| I have been pondering this. I remember back in the early 90's my favorite electrical store I frequented with my dad as a child stocked the residential Electripak decorative mercury vapor fixtures, the ones that used a specifically designed baby mercury lamp with a medium base and manufactured by Philips and labeled as LoVolt lamps. I used to love these fixtures as they were a very "approachable" and "cute" (can't think of better word lol) way to have mercury light outside your door or whatnot if a real man's mercury yard blaster or cobrahead wouldn't do lol! Anyways these used the choke HPS style ballast and from what I learned here had shorter arc tubes that were also thicker and ran at 50-60 volts! I never knew this, thank you to the poster as I haven't seen the post for a bit and can't remember your name. Inlearned the whole reason for this creation was to enable them to start on an open circuit voltage of 120 and use only a choke. They had issues of the starting probe which is much closer being shorted by mercury unless the lamps were run base up. Those electripak fixtures held the lamp base up at 45 degrees similar to the handyman electric "compact" yard blaster a of that era. So I guess we're talking over 2 amps of arc current in this little bulb as they were rated 140watts oddly. I am curious if the wider arc tube was to enable the hotter arc, and of their lifespan would theoretically be shorter than a standard 175w merc. Would they emit more UV also? They were frosted, the ones I remember and emitted very nice light. When they fired it up at the electrical store it "thumped" like my HPS Wallpack which makes me believe there is an ignitor at work...so possibly the bulbs were made with starting probes but used in these electripak fixtures using HPS gear with no harm done? These fixtures really fascinated me then and now! :-) thanks for all input/brainstorming welcome!
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