ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Electronic Balasts

I agree with the above Advance comment. From my experience, it appears their quality has slipped in the last few years. Better success with Sylvania ballasts.

Did I say that? I still think they're the best

We have had pretty good luck with electronic ballasts...except for 1 job where we had a 40% failure rate within the 1st 8 months, and 60% within a year. Motorola 3 lamp 32W 120-277 volt.
I'm the warranty-guy for our company. Lucky me.

CFLs seem to go out a little more often than the tubular lamp ballasts.
Still, though they seem as reliable as the mags ever were. Let's wait until they've been around 30 yrs and see


[This message has been edited by electure (edited 12-03-2004).]

Wow, you guys are bad luck, dont stand near me at the craps table

We have never had any major issues with eletronic ballasts. I do most of our warrentee repair and in the last couple years I can only recall replacing 1 bad electronic ballast and 1 electronic that was noisy. Thats with probably a thousand ballasts installed in new fixtures.

I personally love electronic ballasts, run cooler than magnetic, I believe operate at a higher frequency (no flicker), not as noisy, use less power, seem to usually start faster.

I would check voltages and neutral connections. Or maybe you just got a bad batch?

We did have a problem with a single building we wired 10+ years ago. One room a very large building was always going through ballasts, even though the rooms fed before and after it were fine. This room was even temperature controlled 24/7 at 68 degrees. I checked every connection, replaced every fixture completely and still had the problem in the same room. I ended up just running a new curcuit over and that seemed to fix the problem. Still to this day don't know exactly what was going on.