| 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.
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