My take on this is, each bulb manufacturer has built their bulbs to work on a certain ballast. I think it's actually a bit more complicated than that, there's things like starting voltages and running voltages and European built bulbs were designed with 50Hz in mind not 60Hz and all kinds of issues that can make your head swim (well ... they make MY head swim ....). But anyways. Point being that there's M57 and M137 and what's the significance. The way I look at it is, there will be a recommended ballast to use for a particular bulb. So pick the bulb you want to use, or pick a number of bulbs you may want to use, and then look up what ballasts you can use. So for example I use Ushio's on my own tank. We can go to
www.ushio.com and find the bulbs specs online over there at
http://www.ushio.com/files/Aqualite%200802.pdf and look up the recommended ballast and it says "M137."
The only thing about pulse-start ballasts is that they have a third component, the ignitor, and you need to watch out for something here. The typical ignitor may have a "BTL" rating of 2 feet. This means that the length of the wiring between the ballast and the lamp can not exceed two feet. That's not really going to work out for us aquarists unless we like the idea of putting the ballast in our canopy (probably not a good idea
). So instead what you have to order is a "long range" ignitor and these tend to be good for 20 feet or so, which, given the average length for us probably being around 6-8 feet, gives us a very comfortable margin. But expect the ignitor itself to cost around $30-40, so bear that in mind.
I'm not really the one to talk about this sort of stuff as my understanding of the issues only really barely scratches the surface. And I'm certainly not one to talk, given that I run my Ushio's on M57's. For the longest time, I told myself, if it aint broke don't fix it. And I've been fine, in my opinion, for a long time. It's only this year that there have been hiccups with my lighting, but I consider them only minor issues since the lights still basically work fine. And like you pointed it could just be old capacitors for all I know ... maybe the solution is just replacing those, who knows.
Ultimately, if the ballasts make your lights work, and you're happy with that, don't worry about it any further. But if you WANT to investigate this further, be content knowing there's a wealth of info out there waiting to be learned (I honestly had no idea, but I think you can take COURSES on this sort of thing!!)
