Hi after exhaustive inquiries  and Googling there is more chance in me winning the lottery or having a date with Claudia Schiffer    than me getting the correct leak transformer to run my lamp second choice is a 175W Metal Halide CWA ballast but getting a 50HZ version is proving very difficult as well . So next step I found out you could you could use a 200W sun bed ballast as the currant is 1.5A so I bought one in the beginning of December and to day I decided to give it a try so I linked both end pins and connected neutral at one end and live from the ballast to the other end and switched it on nothing . Next I connected a Philips SX26 ignitor across the live and neutral on the lamp and it lit  so i switched it of and put my Fluke True RMS DVM on amp range and switched it back on to monitor the currant draw of the lamp and when it got to full brightness  I checked the currant and voltage and the results were 172.2V and 2.4A .So I switched it off there was no noises from the ballast and it was cool and no protest from the lamp no flashing and the electrodes were not glowing what do you think ?  kind regards Bob

Yeah, they do seem rather hard to come by, do those ballasts, but yeah the 175W MH one seems the best compromise. As I said, we use a US CWA ballast powered from our 120V 60Hz inverter and that works fine.

Just out of interest, what Fluke meter do you have..? We like Fluke kit here, we've got quite a bit of their stuff, they're not cheap but you get what you pay for. Also Megger do some nice stuff, although their latest MFT is a bit OTT, think I'll stick with our 1741...

Hi Ria the Fluke Multimeter is a 112 True RMS and it reads spot on with SOX Lamp currant draw tried it on a 35W SOX Lamp and it read 0.6A kind regards Bob

Ok, we have the 179, and a 325 clamp meter as well, amongst other stuff. I'm a bit of a test gear junkie, take a look at my gallery here 

Hi you have some interesting stuff there the porcelain B22d-3  lamp holder  are getting hard to find now kind regards Bob

Yeah they are, especially the ceramic ones. There was someone selling brass ones a while back (not on eBay) but I don't recall who it was 

The first 125W MBFU i got in the 70s was a 3 pin GEC Truelight and the lamp holder I used was a  3BC holder of fire glow bulb out of a coal effect electric fire kind regards  Bob

Ah, note that there is a subtle difference between 3BC and B22d-3 which is used for MV lamps. 3BC was introduced to force people to use CFL's on new build houses a while back, the pins are in slightly different places and one won't fit the other, more than a few people have found that out the hard way..!

Oh yes, did you know the sole reason for 3-pin BC caps for fireglow lamps was to force customers to buy lamps at inflated prices..? There was no other reason, it was a marketing strategy. Sadly it didn't work all that well and gradually they moved over to the standard 2-pin caps.