I know you fans love MV, so do I.   I like the greenish hue and the soft coloring non-glare of a coated lamp....but it is true there are more effiecent lamps than MV. We need to accept they are banned and not to dwell on this "ban".

And let me get this all clear.....they did not ban probe start MHs to prevent use of MV lamps. If that was really the case, they would ban everything to make possible of powering MVs....cuz there's many ways to power them.

Probe Start MH ballast are banned cuz there are more effiecent way to USE and POWER MH lamps which is totally true.

Here's surprising thing...Dark Sky isn't the group who had banned the MV, although they used it as a weakness to ban, but they never did ban it in USA, they only requested ban ONLY in Arizona. So no more blaming Dark Sky...they are correct about pollution problem, its just I think they can do it better and do a better job.

All we can now do is just support more use of white lite and less orange light. And makle sure lighting choices can be as flexible as possible......the Ban of incandescent bulbs and ONLY use LEDs are more ridiculious!

Now I want to make this clear everyone. Understood?

Thanks members

-Jace

Jace, I agree with you one hundred percent.  Those of us who love vintage lighting sources are collectors...and if MV wasn't a vintage lighting source, would we really care about collecting them?  I love MV, as much as I love collecting other memories from the past.  If anything, we will have a more valuable collection because of this ban.

Let's keep mercury lights within our hobby. The real purpose of the ballast ban is to phase out mercury lighting althogether, so we should preserve as much as we can. They're fine for nostalgia.

i agree with you jace...mercury vapor is the past..and metal halide is the future.

I do not agree with any ban, unless the subject poses significant hazard and/or harm for others, what was the case for beryllium fluorescent phosphor, upwards shinning lanterns (what should be banned - the new outdoor installation), but not at all for high pressure mercury or incandescent.

MV and incandescent are not efficient as light sources, so a pressure to phase them out, where the replacement exist, is necessary (as the energy cost itself is not strong enough motivator). But there are applications, where they are not replaceable (e.g. a lava lamp will not work without the heat from the "inefficient" lamp), but these applications are so rare, then the total energy consumption is negligible.

So i see as much better approach to use something like "inefficiency tax". This could make these low efficacy technologies too expensive to use in general lighting service, but still available for applications really technically needing them. As i assume such applications are very special, so expensive anyway, such tax would not harm them.
And who would insist on these technologies, he should pay.

Such tax would then make "incandescent" fixtures expensive, so the use of inefficient and short lived self-ballasted CFL's would be limited to retrofit existing installations (still a bit better then incandescent for most cases), but the development effort would be redirected from these bastards (with so competing requirements) into generally more efficient lighting systems, where is room much larger energy saving...

I agree entirely. It's hard for me to tell my opinion about the ban because I didn't really live in the mercury era 

Also I agree with the fact that Dark Sky have good intentions, the light pollution is a huge problem and we MUST solve it. They have good and less good points. Reducing the wattage is probably their best point, but using HPS everywhere isn't necessarily as HPS can't be used in all applications.

So DSA is well intentioned but isn't perfect (nobody is perfect anyway...).