F34T12's containing conductive coating.

I know. Photovoltaic generators are specialized stuff, hard to get and so unproportionally expensive for what they do. Better to get just a finished 60V high current optoMOS SSR. There is a lot of Chinese ones now for cheap. But optoMOS will need a clean DC control current, while two-stage optoTRIAC like S102/202 will trigger on pretty much any crud above the threshold, including unsmoothed buzzer signal )

S102/202 etc are quite large, easy to dissipate ~3W even without a heatsink, but if doubt could be bolted to anything metal.

forward drop of 1.5V @2A

...means power dissipation of 3W, not that small...

There also exist photo MOSFETs or even SSR gate drivers like VOM1271 (an example, there are ton of similar products, many even in more DIY convenient packages), you take a pair of MOSFETs like IRFZ44 or so, connect Sources together, Gates together, between Gate and Source connect the output of the VOM, the drains then form the power switch. You get about 100mOhm, that means about 0.2V drop, so barely 0.4W total at 2A.

If there is a radio as alarm function, an easiest way will be just to hook a relay (contact rating powerful enough for a halogen) across radio power lines.

In fact, S102/202 optos I mentioned have forward drop of less than 1.5V @2A, so still may be OK even for flashing 12V halogen directly, especially accounting for somewhat constant-current behavior of small power halogen transformers.

To invent an optimized circuit, some hint of actual clock schematics is needed, @lightsofpahrump was asked for, but he prefers to keep silence. Ok, his choice.

You might be able to find a Thomas Duplex Safelight for fairly cheap on eBay. Complete examples sell for a bit but I've found units with missing lamps tend can sell as low as $30-50. They're not a wallpack but they use 35w SOX lamps.