Why not electronic ballast for mercury vapor?

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Topic: Why not electronic ballast for mercury vapor? (Read 4416 times)

RRK
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Roman

I bet the reason is mainly economical. There is no reason to hook a $5 lamp on $50 ballast. No problem to make a suitable electronic ballast. Either MH like bridge circuit less the ignitor, or HF sinewave ballast at ~150kHz, so well behind possible acoustic resonances and their main harmonics.

However as HPM lamps are out of favor and banned in many places, no one cares to design a new ballast any more. Also, electronic ballast seems still a bit less robust outdoors than magnetic gear. And one can make heavily cost-optimized choke with aluminium windings. Large and heavy, but cheap. Aluminium is cheap. Iron is cheap. No expensive copper. But extra weight does not matter much in an outdoor lantern. That's unlike rail-mounted shop lighting with CMH lamps where the weight and bulk is of course at premium and small electronic ballasts, even painfully expensive at their time, were preferred.

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RRK
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Quote from: James on April 02, 2025, 05:40:05 PM

In theory it could be possible to make an HPMV lamp to run on electronic ballast but there is little point in lighting applications, because the luminous flux and efficacy both drop by a small amount.

The plasma temperature is increased on a high frequency ballast, which caused preferential ionisation of energy transitions that radiate in the UV wavelengths. So UV-B output increased while visible decreases. Electronic ballasts are therefore quite common for UV mercury lamps.

But probably a better red ratio from deluxe lamps then? May be quite pleasing!

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WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA
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HID, LPS, and preheat fluorescents forever!!!!!!

I am seeing evidence that Toshiba did make some electronic constant wattage mercury vapor ballasts for the Japanese market if you look at pages 1049 and 1050 of the 1992-1993 Toshiba catalog:

https://page3.cextension.jp/c1091/book/index.html#target/page_no=1084

Part numbers for these Toshiba constant wattage electronic mercury vapor ballasts include the following:

4HSE-201HW for 400W mercury vapor lamps

7HSE-201HW for 700W mercury vapor lamps

In that case, electronic mercury vapor ballasts DID EXIST, but were not very popular on a global scale. Additionally, there were also some mercury vapor security light fixtures sold in North America that also used electronic ballasts, but they were not popular as well.

« Last Edit: April 03, 2025, 03:56:46 AM by WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA »

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Desire to collect various light bulbs (especially HID), control gear, and fixtures from around the world.

DISCLAIMER: THE EXPERIMENTS THAT I CONDUCT INVOLVING UNUSUAL LAMP/BALLAST COMBINATIONS SHOULD NOT BE ATTEMPTED UNLESS YOU HAVE THE PROPER KNOWLEDGE. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY INJURIES.

RRK
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Roman

If you are talking about electronically ballasted yard blaster security light discussed here a few years ago, yes this circuit was somewhat extremely crappy and cost-cut...

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WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA
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HID, LPS, and preheat fluorescents forever!!!!!!

I am probably thinking that the Toshiba electronic mercury vapor ballasts for Japanese 400W and 700W mercury vapor lamps would have probably been built more robustly than those low quality North American electronic security light ballasts. It would be nice if someone managed to find those ballasts as they are so unique to Japan.

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Medved
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Quote from: WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA on April 03, 2025, 03:30:09 AM

4HSE-201HW for 400W mercury vapor lamps

7HSE-201HW for 700W mercury vapor lamps

According to the wiring diagram, these are not electronic ballasts, but electronic dimmers. It could be they are there to compensate for mains variation or so, but nothing more.

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No more selfballasted c***

WorldwideHIDCollectorUSA
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HID, LPS, and preheat fluorescents forever!!!!!!

I do seem to see that they might be electronic ballasts whenever I take a screenshot of the catalog pages and run them through translation apps, but the translations might not always be accurate.

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