so i found a green cfl at the shop.the green coating was coming off so i figured i would help it along with a spritz of carb cleaner.oops fumblefingers POP tinkle!
so i tear the base apart after letting out the mercury.
so what will this sucker drive?
an 8w t5 just fine.a 14w t5 fine but a bit of 120hz flicker.upgrading the filter cap to a 33uf from a 10 fixed that.original had an esr of 27.new one .43
so it was about to go anyway.even with the 14w t5 everything ran cool.iirc it was a 13w cfl.
i can see these running a long time with no direct heat from the tube and a good cap.

Did the carb cleaner dissolve the tube glass ? O_o i wouldn't think any of those materials would dissolve glass

In Instructables there was somebody housed the CFL board to power a tesla coil for a HV display

Many cleaners contain a sand. It may be the scratch from the sand, what cause the glass to break (mainly if there was some tension in the material)

i dropped it.
carb cleaner is a blend of nasty solvents.no sand.
the cfl was a meijer brand.seemed to be a common 2700k with green paint.

I have both reused the inverter as well as the lamps. Done relamping on some 12V CFL lamps as the original lamp broke ( me.......) so it got a lamp unit from a dead ( ballast bang) tornado. The inverter is used to drive some small T5 lamps.

My desk lamp is running a LED retrofit, using a 1W lamp on a old CPU heatsink, with a old Nokia charger ( with bigger input capacitors as the old ones were dying) providing power.

I have a board out of a 20 watt "TopLite" brand CFL retrofitted into an old 2' plastic utility fixture in place of the magnetic choke and "permanent" starter it originally came with. Originally ran the F20T12 Chroma 50 that was already in the fixture but have since switched to an F17T8.




I did the conversion back in 2004 if I remember correctly using a brand new bulb from a multi-pack that my mother got from a local Asian supermarket that gave them away to customers who bought at least $40 worth of groceries. Cut open one of the bulbs in the pack with a hacksaw, took out the board, and rewired the fixture. The setup has been working pretty good for the last 7 years lighting up my room and the ballast operates cool to touch. I've only re-lamped it once about 3 years ago when I switched to the F17T8.

I have another of the same board I harvested from a spent TopLite CFL back 3 years ago when I made the video below but I haven't installed it in anything yet. It's actually on the desk next to me right now. CFLs with square bases like the TopLite ones I used are easy to open up using a hacksaw.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWlMRvVzxBY
 

Used 11W CFL ballasts to run PL-S lamps (those with the starter inside), when converting an incandescent fixture to PL-S.

Replaced the 230V ballast with the 12V rapid start in the 11W CFL's to work from the battery in a cottage.

Converted few instant start HF ballasts to RS (by adding voltage mode filament heating and OCV limitation), I'm curious, how the lamps would endure. The setup proved to not overstress anything even when the resonator is operated into open circuit (standard setup kill the ballast, when the filaments are still conductive, but the arc does not strike). But I already blew one of the modified ballasts by accidentally shorting leads to one filament...