Have you been to any other Lowe's stores if they're doing the same thing? I might check them out soon if this is happening to other Lowe's stores and pick up a few modern HIDs that I might not have yet or as possible spares. I was at one recently and didn't see any HIDs on clearance.

Just a side note about their life expectancy when in used dusk to dawn mode in street lights. We have 5 heritage lanterns with SDW-T 50W lamps still in use. The first failed lamp we notice after 3 years. We always replace all lamps together after the first has failed. As the lanterns are situated along the river they are cleaned thoroughly. Some ballasts and controllers are still original from 1987/88 with brown resin potted inductor and large electronic controller. The newer ones are the grey painted chokes and smaller potted controller.

I noticed lately that all the remaining HID (MH and HPS) and fluorescent (tubes, CFL, circline and PL) at Lowe’s have been on clearance. I grabbed a circline for my bedroom fixture and a 70 W Lucalox HPS for my NEMA last time. Decided to go again tonight and they were gone. Looked around and everything had been moved to a tall movable cart in another aisle, so grabbed a few more.

My guess they’ll be donating what’s left soon and it’ll all wind up at Habitat. I guess this is it for that selection at Lowe’s.

High wattage incandescents still remain. Oddly some LED circline retrofits on clearance cart as well.

Ooh, heard those are pretty much non-existent nowadays.

Those are GE M-2s that used those odd NA-9 LPS lamps.

"2 WDG. XFRMR" may stand for a huge range of ballasts from PerfektStart to CWA... This really does not define what your ballast is

Depending on how you paint it, do what's needed to prevent paint or solvent from getting to the terminal bushings or flowing into the capacitor

This screenshot shows my city, Saint George, Utah in the 1950s. You can see some top mount LPS looking fixtures in the foreground and some Form 109 fixtures in the background. Who makes those top mount fixtures?

Good to know. the ballast type in mine is one of those 2 WDG. XFRMR ballasts. I asked if these can be painted cause I want to make it look a bit like either a matte grey or light red capacitor that were used in street lights of the era.

The resistor is not essential for the capacitor operation, but depending on the circuit where the capacitor is used, it may provide wanted features :

 - Discharge the capacitor to prevent a shock if you touch its terminals later

 - Prevent a situation where a charged capacitor is reconnected to line voltage in reverse polarity (it is random, depending n the moment when you connected it), which will make 2x the inrush current and 2x the arcing respectively

 - Prevent a situation where such inrush current is going through a lamp (in CWA and similar circuits)

So long as the resistor is at its nominal value, it is ok for now. (There have been cases where those resistors eventually burn out)

Prevent the paint and solvents from entering into the capacitor. In metal can capacitors this mean the terminal bushings. In plastic capacitors this means all case openings, like all around the cap, along the wires etc

Of course inverter AC is more efficient than fixed speed compressor units.
Once the room is cooled to the desired temperature the compressor just runs slowly to maintain the temperature instead of running at full speed on and off every few minutes.
This really is pretty basic stuff and should be obvious.
Think of driving a car: you don't keep flooring the accelerator and then suddenly let right off only to repeat this sequence a few seconds later to maintain roughly the same speed. If you imagine the poor fuel comsumption this would give then this corresponds to the similar reduced efficiency of fixed speed AC units in most situations.