Awwwwwweeeee that is such a shame, I’m so sorry to hear that ((( hopefully you get a chance of finding some that work soon enough!

 It's not a problem . I pretty much figured the lamps were junk as soon as I layed eyes on the fixtures . Besides , I have TONS of 400w MV lamps anyways !

 Today's project is replacing the current GU24 socket in my Panasonic bathroom fan with a "normal" porcelain E-26 version . Now I can run whatever type of lamp I want ! There's nothing I hate more than all of this damned proprietary lamp crap which forces the consumer to use one specific lamp !!  

Osram 36W 25 in my living room went eol today. Replaced it with well used Osram 36W 20 from my non-collectable bin.

I'm so sorry to hear that your colour 25 osram went EOL today Those are beautiful tubes! Also yay for liking cool-white light in your living space, that is rare. And I like cool white in my living space too! I have a medium-hour colour 20 osram 36W somewhere too, I like it!

I currently have two colour 25 osram 15 watters in use in my newly installed uplight lighting setup which I installed today in my bedroom/computer room, consisting of two Rittal electrical cabinet lights, with some very unique ballasts with built in starters called Perfektstart 2000! I have them on remote-control switches too, so that I can turn them on easily. I may swap the tubes for some colour 827 warm white ones, but at the same time, I like how the colour 25 cool white tubes look in this setup, it makes the roof feel like a sky, and my little warm white CFL on the wall sort of feels like a little sun. It is kind of neat and I like it! I also admittedly enjoy the slightly worse colour rendering of the 25 tubes, I believe those are the same as colour 740.

The new uplights are shining happily as I am writing this

This lamp was in dual lamp fixture where each ballast have been connected to separate switch. The other side has 3500K lamp which allows me to control little the ambient by selecting which color lamp to use (or both if much light is needed).

On todays episode of my bank account cowering before me in fear, I bought my first cobra-head street light earlier today. I ended up buying one of those ITT model 25's that's been on eBay for a while. Now I pray it survives shipping..? Maybe? 

From the guy in California?

I hope it survives the shipping! I also did an impulse purchase of some interesting fluorescent tubes, which I hope will survive shipping too! More TLX tubes, I love them because of how easy they are to use. I still need to work on my homemamde tube sockets for them

From the guy in California?

Like a few others here, yes

I bought a light from that guy, and yes, shipping was stupid expensive from CA to NC.

I'm sure I'll be happy with it, my bank account's still crying from the shipping, but it does make sense going from California all the way here to Michigan.

Today, I did an interesting experiment after work. I took one of my cheap and not very valuable fluorescent fixtures and I modified it. I installed a high pressure sodium igniter into it, with the goal being to try to strike up fluorescent tubes that have been damaged by shorted ballasts. It cannot ignite EOL tubes, this will only work for tubes that have had heater failure due to one reason or another. I recently killed two perfectly good osram 31-830 tubes by trying an unknown fixture that had shorted ballasts, which caused not just one but both of their cathode heaters to go open circuit. On both tubes.

It hecking worked. I plopped in the first of the two damaged tubes, and it strook up absolutely beautifully, cold cathode start of course thanks to the high voltage from the HPS igniter. It’s of course not good to cold start a fluorescent tube, but, the tube is already junk in this case, so getting extra useful life from it is a bonus! I ran it for over an hour before I decided to try the second blown tube, that one appears to have been damaged slightly harder than the other one. It lights up, but only dimly and flickers at half the mains frequency (25hz), and never manages to properly ignite not even after a long time. I also noticed a red glow inside on one end, so that tube most likely got the cathode structure entirely blown apart. While the first tube I tried , got both its heaters blown open, but the cathode structures themselves survived.

Then I remembered that I have another tube that has only one heater blown, I tried it and it also strikes up beautifully!

Very interesting experiment, and if I avoid restarting the lamp a lot, those tubes can probably continue working for quite a while since the cathodes get heated from the emission once the tube has lit. But startups will eat away the remaining cathodes quite fast.



So yeah! A fun experimental evening for me today! I needed it, it was a lot of fun.

@tigerelectronics – Sounds like a fun experiment!! 

He's a good guy, even if something breaks, he should be able to find a solution.