A very timely topic, as far as I am concerned. I have to admit, I haven't looked through all the past threads on this subject, but I agree that there is always something to address concerning HID lighting.
My business partner and I have been addressing problems in HID lighting for parking areas and indoor plant lighting, off and on for years.
In particular, for outdoor area lighting;
Weather rated 277V / 400W metal halide post mounted parking lot lights, both, large envelope lamps and small envelope, have all the advantages of HID lighting, but we have been running into a problem with the enclosure glass becoming hot, then during rain storms with high winds, driving the rain onto the glass, causing it to shatter.
In high bay applications, large plants in particular, the on site service personel have a tendency to allow a high percentage of lamps to fail before calling an outside contractor to re-lamp. By this time, many ballasts, or starters, have failed due to trying to continuously "start" bad lamps. Rather than spending very costly time in trouble-shooting individual components of the ballast set, we have found it to be more cost effective to replace questionable ballasts with "ballast kits", available at most supply houses now. The problem is, this can get very expensive as well. We try to explain to the site service personel that they can save themselves a lot of money by recognizing when an HID lamp is telling you to replace it, rather than waiting for it to fail, but they rarely follow through.
