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HO Troffers
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Here's a shot of the hallway where the HO troffers in my previous pic were. The lights here are a bit run down as around a quarter of the lights were completely dead, I guess this place must have been bright when it opened in the mid 70s though.
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Oddly these HO troffers use Sylvania lamps.
a) One filament has too little emitter.
b) The starter triggers too easily (which seems to be recurrent with many modern starters)
c) It's plain junk
On preheat fixtures rectifying normally causes no harm, unlike leaving a completely EOL tube! Since the preheat current is higher than the running current, the ballast may burn out after a while if the tube keeps blinking and preheating without starting.
Oh and Mike, the Christmas light bulb in the starter is the glowbottle which controls the preheat time, the silver-white cylinder should be the capacitor...that's used to suppress RF interference and to help the glowbottle fire. Not all starter have a cap inside though, the Super Starters tend to be capless.
I've had that problem with lamps rectifying in my preheaters too, mainly with newer lamps and starters though.