MH Ballast Power Draws

[spreerider]

Electronic ballasts should have less interference as they operate on higher frequencys in order to be more efficient, mag ballasts create way larger mag fields that can affect other electronics, but they have to be fairly close.

You would know if the capacitor went, the circuit would not work anymore, and it will probably smell horrible,
I work on MH lights at work, we make ones for fish farms that go underwater with remote ballasts, sometimes the caps go and fill the enclosure with the capacitor material and it smells so bad it hurts the eyes and lungs.
The ballasts we use are isolated secondary so slightly less efficient but we draw 500W on a 400W Fixture and 1200W on a 1000W fixture. They are coil and core non autotransformer type.