I am so sorry to hear about your situation, I understand the space issue though. You've got our love and support, and I hope your parents continue to support you too despite of their seperation.

Do not downsize too much, keep your most loved fixtures and lamps, otherwise you will likely end up regretting downsizing later on. Keeping a good variety is important, but you can give away duplicates if you feel you have too many of a certain fixture or lamp.

I would super gladly give something from your collection a loving home in my collection, of course, with the possibility of you getting it back in the future if you feel like you want that specific item back. I wouldn't want you to feel regret. The long distance might make things difficult and expensive though, but there is most definetely a possibility I'll of course pay for the shipping completely, you shouldn't need to worry about anything. Especially not in a situation like yours where things are already stressful enough as they are.

My best wishes goes out to you, may your collection be safe, and may the divorce go well, as well as something like that can go. <3

Well, today I saved what I thought was a lovely old philips 3-tube fluorescent shop light from being thrown away in the metal scrap bin. quite an old one, from about 1958 if I understand date codes correctly! Quite frankly, I should probably have left it there, because the reflector was missing, and it also had a much more serious issue which I did not think about checking! I looked in the other scrap bins for the reflector for it but to no avail, so it likely was missing for a long time. Either way, looking the fixture over, all looked great aside from the missing reflector, so I thought to myself, I'll just make a new reflector myself. There are plenty of those fixtures still installed in other parts of the building still in service to this day so I went there and got some measurements of a reflector on a working fixture, and felt amazing and looked forward to fixing up mine when I got home. So back home after work, I quickly measured the ballasts with a multimeter, sure, the ohm readings seemed a bit low, but old ballasts usually have thicker copper wire inside them, so I did not think much about it. I connected up my test power cord, plugged it in, and pop goes the circuit breaker aswell as the RCD. okay, that old PFC capacitor is probably bad, so I disconnected it... still pops the breaker. Okay, hmm. Checking all the ballasts to ground, dead short. I trace it to the middle tube ballast, and disconnect it and isolate the wires safely, then plug back in. yay! the breaker does not pop, and there is no ground fault. The capacitor also does it's job, now showing a leading power factor on my electricity meter! Great! I pop in some starters into the two slots that should still work, plop in my test tubes, apply power and - BRRRRRRRR GRRRRRRRRRRR ARRRCCCCC! My test tubes EXPLODE. Well, they do not physically shatter and throw glass pieces everywhere, but they got ruined INSTANTLY. And the breaker popped. Impressive to pop a 10 amp breaker with just a fluorescent tube! Both test tubes, completely ruined, both cathodes melted, the evacuation stem even popped in one! Damnit!

all 3 ballasts, are SHOT. Dead. Not what I was expecting, because usuallly those really old ballasts are ultra reliable, and super rarely fail. But in this case, the fixture must have been exposed to overvoltage at some stage, or something. All 3 ballasts being shorted, and one being shorted aswell as having a ground fault, does not happen often. If one ballast had been bad and 2 good, I would have not thought much of it. But this is certainly unusual.

So.... I think to myself, What should I do. I don't really want to put the fixture back in the scrap bin, because the tube sockets and other parts in it are truly amazing. They are ceramic, and simply cannot go bad from UV damage. even the starter sockets are ceramic, and the connector blocks too! And being a simple shop light, making a reflector does not seem like a huge deal, and should not take me more than a couple hours to do in my workshop anyways, it is not a huge deal to get it back in shape at all. it is just basic metalworking, I won't be able to make it in one piece because I simply do not have a big enough sheet of aluminium, but, I was able to make it in 3 pieces, so I cut out 3 pieces to match the fixture's reflector area lenght. So... before going too crazy, I install 3 new old stock Helvar L40A ballasts. The legendary beasts that almost never die no matter what you do. Plop in 3 new test tubes, turn on the power, and it lights up absolutely beautifully. even the old and probably PCB filled capacitor is working properly, keeping the power factor at a super healthy 0.9 with cold tubes. Seeing the 3 test tubes blink to life happily on the new ballasts put a lot of joy into my heart, even though the fixture is incomplete, and now does not have the same vintage soul to it anymore.

At this point, I might aswell go all in. I'll mount those new ballasts properly and spend a few more hours making the reflector as perfect as possible, then I'll still have a really nice 3-tube shoplight that will perform just as well as it would have done originally, if not better.

it still feels a little wrong to pour this much effort into a fixture in this state, but... a light fixture made with this quality will never be made again. And with those ballasts I installed... I bet it will work for another 70 years with ease.


I'll upload some pictures of this project to my gallery later if anyone is interested

 I make it easy.  Just use  36/40 watt choke and a sox ignitor.  I can also put S10 starter in parallel with the lamp .
 Thing is it going take a muliple restriking until the tubes starts.  Meaning this there no way to heat the cathodes.
 These lamp ment for high voltage strikeing.  The same way  how SOX lamps works. So  a  switch start choke and sox ignitor  is  your best way to go.

 

All three of the lamps are the same orange-red when on power, but with a tesla coil, I could see that one is a deep neon red color, one is a slightly more pinkish color, and one is almost white.
Why is this so? My guess is that the concentration of neon is less. But what is the weird white color gas? It isn't purplish like argon. (irl the color is much more like a daylight fluorescent, slightly bluish. But not the color of argon I remember from starters.)

F18T8s were sold as $2 per tube in shops near me, but now the stocks are over. It is best to find them from office spaces that recently changed out their lighting to led. I found a dozen 18w tubes in the trash from an office building, all were slightly used but working.

Just a shame. However, the lithium that originates from the quartz isn't LiI. No?

I've seen GE Lucalox LU250/XO/T/40 burning reddish color and eventually cycling bluish mercury without reaching the final color. The cycles lasted 7:30 mins: https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-245755
@dchen4: I remember seeing at Haifa HPS lanterns that burning mercury discharge. I don't think they were Osram NAV-T Super 4Y, as these usually retains their color until EOL, and usually rarely cycles.

imo neutral is more commercial-ish or industrial, back when fluorescent tubes were being sold in my country no "regular" retailer had neutral tubes available, it was either warm or daylight, I had to look for a wholesaler of commercial and industrial lighting, and got a 3x cases of each size we use, all T12 as they last longer, it's only for the kitchen, laundry room and basement, so the CRI isn't that important.

Interesting, I doubt they'd be suitable but I'd have to see them.

Unfortunately, fluorescent lamps of any type are rarely sold that cheap these days. Your best bet is to look for them on sale or at thrift stores.