@Wingnut - Activity on LG has been in decline for at least 4 years.
Bulbman256 has gone off to college. Some members left due to harassment by others...most of those doing the harassing have left or were kicked off. 

That last bit makes the most sense. Thanks.
I had no clue that *that* is what made them so different from common HID lamps.

My goal is to have a color 628 HID lamp. I happened to find the CPO at a dutch web shop. I'll continue and see if i can find any similar lamps with low CRI but warm white color, but designed for the drivers i already have.
While 90something euro for a brand new Philips driver is a good price, it's just a bit too much for something i am unlikely to put in regular use.

And no, i'm not planning on overdriving it.

I am in a subtropical country so summers are really hot. You can't walk outside without some kind of cover over your head. Every place has a swamp cooler at least, and AC is very common. Max temp we get is 42°! But summer lasts only 2 months and then comes my favourite rain!

Good morning fellow lighting nerds! So, I was thinking about trying to install some tube holders and stuff in the ceiling in my shed so I Can finaly try out some of my 6 foot, 70W sylvania luxline plus 865's. I unfortunately do not have any fixtures for these tubes, and I highly doubt I will be able to find any because they appear to be really rare in terms of size here. But what I do have, are 3 ballasts intended for use in sign ligting or maybe for suntanning rooms. They have push on tube sockets that hold themselves onto the tubes, and you hold the tubes with some metal clips that you can screw onto any surface, so I was thinking about simply mounting two of them in the ceiling Two of these 6 foot tubes would fit just about perfectly inside my shed lenghtwise! I have 10 of them that I bought a long time ago , and still havent done more than tested on the bench. So I thought that could be fun. I only have 865 coloured ones right now, but I was thinking about purchasing some 840 ones from eBay. But there are not many available, and I do not *really* need them. so if any of you guys want to grab them I can let them slide I already have 10, afterall, and I suspect they will last a bloody long time. It would just have been nice to have 840 coloured ones, but I also really like 865 so hard decision!

But as I looked at these tubes and the gear I have for them I started wondering if these tube lenghts are really unusual, because I have never seen many of them, at least not where I live. and I have never seen many for sale on ebay or anywhere else for that matter, I just happened to see some for sale today. I havent decided if I will purchase them or not yet, I am a little worried about how the shipment will go because such long tubes are surely hard to deal with in shipping.

Just my random thoughts again,

So what is the point? Pretty anyone can run a lamp on a wrong ballast and flush this to youtube...


My guess is if CPO lamp is run on a standard electronic MH ballast of close wattage (50/100W) it will be overdriven by about 10-20%.

Specs are somewhat entangled for them. While for CPO lamp 91V*0.484A = 44W is almost exactly lamp design power, for 50W HPS/MH lamp 0.76A*85V=65W which is way higher. I guess this is because CPO is specced to work exclusively on squarewave e-ballast and power factor is close to one, regular HPS/MH lamps are originally specified to run on 50Hz choke at sinewave, so lamp power factor has to be accounted. 

It's the larger appliances that are even more fun. Major appliances from the 70s and 80s are basically indestructible and are built like tanks. For example nothing can compete with a Kenmore washer or dryer of this vintage. I had a Kenmore dishwasher go for 22 years before it finally quit and that was nightly use and in those 22 years it never once needed repairs but my brother and a retired appliance repairman got it running again. I love the powerful motors on old appliances nowadays they just spit water onto the clothes or dishes. Or the click and hum when the fridge compressor kicks on. As for electric clocks who knows how long the motors in those last especially if they are GE.

Agreed there. Our Kenmore fridge turns 45 this year and shows no signs of slowing down. The newest appliance in our kitchen is a 1993 KitchenAid dishwasher, made the year before Hobart spun the division off. Washer and dryer are a set of Kenmores from 1985 and they actually get the clothes clean. None of the appliances have electronics to fail, everything is simple to work on, and parts are cheap and abundant. Whenever something breaks I've gotten it going again in an afternoon, although I've had to be patient while waiting for the replacement part. Probably the hardest thing to fix was one of the roller shades in a bathroom window - the spring snapped, and finding a replacement rod was nearly impossible. I eventually lucked out and found a good one at an estate sale, but for the better part of a year the shade was stuck 3/4 of the way down...

Here is a user that runs a Philips Cosmowhite CPO-TT 90W Extra on a 100W HPS gear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lWFXWC63pQ

The longer days are my favourite part of summers here in Canada. Close to the summer solstice, it doesn't get dark until 9PM here. Meanwhile the darkest day here on the winter solstice, it get dark at around 4:30PM.

The heat and humidity can be pretty hard to tolerate, but most people have AC here which helps a lot. And I much rather prefer heat compared to -20C days in the winter, or shoveling snow.

I do believe that consumers would pay a premium for incandescents up to a point, though. If someone had one or two lamps they specifically wanted to use incandescents in, for example, they would probably justify paying $5 or more for a high quality bulb. While expensive, it would be roughly an annual expenditure and not enough to impact most people's budgets.

Specialty stores here are still coasting on the old stock incandescents. You can literally walk to the specialty stores in Amsterdam or Den Haag and walk out with an entire backpack full of standard incandescents.
But clearly, people aren't really doing that a whole lot becuase the stocks still haven't depleted and we're more than 10 years after the ban of import and production of incandescents in the netherlands.

Alternatively, all thrift shops have bins full of both new and used lamps of all types. I sometimes see people dig up incandescents. Apparently those people really want them, but also they will just keep buying them there for €0,50 to €1 for as long as people keep bringing in NOS incandescents to the thrift shop. As for their motives - i have no clue if they really specifically look for incandescent light, or that they are completely ignorant about the differences and just buy them out of habit, or whether they need them for dim bulb limiters like i do.

It will take another decade or so (hell, maybe even more) to actually deplete existing stock, so only then super expensive new production won't face the competition from cheap, sunk cost/written off old stock.

Any peron caring about light quality today will likely sooner buy a 94 CRI led (the Ledvance thing i have is definitely good) than deal with the fact that modern fixtures are usually not designed for more than 25w of thermal energy, conciously buy older fixtures that still have heat resistant sockets etc.

Maybe in 50 years time, when stocks have properly dropped to the level of individual NOS lamps' prices rising to 50 euro a piece, that it will be possible to restart a small scale production system, like they're currently doing with bright emitter vacuum tubes: https://brimaruk.com/product/ediswan-type-r/ or like Dalimar is doing with brand new Nixie tubes.
But it will be a considerable amount of manual labor, and you'll be looking at cost closer to 50 euro than 5 euro per lamp.

Getting an automated production line up and running will be at least 2 million euro just to fix everything in the production line (just getting 'stiff' mechanisms, iffy limit switches and old computer control systems working again) and re-line the glass furnaces and stuff. Double or triple that if you have to strip out the tons of asbestos from legacy production facilities. Philips' glass furnaces are still around and have not been demolished yet. It wouldn't surprise me if that's becasue the furnaces are absolutely filled with asbestos and they're hoping the company's remains switch owners often enough for the national government to lose track and the cost for cleaning up the mess just goes to the tax payer...

More likely is that this will just happen in China, though even China doesn't seem to be bothered with producing incandescent lamps anymore. India maybe?

@phosco179 Don't come to Australia then! In summer, I have to walk home in ~38° weather! Going outside in spring usually involves a swarm of mosquitos. With that said, I do love living here and certainly prefer hot whether to the below 0 whether we have now!