Thanks for the suggestion, but these need to be able to run on 120 volts.

Best wishes

If you can't find the wanted ballasts but you have 240v available, you can use plain modern 240v 50Hz Preheat ballasts which are 2 wire chokes. Theyll underpower the lamps a bit on 60Hz but not too bad

There were two 25 watt shop light bulbs among the ones in the lights. That's probably what caused the damage. I have those doing duty in a T12/T8 electronic strip light that is rated for them. I'm also running two of the cool white Lifelines in a '90s T12 fixture with a typical Advance rapid start ballast. The color is better than most new cool whites! I will hopefully be getting some preheat ballasts on eBay soon to get these old lights working like they're supposed to.

Wellcome to LG and that some neat fixtures

The ballasts are generally damaged by using wiht improper lamps as Funkybulb mentioned, or with lamps at end of life which cause continuous flashing, in turn damaging the starter, which then shorts out and blows the ballast

Well good luck with that one too. Sounds like an even better job anyway!

hello nick wellcome to Lighting Gallery

 those are nice Preheat fixture you got there, those Daylight lifelines are more rare then the Coow white ones
as the lamps are made from the very late 60s to the end of 1970s

 As far as ballast goes, there replacement ballast kicking around on Ebay and Restore
 the problem with Full power ballast is people dont know, and put in 34 watt lamps. The energy saving
 ballast roaster in them, thinkin that they save energy, ends up cooking the ballast becase
 the ballast is drawing more current then it should and cause them to overheat.
 Universal 205 is good ballast replacement, and every now then you will find GE tulamp ballast

  other than that it a great score

Hello everyone, I'm Nick. I found this site a few weeks ago and have really enjoyed exploring it! Lots of cool photos on here. Anyway, I went to my local ReStore yesterday (one of my favorite places) and scored three 3-lamp "Edwin F. Guth Co." preheat fluorescent fixtures for $20, which came with a few modern F40T12 lamps. I also paid $9 for nine Sylvania Lifeline F40T12 lamps, 6 cool white and 3 daylight. Anyway, I opened the fixtures as soon as I got them home and found that each contained a 2-lamp ballast and a 1-lamp ballast. The 1-lamp ballasts are all GE and all dead. There is one Advance 2-lamp that is perfectly intact and appears to be a replacement. The others are GE 2-lamp ballasts with tar oozing out. One of those works fine, and the other would only light one lamp. I removed all three 1-lamp ballasts and the malfunctioning 2-lamp. I installed a 3-lamp electronic ballast in the fixture with no good ballasts, and left the other two lights as 2-lampers. I am planning on getting some replacement preheat ballasts on eBay to restore all the fixtures to the original configuration. As far as the condition of the fixtures themselves, only two of the three glass diffusers are present and one is broken. Oh well, it was still a good deal.

Anyway, the reason I came here is to find any information on these fixtures, like time period (I'm guessing '50s), value, rarity, availability of parts, etc. I couldn't find anything on them via a Google search (besides the Guth company itself) so I decided to ask here.

Thanks in advance.

well they do use electronic ballasts(all that's available) at least they use sylvania ballasts and lamps and GE lamps. they seem to use full mercury extra life lamps, but dead/working lamps replaced are inventoried and recycled so i may not even be allowed to take working lamps, so yeah kinda a waste
i have been in those stores many times that they relamp, often times they replace lamps every other year, only a small percent of them will fail before being replaced, but i mean i might be able to get away with making ballasts last longer(using 4 lamp ballasts for less lamps) but i dunno yet, i start on Tuesday relamping some store

Thats neat ! Hopefully they are in the mind of "reliable lasting" in contrast to "green"

thanks guys, the thing is i got laid off from my job, they didn't have enough work for me, but the good news is i got hired on the spot by a lighting company called stay-lite, they do relamping/re-ballasting of any kind of light, mainly in walgreens and Kohls stores, they were glad to hire me because of my lighting knowledge