So I am under no delusions that this would not DRASTICALLY shorten lamp life. However I am curious how far warm up times could be reduced on a standard E26 or E39/40 based sodium lamp. hearkening back to my previous brainstorming on making a (pretty impractical) sodium flashlight. Ideally for such application you would want a xenon headlamp type warmup speed... Say we got the lamp rapidly up to 50% or 60% of it's brightness in about 3 seconds or so (arbitrary numbers obviously) with some REALLY harsh high voltage ignition pulses and current dumping into the arc tube... how short of a lifespan will we get? 1000 hours? 500 hours? 10 hours? 1 second
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I assume eventually there would be a pretty violent failure at some point. but I have a rather large amount of 250 watt and 400 watt ecolux lamps that I would not really shed a tear for if they exploded in the name of science.... obviously for a flashlight a 35-100 watt lamp would probably be more practical though. Obviously the lamps would get run at their rated wattage after their initial "Forced awakening". Has destructive testing like this already been performed
@James ? I can't imagine it hasn't but I am having trouble finding it if it is even publicly available....
I have a few old schematics saved from websites for DC operated HID lighting (one primarily aimed for ocean fishing use). I will have to find them at some point in the near future... but I am sure they could serve as the concrete foundation for this mad scientist abuse of innocent lamps....
In the past I definitely have been known to feed EOL 175 watt Halide lamps to my 1000 watt ballast.... In the name of pyromania mostly.
