@Multisubject Thats awesome!! I’d love to see yours. And I’ll try to get some good photos of my contraption too! And yeah haha I think it must be quite bad for the insulation. But so far my ground fault circuit interrupter hasn’t tripped or anything, so I’m calling this a 101% success lol!
I’m not the best at igniter terminology, but I’m using the kind of igniter that you connect in series with the output from the ballast. So in my case, the circuit is the same as what would be used to power a HPS lamp, but with a fluorescent tube instead. I’m only using one wire per tube socket, one pin per end of the tubes. and the reflector of the fixture acts as a ground plane for easier striking. Without it mounted the tubes will not ignite at all!
Being able to get some extra useful life out of these severely damaged tubes is the only reason I did this, at first it was only an experiment to see if it would even be possible and yes it is! So the plan now is to tidy up the wiring a little, and then I’ll just put a power cord on the fixture and hang it up temporarily so I can run it some. I’m extremely curious to see how long these severely damaged tubes will work! Once these damaged tubes finally die completely one day from the emissive material completely dissapearing, I will return the fixture to its original wiring layout, lead lag. So no permanent changes have been done, I’ve just added some wires, cut some wires, and rewired. It can all be re-done to the original state one day
My ballasts are cheap and readily available ones so if they get damaged from this I won’t become too upset, but their insulation is probably pretty good!
I’m also going to mark the fixture very clearly with labels all over saying that it is modified and to NOT put fresh tubes into it, I imagine that this is not at all good for actually healthy tubes! Just in case someone else ends up with this fixture for whatever reason, hehe.
