Interesting though, doesn't look like that one has the little sodium deposit nibs in the side of the tube like the philips one, but apart from that it looks practically identical.
Hehe, desperate (or impatient) times require desperate (or impatient) measures.
There are two nubs near the bend in the tube but that is it, aye. There is a LOT of sodium in there! Even when fully warmed up I can move the tube about and feel the sodium sloshing around.
I had it on for about 45min earlier and the ballast just barely felt above room temp. I'll have it on longer tonight (now) so I'll let you know if it gets hot. I just wish this ballast had a lug for ground. I'm going to be building a wooden fixture for it and the ballast is aluminium encased, so I'll have to use one of the screws as the connection point. Right now I have the wire crimped through the hole while it sits on my table-thing.
I didn't mean "burn out" as in permanently damage, but you do get photochemical depletion. After going from a high intensity LPS environment to a white light one colors still look funky for about 30mins I've noticed. That's all I meant in the vid, plus it's YT, better exaggerate safety whenever you can.
I had the ballast sent to MarioMaster to reship with some other stuff, so will be a while before I get that yet. In the mean time I should get the bulb early this week, so I can start designing a fixture around it
I've had mine on for more than 90min now and the ballast is at about 80F (room temp is 72F). The tube's outer jacket feels about 100F, still comfortable to touch. My cat REALLY likes this light. Her pupils are normally very constricted in my room with my normal (200W fluorescent 6500K) lighting and she hindes under things and squints a lot. Now her pupils are relaxed and dilated and she's more active and playful.
It's really too bad I am a TERRIBLE carpenter, my fixture is going to suck pretty much, lol.
I took some photos of the tube with a 350-550 pass-filter:
I couldn't get a shot of it like this also through a diffraction grating but there are three distinct lines: (estimates of wavelength are based on what the color appears to be to my eyes) 395nm 465nm 515nm. I wonder which element(s) are responsible for these lines.
^That's weird. I just found out about that fuse coil the hard way. :yabbem:
Oh well, time to open it up carefully (with my hammer, of course).
They're not very useful without the outer envelope. Even on a 150W halide ballast, it didn't warm up properly. tube measured 190C.
Here are the cathodes on way more power than they're supposed to carry:
With both ends of the filament now exposed, it runs on weird ballasts like this broken CFL:
Beautiful photos, Cyparagon! Sorry to hear about your partial loss, though that is pretty sweet that it will run on a CFL ballast now that you've separated the fillament leads.