Good evening, fellow lighting nerds
I was sitting around a little earlier today, thinking about things as I usually do. As an industrial electrician, I tend to think a lot about how different scenarios affect fluorescent lamps, since they are obviously a huge interest of mine. Something came to my mind, regarding how much input voltage to a magnetically ballasted fixture actually affects the current aswell as the total power going out from the ballasts and into the tubes. In my off grid shed, where I have my fluorescent lights, I run everything from solar power and my battery bank, so entirely free energy
The beauty of this, is that I have a fully configurable victron power inverter to run it all. One thing I have done deliberetly, is turned down the output voltage from 230 volts to 220, because I noticed the ballasts in my fixtures run much much cooler at 220 volts. I have a power meter connected to everything, and the total power draw drops from around 270 watts to 230 watts total (3x glamox Gun-236KL fixtures, 2x36W each. I am running 36W T8 tubes in each fixture for now) It is quite a massive difference with just a few percent decrease in voltage. I have also tried them at 240 volts, which is the upper end of the spectrum, and at 240 volts, the ballasts get burning hot. I have also noticed that the tubes are noticeably brighter at 240 vs 220 volts. if you change the voltage live via the app like you can do, it is actually quite a difference in terms of brightness. So this sparked a question of mine, how much does elevated input voltage affect tube life? Plus, is it posssible to extend tube life by simply running the fixtures at a lower voltage? Now,, I have plenty of tubes. So this is not an issue for me, but... I am just curious, as usual. I was thinking about running some current measurements and voltage measurements on the output of the ballasts, I just need to figure out why my clamp meter is not behaving well and showing random values when I try to clamp the output wires going to the tubes from the ballasts. I think I need to do this with a spare fixture which I dont mind cutting the wires inside, and hooking a proper meter in series instead because the clamp will probably not be accurate enough anyways.
The lights in question are 36W T8, or 40W for T12 (the current is the same, but the tubes drop different voltages so therefore T12 bulb gets slightly more wattage than a T8 bulb.)
If there is enough interest for this, I might make a youtube video for my little channel, where we do some actual tests!
This is mostly meant as a ramble of my thoughts, so apologies if what I wrote seems a little messy
