Wow, that is an efficiency nightmare.
My pick is probably my purple Diazotype reprographic 400W MH lamp (my profile picture). Don't get me wrong, it does look cool when lit, that is why I chose it as my profile picture. But there are a few reasons I am not exactly a fan of it:
- First HID lamp I ever got, looks 100% normal, was expecting it to be normal/usable
- Light output is not usable, may or may not contain harmful UV (nobody seems to know)
- Cycles on it's appropriate ballast (even though arc tube looks pretty new), can only be run up nicely with added CWA capacitance
- BT-37 takes up a lot of my space, and I don't ever even take it out of the box anymore
- Even if it did work right and wasn't harmful, the hour rating of these kinds of lamps is apparently crud anyway
Honestly if I could magically wake up and have this lamp transformed into a normal 400W MH, that would be great. It is just a waste of my space. But I am not gonna just throw it away because they aren't super common, maybe some day someone will give it a loving home lol.
@Multisubject — do you want a NORMAL MH400?
My biggest peeve is bad lighting. Ie, half-assed, poorly-maintained lighting installs. I have somewhat of a "perfectionist" nature, so if something like a chandelier has 16 different kinds of bulbs and three color temperatures, I will not be able to focus on anything else in the room, no matter how "nice" it may be.
Also flickering LEDs are up there. Recent-manufacture lamps from the likes of K-Lite (branded Philips) have a tendency to flicker horribly for no particular reason. They are straight junk in every application, and not worth more than $1/lamp, "unique" attributes aside (ie, SceneSwitch).
I also can't stand missouts. Like you went out of your way to replace every light in town. So WHY is there a light smack in the middle of it all, that is probably EOL, that is still in place??? My only exception to this rule is when a light left lit is something like a vintage MV lamp (ie, a local town converted entirely to LED, and they missed a Westinghouse OV-15 that's been reliably lighting dusk to dawn for the past 25 or so years).
There are more, but that's all I can think of so far.