I microwaved in the past, a worn out chinese GE Standard T5 F8W/33 lamp in my mother home, and it was glowed very bright, almost as bright as a T5 HO lamp.
Here is a video.

I microwaved in the past, a worn out chinese GE Standard T5 F8W/33 lamp in my mother home, and it was glowed very bright, almost as bright as a T5 HO lamp.
Here is a video.

 

My first post.  I thought *I* only did distructive things to fluorescent bulbs. Years ago I brought an EOL  F4T5 CW over to a friend's place and we hooked it up to a dual lamp F96T12 ballast. We REALLY got a light show and were SO sad to hear SSSSSSS and the lamp went out. It got black on both ends to a 1/4 of an inch in the middle.

Powell somewhere in South Carolina

I recently finished off both a F4T5 & F8T5 that were at EOL with a VHO ballast

Quote from: dor123 on January 12, 2011, 02:24:37 AM

I microwaved in the past, a worn out chinese GE Standard T5 F8W/33 lamp in my mother home, and it was glowed very bright, almost as bright as a T5 HO lamp.
Here is a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUBDcbx4XfM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1VPAVFAD2Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mARTSw8gp7c

"yes it's a goo idea" 

I just remembered this tonight. I used to volunteer at our community theater, and when I was digging around back stage where all the misc. lighting related stuff is kept I found a completely melted clip on type plastic desk lamp. When I took a closer look it was immediately obvious as to why...someone had screwed in a 500 watt incandescent lamp The plastic had all melted and dripped around/fused itself to the bulb in a molten mess of what could be considered modern art to some. But to me it was just

I did participate in many theater classes at school

I did not officially take theater class - it began from "Hey ash, can you help up us set up the audio ?" "Hey ash, can you see why the dimmer isn't working ?" "Hey ash, can you help us relamp the lights ?" "Hey ash, can you operate the dimmer ?" and finally "Hey ash, we need one more player can you join on stage ?"

In one of the bigger shows (with parents invited, at school outdoor) 2 stupid things were done at once :

We did set up few halogen colored PAR38 floods to light up the trees from below, "for the aura". Then came a contractor to put hundreds of plastic chairs for parents and students to sit on. He did not mind the floodlights and put a chair right above one of them. Sun is going down, crowd allready siting. We flip on the slider on the dimmer. After a few minutes somebody at the far side of the crowd (as seen by us on the mixing / dimming panels) jumps up and shouts "MY &#!!". Upon inspection, we found the plastic chair sagging in the bottom and stuck directly to the glass of the lamp

After connecting everything up, we see that there is one more group of halogens that need connection, but all channels in the dimmer allready are used. So we pull a chain of extension cables to the nearest window of the school building (to be able to plug / unplug this light group as means of control), which happened to be the principal's office. Cable was not wired very well (a loose connection in one of the sockets), so in the mid of the show we set off the fire alarm of the school building. The bad connection was smoking up inside the office



Earlier that year, school hired an "electrician" to make extension cables for the theater workshop to work with the dimmers (a single cable, with 10 plugs on 1 end and 10 sockets on the other, so that several groups of lights can be controlled through it). Luckily i spotted this in time, cause he used 12 conductor cables : 1 common earth for all, 1 COMMON NEUTRAL for all, and 10 lives intended to hold 1KW lights each. I then modified it to have 5 plugs and 5 sockets, with separate neutrals. I guess we would have some excitement if this cable would be used at one of the evenings

Found a good one yesterday.

My parents told me that their outside light had stopped working, and was tripping the circuit breaker for the lighting circuit.

Simple enough, I say, as there's only about six feet between it and the light switch which it works from.  Probably just a bit of water having got in somewhere.

You can imagine my surprise when I pulled the light switch off the wall and discovered what it had been wired up with.  TV ANTENNA COAX!

Even more surprising is that it had been working perfectly fine for at least the last eleven years since we moved in.  Unsurprisingly, the cable was a dead short and the cause of the tripping circuit breaker.  It's now been re-wired with something rather more suitable.

Wow, that is about the worst I've ever heard! I can't believe someone used TV coax for electrical work.

Have to admit it was somewhat of a first for me finding it too.  Especially scary given that the previous occupant of the house was an electrical engineer.  He obviously got a good deal on a bunch of yellow cable as well, as virtually every piece of wiring in the loft aside from the actual ring main cabling is yellow.  Tracing anything generally involves patience and a multimeter.

That however is annoying...the coax incident in contrast is downright absurd!  I really can't believe how long it lasted either.  We've lived there since early 1999 and aside from one or two lamp replacements that light has never been touched.

Unless it is damaged in some way (moisture ... ) it is likely to hold 120 V (maybe 240 too) just ok. I think it was moisture / dirt / insect / isoltion deterioration from lamp heat that initiated the failure, and then it arc-tracked or something

I do wire 240 V lights with fire alarm (smoke detector) cable. It is red double isolated cable, 0.8 mm^2 Cu. Allthough not rated to 240 V, its isolation is nice and thick and can withstand 240 V no problem

I can see some of the higher-grade coax withstanding mains voltage and current, but not television coax. After all, voltages and currents from higher-powered transmitters can well exceed mains voltages and the coax has to be able to handle it. The RG-8 feedline from my ham radio to antenna could probably withstand high voltage, but I still wouldn't use it that way!

Zel, when you say yellow cable for your ring main do you mean he's wired it in arctic flex? Yellow is normally used on work sites for 110V equipment although isn't any different from the blue mains cables, just the colour.

I've seen coax used as mains cable before, I should think it could handle the current of just one lamp but certainly isn't safe. The worst I've seen is where someone wired the whole of the lighting circuits in their mother's house with bell wire!

The TV coax is actually rated for use up to 1kVDC, as it was common to use the coax to power head end amplifiers, converters and distribution amplifiers up the cable from one end, either at 60 VAC or 220 VAC, via an isolating transformer, depending on the power required. The cable is rated for around 1A current or so, and will easily drive a lamp load.

Not too common nowdays except in older communal living sections, and bigger blocks of flats where there was a single antenna and a trunk cable that provided each floor or group of floors with a feed, all powered from the bottom from a single socket in the meter room.

Scary wiring is that the shack dwellers put up to get power, single wire, often phone cable or fence wire, no insulation, at between ankle and head hight, with earth return and fusing depending on what blows first.

The real problem with with most types of wires when used for lighting, is when it is heating for years in and behind the light fixture, isolation degrades, and it flashes over

A while back i have found a light fixture (2x4ft 36W preheat batten), looking brand new, complete with 2 lamps (one blackened on both ends) and starters discarded. I picked it up. After some examining i can tell what happened :

- The fixture was made with the wires touching thwe ballast cores, which is bad as it degrades the isolation from the heat

- The wires were of very bad quality, so the isolation degraded very quickly. (The ballasts are intact and dont show any sign of overheating so i think it was heating as in normal work and not as in stuck starter)

- The fixture was wired with earth connected to the metal, and ballasts on the neutral side. Since it is AC, it does not really matter unless there is a short to the enclosure

- Isolation on one of the wires broke down where it touched the ballast, and shorted to the ballast core

- This effectively shorted the ballast out of the circuit, leaving 2 filaments and starter across the mains

- Results : BANG, lamp blackened on both ends, starter with exploded glow bottle inside, scared owner threw it away