Talk:Overdriven fluorescent light

VfD
On April 12, 2005, this article was nominated for deletion. The result was keep and cleanup. See Votes for deletion/Overdriven fluorescent light for a record of the discussion. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 12:24, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Expertise needed
This article needs someone that understands the technical/electronic aspects properly. I dont have time to sort it now, and suspect it would get reverted by someone relying on information from inexpert sources.

"Only electronic ballasts can be used for this; magnetic ballasts will self-destruct."

This is not correct. I heavily overdrove a twin 5' fitting using mag ballasts. Resistors were added across the filaments to prevent them overheating.

Any mag ballast expects certain conditions to remain within its safe operating limits, and if you change those you may need to tweak the circuit to keep both tube and ballast happy. It is certainly possible to destroy tubes and ballasts by ill-designed overdriving, but that is not because the ballasts are magnetic, it is because someone failed to design the system to work correctly.

Electronic ballasts have some degree of self regulation and selfprotecting action, so less deliberate design is needed to (mis)use them.

"Each electronic ballast normally drives either two or four tubes. The ballasts are wired with their outputs in parallel such that a normal two-tube ballast drives a single tube; a four-tube ballast drives either one or two tubes."

Thats just one possible way to do it, and I doubt one any electronic engineer would recommend. This type of operation is a no-no for anyone but hobbyists as it creates multiple problems that lead to high failure rate and fire risk.

"The reason that this only works with electronic ballasts is that they use current mode programmed control to limit their output based on legislation for energy efficiency passed in 1992 in the United States."

The way an electronic ballast works is not a reason to not use magnetic ballasts. Also US legislation has little to do with ballast use in the other 95% of the world.

This article needs someone that understands the technical/electronic aspects properly, and is willing to search for basic electronic expertise offsite to use for references. Tabby (talk) 07:48, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Rewritten :( No extra refs yet. Tabby (talk) 11:03, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I've removed the how-to tone of the article. This needs more references - preferably published in a book, not blogs and web sites. I don't think Wikipedia generally gives hotrodding advice anywhere else. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:51, 31 October 2009 (UTC)