This whole topic was made before LED got so bad…

... but for general lighting I have a hard time imagining they'd take over everything. Who knows tho...

Oh, the good old days... It's hard for me to imagine LEDs only having 100lpw. I wonder which technology is next?

A useful way to finely adjust lamp current in 230V realm is to hook some low power fluorescent chokes (like 8W T5 or 11W PL which are almost equal) in parallel to main choke. If still not enough current, hook another one or upgrade say, to 30W choke

As for ignitor, 230V starter may work alone (or better in series with 100W lightbulb to make short circuit current reasonable). Or may not work with some hesitant LPS lamps which really need a dense series if ignition pulses to do glow-to-arc. In that case, assuming you have a pile of like LPS lamps and do not especially care for one of them, I'd just whack the lamp with some superimposed HID (MH/HPS) ignitor. Ignitor voltage will be somewhat high but outer volume of the lamp won't break down as it is hard vacuum. There is a remote chance of base flash-over, you have to look, but I believe ignitor voltage will be immediately clamped by arctube breakdown and lamp will light-up just OK.

Also, there are really heavy duty electronic ballasts having circa 800mA current, one probably will take a good care of such lamp, but these are quite rare, intended for equally rare high power CFLs.

I have seen Satco branded lamps at various Ace hardware stores, and some independently owned hardware stores. For a cheaper basic brand of lighting, their lamps have served me well in my testing.

I've used their Halogen "eXcel" 65w R30s in my kitchen for years and they've lasted much longer than other halogen and incandescent flood lamps, especially compared to modern GE. My aunts house has these same R30 lamps in the Recessed cans at their house, and most of them are still working and been in service since the 2000s!

Found this doing a search:
https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=229&pos=60046&pid=72012

How about that?  GE made a trimline stereo record player...   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diBA38wir3I

Sooooold!!! I don't have the lamp in my dorm right now but I will figure it out if you ever find yourself near here

@Multisubject — if we ever meet up, I can give you one or multiple. I have more than enough.

@Multisubject — do you want a NORMAL MH400?

Not enough to go through the effort of actually buying one, but kinda lol. I just want this piece of crud out of my vicinity.

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.