It was actually much darker in person. The PC is actually very sensitive! It's a tall Ripley from around 1970. I always associate these PCs with silver M-250Rs. They look great. They're great PCs but they look out of place on a newer light lol. I have a second one that looks great on my Westinghouse RMA.
This is 175W MV just warming up in the pink phase. I have a 250W HPS ITT ballast but it's not inside a fixture. My highest wattage HPS fixture is my 150W OV-15TD.
Thought you had a 400w Westinghouse HPS ballast that needed a new capacitor/was nonfunctional/needed some work...did you give that one away or something?
150W is my highest wattage fixture but I have a 250W and 400W HPs ballast. I did get a new cap for the 400W Westie BTW. It works great, just using it for a weight for my light pole in my room.
Yeah the capacitor had gone open circuit so the lamp wouldn't light at all, but the ballast was humming and the igniter worked on my 250W ITT ballast so I knew the cap was the issue. And after testing the cap with an ohm meter, it proved that the cap went open circuit. I replaced it with an idential GE cap (yep, Westinghouse ballasts in the 80s came with GE caps a lot of times!) Works like a charm now. The ITT ballast had a bad igniter so I replaced the igniter with a generic plastic Advance igniter.
35-150W (S55) HPS have 55V igniters and 150 (S56) through 400W use 100V igniters. There are no NEMA standardizations with igniters so using, let's say, an Advance igniter to replace a GE igniter won't necessarily work properly, though I've never had any issues mixing igniters up. It could have long-term effects though. Theoretically 35-150W (S55) HPS fixtures share a common igniter, 150W (S56)-400W HPS fixtures share a common igniter, and 750-1000W HPS share a common igniter. There are two types of 150W HPS lamps. S55 lamps run on a 55V circuit like 35-100W lamps and S56 150W HPS lamps run on 100V circuits like 200-400W HPS lamps.
With capacitors, just match up the uf/MFD rating so it is exactly the same and make sure the voltage is equal to or greater than the rating of the old capacitor.
Interesting! How does an HPS ignitor wire up anyway? (I need to figure out how as another step toward ballasting that SunLite 50w HPS lamp I have laying around...in theory with 2 or 3 20w preheat fluorescent "choke" ballasts it should work as long as I have the proper ignitor, right?
Well, with a three-wire igniter, you have three wires: red, blue, and white. The white is the common, and ties in with all the other white wires in the circuit. Then the red wire connects to both the ballast and the socket's central contact. The blue wire connects just to the ballast.
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Wow your neighbor must really not like looking at that! Look at all that lattice!
With capacitors, just match up the uf/MFD rating so it is exactly the same and make sure the voltage is equal to or greater than the rating of the old capacitor.