This summer I was driving by a skiing area near my parents that is normally lit by huge 2000 W MH lamps. I happened to see that they were changing some of them to LEDs. I took to opportunity to write to them explaining that I am a lamp collector and that I would be happy to receive a lamp and ballast if they throw something away. It worked, and some weeks ago my father was picked up some stuff for me from them.

I have now acquired a 2000 W Philips HPL ballast, a 2000 W HPI-T metal halide lamp (which looks new) and a huge luminaire to put the lamp in. I posted pictures of everything in the gallery . However, what I am missing is an ignitor (and power factor correction, but that's not important). The lamp is a quartz metal halide without starting probe. The problem is that I do not have any 400 V ignitor available. I have a 230 V parallel ignitor and a bunch of 230 V superimposed ignitors for much lower wattages (up to 400 W). I did not try any of these to avoid frying them.

I have already tried just connecting the lamp without any ignitor, but this has no effect. I have also tried putting a switch in series with a 100 W incandescent lamp after the ballast, and turning the lamp on and off to try to ignite the lamp using the inductive spikes from the ballast, but this also has no effect. I don't want to try without the incandescent lamp as current limiter, since the short-circuit current of the ballast is probably over 20 A).

Does anyone have any ideas on how to ignite the lamp? I have tried looking for the appropriate ignitor, but I did not find any for a price that I currently would like to pay (and shipping to here would take long).

Have you tried to contact Philips Lighting for an ignitor to go with your ballast and lamp?What is the ANSI code of this light-If you have that you may be able to look up a proper ignitor.

What is the ANSI code of this light-If you have that you may be able to look up a proper ignitor.

This is irrelevant as he isn't from the United States, and his fixture, lamp and gear are all european.

@f36t8: Try use a plasma globe. Lamps with tubular outer, usually allows the plasma globe to reach close enough to the arctube to ionise the gas inside, in contrast to elliptical outer which don't allow.

Oh-sorry didn't notice he wasn't in the US.I would think a Philips Lighting in his area could help-at least worth a try.

According to some search tool on Philips' website, the SI 54 parallel ignitor should work. I am a bit skeptical about this since it is a 1.5 kV parallel ignitor and this is lamps does not have a starting probe. Additionally, I would be concerned about stressing the insulation on this old ballast which was only designed for MV lamps without an ignitor. I concluded a better choice would be the Z2000 5 kV superimposed ignitor from Vossloh Schwabe (400 V system, up to 12 A lamp current), which seems to be available for 50 €, which is a price I am considering buying one at. (The lamp's datasheet says up to 5 kV is ok for starting).

@dor123: The plasma globe is a good suggestion, unfortunately I don't own one.

Maybe I will try using a car ignition coil with some wires wrapped around the lamp.

1.5KV should be enough to start this lamp, since it have a neon-argon penning which reduces the ignition voltage of the Philips HPI-T lamps.

I think avoiding a pulse across old ballast islation materials is correct thought. Im too for the Z2000 choice becaue of this

Maybe you could ignite the lamp using a BBQ ignitor.

You need a 380/400 volt Ignitor,  this will be OK see HERE.

That's significantly cheaper than the other alternatives I found, thanks for that link. I will get one.

I just tried it with the 3.5-5 kV superimposed ignitor ELT AVS-2000/380 (datasheet see http://www.elt.es/productos/pdf/406000000.pdf?20170518) and something sad happened: one second after applying power, there was a flashover inside the lamp near the base, causing an arc between the input leads, resulting in much heat cracking the outer envelope of the bulb as well as filling it up with smoke. (The arctube seems still fine, and was flashing like normal for ignition before the flashover happend).

The bulb is now pretty useless, but I might try tomorrow with the naked arctube again though. I am really confused as to why it happend, since the lamp itself is specified for ignition voltages up to 5 kV (see datasheet http://download.p4c.philips.com/lfb/5/5dd16b64-7ca0-4689-b31e-a56b013f1935/5dd16b64-7ca0-4689-b31e-a56b013f1935_pss_en_aa_001.pdf). (It does not have a starting probe, and it did absolutely nothing when I tried to start it just using the 400 V OCV from mains or manually made starting pulses by partially shorting the ballast with incandescent bulbs).

Any idea what happend?

Moisture or foreign object (a bug ?) happened to get inside the cap

Or the lamp was damaged...