Hello everyone.  I am just curious if any members on here may have made the same mistake that I did.  What I am meaning is, when the electonic HF ballasts came out, I thought that they were the hot stuff and soo much better, I pretty much ditched a lot of my magnetic ballasts and converted all my fixtures I had at the time to electronic ballasts.  In a few years, I really started to regret every ditching my magnetics since I was losing electronic ballasts faster than I was the lamps.  I was just wondering if anyone here in the gallery may have made the same mistake that I did. 

Rest assured, I will never fall for that scheme again, which is why I am grabbing all the old stuff that I can find before it starts to get scarce!  There is nothing like the hum, and the fun of watching magnetic ballasts starting up fluorescent lamps!

I did basically the same thing. I explained it in this post. The thing is, electronics are marketed as a great energy saving product, but I just don't see the savings when you're replacing it every five years.

Public institutions and offices in Israel, do this mistake on purpose and converts magnetic T8 to electronic T5 or LED and HID to LED/T5/induction/energy saving compact fluorescent lamps, and don't regretted at all, when their electronic ballasts/driver fails within a short time later. Up to 90% from all failures of CFLs and LED lamps in Israel today, are ballast electronics, rather than the regular electrodes deplated emitter, since they are operated on fixtures that aren't designed for use with self ballasted CFLs.

I ripped out the advance ballast that only glowed lamps at the electrodes (poor grounding) and I destroyed the ballast. I replaced it with a 2x f32t8 ballast. Never again.

This one isn't too bad, but several years ago, before I really got back into lighting, we were cleaning out the garage and I threw out a perfectly good Universal/MagneTek 14-15-20 trigger start magnetic ballast because I had no use for it. In my defense, I haven't had a use for it since then. Also, I remember my late grandfather and me cleaning out his garage one day, and we threw away two 1970s shoplights (possibly Sears/Harmony House) that worked fine but were rusty and the paint was peeling off. They likely had full power HPF ballasts but it was a long time ago and I don't remember. I just remember that they ran the lamps nice and bright.

Were they preheat shop lights or rapid start?

Rapid start, fortunately.

Good, but not good. At least it wasn't preheat. Those are harder to come by.