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

...I have a job in progress,...it's an office space, and they have 2'x4' troffer layins all throughout the offices..the voltage is 277v., and the problem is that it seems that one by one, the ballasts are dying out..they were all installed about 5 yrs ago,and they're on 6 days/week,10-12 hrs a day.I've been told that these ballasts have a "life" of around 5 yrs..and it is common that they will all die out around the same time period...The company wants a bid from me to re-ballast and re-bulb all of the lights in the space...Is this a common occurrance or could there be a spike in the line thats causing this..?? I dissected a dead ballast and found that the small glass fuse was blown..it is on a pc board,so it would be a pain in the drain to replace just the fuse...What do I do..?? I've already replaced 8 of the 90+ ballasts as they wink out..Anyone ever hear of this???
AR

Give em the price and have at it.

We just replaced about 300 ballasts at a warehouse.

At the same time the fixtures where reconfigured from 2-F96T12s with a magnetic ballast to 4-F32T8s with electronic ballasts.

Orsam Sylvania provided the retrofit kits, sockets, brackets, lamps and ballasts.

Reduced energy consumption and more lumens made a happy customer.

In some places electronic ballasts are notorious for failing. In others you get many years out of them.

There was a Super K-Mart near me. We did not do the store but almost as soon as it was done they began calling the contractor I was working with. We eventually told them to get corporate to order 50 ballasts just to have on hand. We would go there at least onece a month and replace 5-10.

do they go up in smoke, or just die silent?
perhaps you can open one to check where the fault is, maybe you caught a bad series 5 years ago...
i thaught they would live longer.

the ones we have changed at the production plant i work at, were mostly broken solderings due to hot/cold cycling and perhaps high frequent vibrations from the circuit.
some few had blown FETs or capacitors.
and a few failed running the tube on only very low brightness and a violet touch of color.

Overall, these were very few. Out of about 600 lamps with e-ballasts, in one year we changed maybe 15 or 20.
mixed manufacters, Siemens, Osram, AEG, Philips, ...

[This message has been edited by :andy: (edited 02-01-2004).]