Read today a newspaper report about a possible result of current attempts to consolidate "Ecodesign" (I think that's what they are called) regulations, to eliminate an existing multitude of them:

It could make it legal again between 2018 and 2020 to sell MV and halophosphate FL lamps in the EU. Industry lobbyists are alarmed, fearing that some manufacturers from outside our developed socialist society (or whatever they call it nowadays) could use the opportunity to sell exactly this stuff, in particular to organizations that could this way be dissuaded from the proper way to invest lots of €€€ into new lighting systems.

Is this the right moment to make facepalm?

Was there any details about how this could be possible?

This shows a point. Even after over half decade of aggressive promotion of "more efficient" lighting, the users still want MBF's and 640's. They apparently have good reason to stick to them

Lighting manufacturers see this as a threat ofcourse



Sharing the experience from Israel :

Up to the last 5 or so years, the "proper" manufacturers were making Switchstart Fluorecent lanterns as usual : Gaash 505 series, Shaltiel A2, ..

Aggressive promotion broke the market :

 - Institutions, under pressure to be "green" bought in the "efficient lighting" deals

 - Too little sales of Switchstart Fluorescents

 - Goodbye Switchstart from Gaash

 - Goodbye Shaltiel (RIP company. They were allready in bad finances, but the sudden drop in sales just snapped them. Some of the very last lanterns coming out of their company were just the same ex-36W A2's, without any ballasts, just 240V to the socket and bundled with LED tubes, but that was too late)

 - Home/small business users, maintenance workers etc want their Switchstart back

 - Cheap imports, of asinine quality flood the market. Few of them are just not as good, few are downright scary from a safety aspect

 - Cheap imports stay in the market. and the fraud companies that import them (some are literally fraud, for one, the products dont satisfy any basic safety requirements, second, the company name is often unknown and they go on great effort to hide it and the name of city of importing company headquarters, interesting why) get richer and reacher

I didn't know that Shaltiel were in bad financial state, even before they went bankrupt. Their products were still very popular before the LED boom began here. Until recently, I thought that MSlight is a generic brand, since I've seen it on a lot of Siteco 5NX74721 PS92 ripoffs here, until you said somewhere here, that MSlight is Shaltiel.
If from your things, Shaltiel would survive if the LED boom here won't occur, so I think that the main reason for the agressive promotion of LED lighting here, is simply to close the local lighting factories and encourage crap lighting from China, or to close the smaller good lighting manufacturers. so I think there is some Cartel here.
I also think that to the LED boom here, contributing the fact that Israel is a land of startups and Hi-Tech.
This looks like there was a ban on the old lighting technologies here.

I seen some of the very last A2's that came off Shaltiel "officially" (while the company was still active i think, but in its last days)

They are the same final version A2's (with the folded in ends) as the normal switchstart version

No gear inside whatsoever. IIRC the wiring (i seen them ~2 years ago) was 240V supplied to the 2 pins on one end of each tube, the other end is blank (there is a proper socket there, but not connected to any wires), so very obviously intended for LED tubes

The starter holes were left open, black holes (which i think is violation of the IP20 specification of the lantern, allthough there are no live parts present behind the hole either)



Now consider this :

In the last few years, Gaash were pretty much the obvious choice for institutions and everyone who would invest big into their lighting, and Shaltiel were the "alternative" preferred by the users who want good lighting for less deep pocket

In Shaltiel's favor i'll say, that they put quite a bit of thinking into their main products - The A2, B40, HID lanterns (dont know model numbers), how to cut costs with only minor impact to quality. The lanterns are made of a thinner metal, not galvanized, very simplified construction (folded in like a handmade box), ballasts mounted using a slide in catch to save on 1 of the 2 bolts, .... But in the bottom line are the same Switchstart, with the same Eltam/VS chokes, and will last the same many years

So Shaltiel had a market they fit in and that market was ok for them



Now here comes another thing - From here on, here is the way how i understand it :

Shaltiel's significant customers were sparky's doing relatively small works (for example, you would see medium size private shop lit with A2's), maintenance personnel who need lanterns for replacements, and homeowners. The common to all of them is, they shop in hardware shops for their lighting. So from Shaltiel's side of the supply chain, their customers were the suppliers for such shops. In contrast, Gaash's customers were/are bigger electrical wholesalers (though there are exceptions)

Hardware shops dont only sell ligthing, they sell all sorts of hardware. Traditionally, the other devices they stocked were about the same class as Shaltiel were in lighting : Good devices that overall last well, but not the most expensive ones with the thickest metal. If you are up to some home upgrades, you go to the hardware shop and get good stuff that will serve you well, for a fairly good deal



Among the good stuff, there were the "rotten apples" too :

Some things - esp the ones that can be easily imported from China : Lamps (of the types used by home users, so mostly Incandescents, CFLs and T8s), receptacles and switches, and such, existed too. They were usually the generic brands on the bottom shelf. The first i can recall seeing allready in the end of 90s is Luxten (lamps and starters, that allready as kid i noticed that they are absolute crap)

The products were of substandard quality, but officially with a certificate so nothing illegal yet. Some shops started buying the cheaper stuff right away, some waited, but through the early 2000s it slowly and steadily got from the bottom shelf to the center one : Suddenly there are Luxten CFLs too, suddenly Luxten AC adapters too ....

Then suddenly, in a fairly fast changeover, all the rest of the stuff became Chinese crap as well, split to different brands

I guessed, and asking some shop owners confirms this, the supplier for the generic brands started offering them deals along the lines of "order the entire electrical island from us and get a bargain"



The interesting thing is, it appears that they intentionally "assaulted" other companies on a per company basis, rather than offering products by category like a normal company (even an importer) introducing new products would

For each "victim", a new generic brand appears. For example, there is a company named Waissboard, that makes a variety of electrical components : "Wiring" devices like receptacles, switches, time switches, terminals, E27 lamp holders, and "Plug and play" devices like power strips, kettle leads, surge protectors, various adapters and more. While that is obviously the range of products of the company, they are different categories of products : a terminal (used in connection boxes, equivalent to a wirenut) and a plug-in surge protector are very different products

If one day the shop have terminal strips of another brand, this is nothing extraordinary....

If one day ALL Waissboard products in the shop get replaced by others, ALL others of the same brand, this does not look innocent at all. The other brand (a generic sticker brand) is not a coincidence. It was a proposed and well chosen assault on Waissboard

Nowadays, the hardware shops are stuffed with the cheap crap. It is rare to find anything different there

(Speaking of Waissboard, they are still around, but a lot of the good old products were discontinued, or they changed from making their own good ones to impoorting Chinese equivalents with a custom branding. This change is consistent with the time of "assaults" on Waissboard's products)



Thats not all

Some of the products are fraudulent in one way or another. Fakes of other brands, lamps with fake EEI labels (im not talking about the "equivalence game" of the LED industry, but outright fraud with any ype of lamp), fake standard certification signs, and so on

Some new stuff appears in shops now, that is either unbranded at all, or branded too cryptically to make it out who the importer is and where its headquarters are. (company names like X.Y.Co, incomplete addresses and invalid phone numbers, spelling Chinese names with Hebrew letters - I can only tell that it is worse than spelling them in English)

If the former products were just "crappy" but most of them were not an imminent danger, the new ones are scary. Things you ask yourself who in their right mind would even wire to 240V, based on their internal look and feel alone. Fluorescent lanterns with substandard (and very hot running) chokes exposed on the back of the lantern, where it would be mounted often to a flammable surface. Phase wires loose from their terminals and touching the metal enclosure from inside, in a device brand new out of the box. No specifications whatsoever - Just trust that this lantern is for 240V and will work with the 36W lamp that fits in...

Those things seriously look like they were illegally imported into the country. Sometyimes clearly illegal things pop up ike 100W incandescents, those are too untitled without even a Lm rating



Now, consider that all this is in the same "bundle electrical island" from the same supplier. Makes seriously wonder what they are up to

Checking where the products come from, makes an interesting finding

All the brands that show up in the bundle, come from a place known as "The Triangle". Its roughly equivalent to an European "bad sector" of immigrants with murderous attitude, who think they are boss in the country. Actually, there is much in common indeed

If you want to buy any counterfeit item and are not satisfied by Ebay, the market there is for you. If you want illegal or contraband goods for a bargain, at a slight risk of being murdered in the street for no reason, look no further. If you are placing bets where the next mass knife stabber, shooter, GTA run over driver or other domestic terrorist will come from, that is your best bet. If the entire city goes for a mass "peaceful protest for human rights" (about which you can hear from miles away - AK-47s make really a lot of noise) when a terrorist organization is banned (but at other times they say "the 1% makes a bad name for the rest of us"), the city is no other than the one from which Luxten came

Really makes me want to go shopping in hardware shops nowadays (NOT).... The shop owners are basically like "i dont care, those things sell well". Of course they will, Most customers appear to not think beyond "it is so cheap, if it beraks i will buy new one", are either not aware or not concerned with anything else. Looks like im the only one who noticed that "something is going on bigger than market forces alone, WTF is going on ??"

The fakes and untitled lanterns : Those appear to be illegal imports. With where they come from, the lanterns are very possibly just a little package in the same import path through which we get drugs from "The Triangle", weapons in the hands of terrorists of "The Triangle" and so on. This means, that it is plausible to assume that the peeps with the untitled lanterns are the same, or at least familiar, with the ones with the drugs and illegal weapons

The "assaults" on local companies : In light of this suspected relation to the terrorism networks of the Middle East, i wonder if the "assaults" activity by itself is an active part of the Middle East conflict (i.e. a silent war on Israel's economics), and not strictly business strategy (while it works damn well as a business strategy tho)



Kai mentioned "some manufacturers from outside our developed socialist society"

In fact, the manufacturers can be the same : Osram and Philips still make the 640s and MBFs. They are not listed in the European/Global website, but are available here (from the more respectable wholesalers, not from the generic brand suppliers)

What i do think is a realistic possibility, that Osram/Philips dont want to open an easy door for new cheap stuff importers who will undercut them on the 640's first, and then eventually expand to the LEDs too. Basically, looks like the EU lighing industry is aware of what goes on here

(That is in addition to not being able to force customers to LEDs)



Back to Shaltiel lighting :

The generic brands attacked Shaltiel allready in the days of Switchstart in the mid 2000s, exactly in this strategy. The generic brand that replaced Shaltiel is Optima, a twin of Luxten. That is probably the point from which Shaltiel started going downhill economically

The generic brands sell pretty much everything that is Chinese and cheap, as soon as it appears on the China Export market. No wonder, all generic brands got a very good ride on the LED madness wave. While proper manufacturers had to build, test, and so on the new LED products, the generic brands started selling right away everything half baked available from China. So they were the first to LED in the hardware shops

One of the products from the generic brand were battens (of various styles) complete with LED tubes. As i understand, Shaltiel attempted a last rescue by assembling a "quick and dirty" LED version of the A2 lantern, but it was either too late, or they still had no chance because they allready had a big blow on the customer base