Light flickering problems

[Al B. Fuct]

Jimbo, if you have recurring problems with power dropouts which cause the lamp to restart while hot, this may happen again. Hotstarting an HPS light can indeed cause the ignitor or (more commonly) the lamp tube itself to fail prematurely.

 

Ideally, an HPS lamp should be dead-cold before attempting to restart, at least 10-15 mins off. This is something you may not have any control over if the mains svc is dropping out and coming back on in a minute or two- or worse, quicker.

 

Very brief power glitches are the worst for HPS tubes. It only takes an AC mains dropout/power glitch of about 1/10 of a sec to stop the arc in an HPS tube. When power comes back up, the hot tube will sit there and arc-n-spark. Some ballasts will pick that up and re-ignite or will hold the lamp off until you manually restart it. A lot won't do either one! If you run lights while you're asleep or away, you may not even know such short glitches are happening.

 

This has happened to me before, it's most annoying... has cost me a few 1000W HPS tubes, too. Took me a while to sort it out and get the pwr co to fix an intermitting connection out on the power pole. When windy, the drop lead would swing and cause the brief glitches.

 

If you have mains powered digital clocks which require resetting after a power outage, you may get some warning, but some (even without backup batteries) will soldier on even through 1-2 second power dropouts, leaving you with little to go on for troubleshooting.

 

Hopefully your ignitor was just dodgy and you've got this one solved.

[Al B. Fuct]

oops, put a post in the wrong thread, can't find the delete button..

[jimbojones5678]

Ha! I cannot even count how many times the power drops out! At least 50 times since I set this up.

We get sooooo many tiny power drop outs around here it's just plain accepted as norm.

I never even thought that it would be bad for my bulbs but there's really nothing I can do. It's not faulty lines, just shit weather.

 

Jimbo

[godonacid]

a ups like people run on their servers should work depending on how many watts you are running, the good one we have at work, which did cost a lot of money will run 2000w for 26 mins, we have it set to shut down one server and one hard drive rack which drops the load to just under 1000 watt and it will run for 56 mins.

 

you could get one of these, set it to turn all lights off bar 1 and you would get 50-60 mins before the all the lights go out, then set it to turn them back on after 10 mins, the one we have is controlled by the PC so im not sure how they would go with out it there and like i said the one we have was expensive, i was looking at a 600 watt job the other day for $200 but it only had 2 mins of charge on it when under full load so not much use imo but if you only get 5 second drop outs it might be just right.

[moKing]

Defiantly sounds like you need a new igniter. The bloke at my local hydro shop was telling me the 3 main things that go wrong with them is; a.) The Globe, b.) The Ignitor or, c.) The Transformer. If the transformer goes it shouldn't do a thing and you will need to buy a new ballast. As godonacid said it could be worth taking the bulb out and checking/ cleaning the contacts.

 

peace

 

moKing

Edited September 18, 2007 by moKing

[Pam]

There is a gadget that's made for HID lights to stop them from reigniting when there's an outage. I saw one can't remember where but I need one too so I'll start looking ( maybe it was on ebay) I know I'm getting too old to keep running for the switch every time there's a 2 second break in the power.

 

I think the thing was either a timer with this built in or something that hooked right to the power cord.

 

Gonna go look....

I'll be back.

Edited September 18, 2007 by Granny

[Luke Skywalker]

Yeah, I seem to recall something similar myself...

 

I know you can get switches that keep it off if it trips....

[jimbojones5678]

Defiantly sounds like you need a new igniter. The bloke at my local hydro shop was telling me the 3 main things that go wrong with them is; a.) The Globe, b.) The Ignitor or, c.) The Transformer. If the transformer goes it shouldn't do a thing and you will need to buy a new ballast. As godonacid said it could be worth taking the bulb out and checking/ cleaning the contacts.

 

peace

 

moKing

no mate, it was the ignitor - I had it repaired by a shop.

If you scroll up from your reply you'll see...you musta missed it.

 

sometimes we get 4-5 dropouts a night here, the bloody plants wouldn't even get an hour of light if I had the delay on!