General update and explanation of ballast factor

Back to school again. First "official" lighting project in the works to upgrade some lighting in a private horse barn. I prioritized efficiency and am going to retrofit a F28T5 strip light to take a F54T5 HO bulb.

Also, investigating the weakness of Fulham workhorse ballasts. They do not have very high ballast factors for many of the lamps they are supposedly compatible with. That's only half the problem. The spec sheets don't list the specs for most of the possible lamp combinations. I found out that my workhorse 2 underdrives my 18W SOX lamp as well, but interestingly enough, it also underdrives a 18W twin tube CFL by nearly the same amount, too. I did test to find that the workhorse 5 ballast runs the 55W SOX lamp very close to its nominal power, perhaps slightly underdriven, but it still works great. I wish Fulham would have the courtesy of being upfront about the specs of their products for configurations they are advertised to work with. Planning a modern lighting installation where maximum output while maintaining rated lifeof a given lamp is important becomes very difficult when your ballast could underdrive the lamp as low as 40% or overdirve as high as 20% and you have no way to know except than to test it yourself!!!

I also say that a lamp that's run with a ballast factor of 0.64 is not a compatible lamp for that running gear and shouldn't be advertised as such.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ballast
• factor
• fluorescent
• instant
• start
• compact
• efficient
• SOX
• low
• pressure
• sodium
• 18W
• 55W
• light
• bulb
• lamp
• fulham
• workhorse

[davyd05]

I learned so much, it's not funny. Thanks for posting this as it cleared up some question about ballast/lamp configs on that workhorse5