A good friend of mine’s son races quarter midgets and we have a small track here in downtown FoCo lit by a smorgasbord of 1000w MH floods in triplets on im guessing 40’ wood poles around the track. The trouble is, theyre all incredibly dim and have always been that way for years. My friend contacted me about it about a month ago, so we went out and took a look. Listening to him at first made me think the lamps were just worn, but after taking photos of all the fixtures we could clearly see the lamps had plenty of life left with minimal wear. Further investigation in the evening by turning them on revealed slow warm up times and a blue-green color temp, my gut instinct telling me we are only getting to 60-70% brightness and its taking 30 mins to get there. Methinks undervoltage or the wrong tap.

Meanwhile he found out that our track and the one in Braselton will together be hosting a national quarter midget event soon that was moved from Ohio (where it has always been) since they are no longer able legally host such an event for the time being (rona restrictions) and we have no such restrictions here in GA. This event is soon, and therefore we must get to the bottom of this issue fast since the track is too dim in the evening currently.

Also during this time we are planning on replacing all the lamps and ballast caps regardless of the what we find to bring everything up to spec. Yes they want to keep HID! For cost reasons mostly, its much cheaper to replace the lamps and caps than the whole fixture for a LED one. I have volunteered myself to do the fixture maintenance and a member of the local club is donating a jib lift for a weekend to allow us to get to them. Yes I am lift certified for scissor and jib lifts.

I received some news yesterday from some preliminary troubleshooting where they found only 214v at the breaker with the circuit off, It is supposed to be 240! I was also told that the bottom of the poles were reading 211v while on. This makes me think the ballasts are on the 240v tap and explains the dim fixtures. They have contacted the city about this since it is their property and power infrastructure to see if they can rectify this before next weekend, otherwise we will switch the ballasts to the 208v tap and that should fix the problem for now. I will update when new info comes in. 

Check for more than just voltage drop. Some things to look out for :

 - Mismatched "European" vs "US" lamps used on "European" vs "US" gear

 - Bad or wrong value capacitors in the entire lot of lanterns

 - Wrong wattage ballast



And for the voltage drop, the wire may be simply too thin to handle the load. Changing to lower tap on the ballast may or may not improve the lamp power condition, but it will increase the current on the wire even more, so increase the actual voltage drop, and possibly exceed the current carrying capability of the cable

In this case, the better solution may be to use higher voltage for the entire system : If you have 277 or 480 available and the ballasts can work with that, great. If not, step up the voltage on the input to the system (for example, from 240V to ~288V using 2x 24V isolation transformers), and use the 277V tap on the ballasts

All good points I will keep in my mind. Hopefully no lines need work as they are all buried in concrete to and from the breaker panel and poles. In as far as the lamps and gear go, these are all probe start lamps.

Attached is a sat pic of the track. red circles are poles with 3-4 floods mounted on them and the green circle is the breaker panel which is also used to switch them.

A good friend of mine’s son races quarter midgets and we have a small track here in downtown FoCo lit by a smorgasbord of 1000w MH floods in triplets on im guessing 40’ wood poles around the track. The trouble is, theyre all incredibly dim and have always been that way for years. My friend contacted me about it about a month ago, so we went out and took a look. Listening to him at first made me think the lamps were just worn, but after taking photos of all the fixtures we could clearly see the lamps had plenty of life left with minimal wear. Further investigation in the evening by turning them on revealed slow warm up times and a blue-green color temp, my gut instinct telling me we are only getting to 60-70% brightness and its taking 30 mins to get there. Methinks undervoltage or the wrong tap.

Meanwhile he found out that our track and the one in Braselton will together be hosting a national quarter midget event soon that was moved from Ohio (where it has always been) since they are no longer able legally host such an event for the time being (rona restrictions) and we have no such restrictions here in GA. This event is soon, and therefore we must get to the bottom of this issue fast since the track is too dim in the evening currently.

Also during this time we are planning on replacing all the lamps and ballast caps regardless of the what we find to bring everything up to spec. Yes they want to keep HID! For cost reasons mostly, its much cheaper to replace the lamps and caps than the whole fixture for a LED one. I have volunteered myself to do the fixture maintenance and a member of the local club is donating a jib lift for a weekend to allow us to get to them. Yes I am lift certified for scissor and jib lifts.

I received some news yesterday from some preliminary troubleshooting where they found only 214v at the breaker with the circuit off, It is supposed to be 240! I was also told that the bottom of the poles were reading 211v while on. This makes me think the ballasts are on the 240v tap and explains the dim fixtures. They have contacted the city about this since it is their property and power infrastructure to see if they can rectify this before next weekend, otherwise we will switch the ballasts to the 208v tap and that should fix the problem for now. I will update when new info comes in. 

sounds like bad capacitors to me.

Being that your voltage at the both the panel and at the base of the pole is low , you definitely have an input voltage problem . assuming the fixtures are multi tap , the 208 should provide a temporary solution for the time being until the city can find and fix the issue . I would recommend checking the caps while your inside the lights anyways.  While you in there make sure the lamps are actually correct . It's possible depending on how old the fixture are that they could be something other than standard 1000w M-47 MH . 

 BTW , where was the race in Ohio held ? My local short track, Columbus Motor Speedway , (got bulldozed in 2016 for a rugby arena !) had a 1/4 midget track on the property. They also race at Kilkare Motor Speedway and there's an indoor track at the Ohio Expo Center (state fair grounds) . 

We are planning on replacing all caps and lamps anyway, though I dont believe it to be the problem since there is a myriad of fixtures and different ages all with the same exact problem.

Im not sure of the exact location in Ohio, though I do know it was an indoor track.

Pull an extension lead (with 208/240/277V, and thick enough gauge to not have too bad Vdrop) from a nearby building with intact voltage, right up to the base of one of the columns and power one of the lights for a test

Calculating vdrop :

Cu wire resistance = 0.018 (Ohm * mm2 / m) (for one conductor alone)

AWG units Cu wire resistance : (for one conductor alone)
#12 = 0.0016 Ohm/ft
#14 = 0.0025 Ohm/ft

The resistance of both wires (L1+L2 or L1+Neutral) counts, so double it for the complete current path

Then (assuming HPF gear in lanterns) Vdrop = I*R

That might be a test we do since we have some 6kw genny’s available. Im going on the assumption that they are all CWA since that is the most common i’ve seen for high wattage MH.

As long as you have the right voltage available (or use a transformer)

You say that this situation has existed for years. Do you know if this installation has ever operated  properly? The voltages that are being measured sound like the panel is being supplied from a three phase wye transformer installation, giving you 216Y125 volts. Single voltage 1000 watt CWA transformer ballasts were available. Perhaps the original installers put in fixtures with only a 240 volt ballast, not multi tap.
When the installers left, the fixtures worked but not properly and no one noticed.

You say that this situation has existed for years. Do you know if this installation has ever operated  properly? The voltages that are being measured sound like the panel is being supplied from a three phase wye transformer installation, giving you 216Y125 volts. Single voltage 1000 watt CWA transformer ballasts were available. Perhaps the original installers put in fixtures with only a 240 volt ballast, not multi tap.
When the installers left, the fixtures worked but not properly and no one noticed.

To my knowledge, no. 216v could certainly be three phase 208/120. I imagine they are multitap, most manufacturers want to keep a low number of skus to fit a wide verity of installations, this keeps costs down and the city is cheap. Therefore a 4 tap 120/208/240/277 ballast is most likely. The only commercial single tap high wattage ballast ive seen common in the field so far has been 480v. Keep in mind this setup of 15+ fixtures is a hodgepodge of fixtures the city had just laying around. There are at least 6 completely different models in service.

So an update and final installment here. There manifold problems that took knowledge, careful planning, and a good helping of luck for us to come through. Let’s start from the top.

Mains
The breaker panel (consumer unit) for the track lights is a light duty residential/commercial single split-phase(120/240v) 4 wire (L1,L2,N,G) unit that is connected to two phases and neutral of a 120/208 Wye three phase transformer. Definitely a head scratcher. I’m not sure where the third phase ends up?! That being the case 216v at the pole is a nice healthy voltage under load with 19x 1kw lights on it. 12 (3 per pole) of them are aimed at the track and really the only ones we care about.

Ballasts
The main source of our issue lies here. First thing is all but two (two were retrofitted already with M47) of the fixtures were equipped with S52 ballasts and furthermore all ballasts were set to 240v, not 208v, where they should be. We had no idea beforehand that almost all of the fixtures had HPS ballasts. Who would think that whomever installed the fixtures 40’ in the air would be dumb enough to put a MH lamp in a HPS fixture? Thankfully in an odd helping of luck the M47 capacitors we were going to order were out of stock, so my friend ended up ordering complete M47 ballast kits for all 12 fixtures. He also ordered brand new GE Hungary made M47 BT56 lamps as well.

Fixtures
6x cooper streetworks floods https://images.app.goo.gl/gTkxKkHKmNq3L28u9
2x GE powerfloods https://images.app.goo.gl/cNq5A4XU91eL6iBY7
1x 3 piece housing flood with a rear mounted ballast and separate cap box
3x vertical Lamp floods


A 40’ boom lift was donated for a week and we retrofitted and modded most of the fixtures to take BT56 lamps (S52 is much thinner) and all of them with new M47 ballasts. All of the fixtures had pro-Lume BT37 lamps and we had to leave those in the coopers since BT56 wouldn’t fit with the shallow HPS reflector. Thankfully since the pro-lume lamps have been so under run for so long there’s almost no wear on them so I was ok re-using them. The cooper floods  and the three piece unit were very difficult to re-ballast. The coopers being the worst and not holding up well. They were the only ones full of bugs, water, and rust. The GE powerfloods were In the best shape and very easy to work on. It took us a day and a half in 28F windy weather to get them all done. A big win for the community and HID, I’m happy. Some results below

A video from the club president showing and commenting about our efforts:
https://www.facebook.com/ngqma/videos/230747035284679/


In the pic below you can see on the left pole, which already had two M47 equipped fixtures wired@240v and one S52 also wired @240v vs on the right with new ballasts and lamps wired @208v. The left pole used to be the brightest pole before we started. The next day the ones on the left were completed as well.

Awesome ! I'm glad you got them all working correctly !! The wrong lamps in the fixtures kinda doesn't surprise me one bit. I've known a number of people , some who were electricians , who didn't know that you have to match the lamp to the appropriate ballast.  Nice job !!

Awesome achievment

Awesome ! I'm glad you got them all working correctly !! The wrong lamps in the fixtures kinda doesn't surprise me one bit. I've known a number of people , some who were electricians , who didn't know that you have to match the lamp to the appropriate ballast.  Nice job !!

Amazing, lighting lamps on the correct gear, what a novel concept...