Well said!

Yeah, heaps of companies just silently ceased operations, perhaps @LightsoftheWest will know?

Quite possibly. It is rather annoying that we are in the age of information yet some information regarding things that have happened recently is hard to find.

Yeah, heaps of companies just silently ceased operations, perhaps @LightsoftheWest will know?

I'm sorry to hear that, that sounds like classic postal services, breaking/loosing stuff and not taking responsibility.

You may have seen a picture of a QL Design 114-24B in my gallery. If not, see it here: https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=8815&pos=32&pid=255280
After some searches on the topic, I could not find any relevant information on what happened to the brand, despite countless brochures for their various fixtures being available on Scribd. So, what happened to the brand?

Unfortunately, the tubes never made it here so I’ve put this project on the back burner for a while. I’ll try to find some other cool vintage tubes to use for the DIY light fixture, but right now I sort of lost motivation when the tubes didn’t make it. The postal service managed to screw up really bad and somehow they got stopped at one of their terminals and sent to a wrong address and it just became a huge mess. I don’t even know if the seller got them returned, I doubt it because I haven’t got a refund I’m very much at a loss and I don’t know what to do to correct this, the postal service is not being helpful whatsoever in resolving the lost package.

It may survive up to originally intended lifetime, assuming most of oxide coating is left intact. Broken electrode of course will always cold start, so it will die prematurely if the tube is on short on-off cycles.

Additional data point: my 18w SOX draws 29w at 240v using the same watt meter.
With a TRMS multimeter (different one than the conventional one at work!) the current is 154mA, indicating 37VA.
The efficiency of the SOX 18 is, in other words, quite bad. As far as i know this SOX fixture i have (The Philips Combi Pack thingie, forgot the model number) has a series choke style ballast.

I was doing some silly experiments today with fluorescent tubes, I was playing around with mercury migration on DC using some high hour tubes. Long story short, I had fun and learned a few things, but accidentally fed about 100 watts through a 36W tube, which means that one of the cathodes didn’t enjoy it and blew up quite spectacularly. So I did an old school trick, using some very thin wire and shorted the two pins on the end that blew. This allows the fluorescent fixtures to heat the still working cathode heater, and to my great amazement, the tube strikes and lights up normally with a fresh starter. It’s been running for a few hours now and is not showing any signs of problems.

The tubes I experimented with are 4 old and well used General Electric PolyLux XLr’s, the much newer ones with reduced mercury that don’t like cold weather too much.  The 3 others survived my experiments, but probably have very reduced lifespan now. And well, the 4th with a blown kathode also technically survived since it still works, but I’d say that it’s on life support right now heh. All tubes got fairly dark ends, but I learned a few things so I don’t feel sad about it. These tubes were already well used and I’ve got so incredibly many new ones, those ones I am not touching! These were worn!

I also experimented with a new osram tube, which survived without damage, a very new and sadly very low quality one that had a rattling cathode inside. It got very dark ends but survived just fine. I have a few more of those tubes without cathode issues, which of course I’m not going to do stupid experiments with!

Here is a picture of the tube with blown kathode, it works, and you can very much see a large fragment of the kathode heater laying in the bottom of the tube there!

I’m going to run these tubes for a while, and I’ll keep you all updated on  how they fare. Especially the blown one.

@RRK, @James?