AgHhH!! Ballast question . . . YaY!!

[StirCrazy]

Originally Posted by Van down by the river

megatron_55 was simply turning on and off his halides before they had a chance to fire up.[/quote]

so how fast was he turning them off, because a couple seconds is all the bulb needs to fire weather it is new or not. the rest of the time is it warming up, but it does glow right away as I am sure you know.

Originally Posted by Van down by the river

A MH arc tube contains various elements sush as mercury,sodium, thallium,indium,etc. These elements vaporize and coat the arc tube. When a bulb is new, they have yet to fully vaporize and that is why the initial few ignitions have a time delay. [/quote]


Van, sorry to disagree but there is no time delay whats so ever, the initia arc is imeadiate (talking a couple seconds maybe of delay, but not 5 min)
it is the warm up that is the 3 to 5 min period

Originally Posted by Van down by the river

With additional firing and burn time, the bulb will ignite sooner. Also switching on and off the ballast in short intervals can delay ignition.
This is not something to call the manufacturer about.

the ingnition shouldn't be any different in time but yes the warm up time will be.

A characteristic of HID lamps is that the HID lamps take several minutes to warm up (ranging from 3-5 min). After any interruption of power (1/20th of a second or more), a lamp that is hot will not start immediately, and must cool sufficiently before restarting. This time delay is called the restriking time and may take anywhere from 10-20 min for MH lamps.-Sanjay Joshi

this is refuring to the warm up not the initial start, the bulb will do an initial start with in a couple seconds in which the inner tube starts to glow, this over the next coupld min will get brighter and brighter (about 3 to 5 min)

So if you turn the power off befor it is bright (you led us to assume that it wasn't even arching) of course it won't light laiter as the ballast needs a cool down period befor it will relight, about 10 to 15 min.