Wow! This fixture got hot enough to stain the white paint on this fixture! O_O Pretty damn hot! The ballast sprayed tar all over the insides of the fixture almost like it exploded. It leaked PCBs too since the tar was thin and watery. I wore rubber gloves when handling this fixture and it's at the curb. Not even gonna try to salvage this thing.
Yeah well if there's any good side to this I have room for one more light. I'm not allowed to put up any more fluorescents unless I fuse them though. At first they said no more fluorescent lights mounted period but after I told them I can fuse the lights they said I have to do that.
Well the basement lights are the only thing on the 15A breaker. that includes three 52W Halogen lamps, two 2X F40T12/RS, one 3X F32T8/IS, one 1X F30T12/RS, one 90W incandescent, and this light. That's only around 6A or so.
Vince made a good point about this specificaly saying FOR INDUSTRIAL USE ONLY. That was likely put on there because it lacked protected which made it unsafe for residential or even commercial applications. Although I'm not sure that protection was around for any ballasts back then anyways.
IIRC thermally protected ballasts came out in the 1960s. The early ones had non resetting protectors but the later class P ones had resetting protectors. Some argue that the non resetting protectors were safer since you can't let the ballast cycle. A faulty class P ballast can cycle on and off until the protector sticks closed.
yeah the non-resetting protection is good if the ballast is actually bad but if it just overheats from the wrong lamps or something then the ballast is useless even if it was still good.
Yeah I have an Advance Kool-Koil cycler that does it even with 40 watt lamps! It's been like that for years and I figured it'll just passively fail but this makes me wonder!
If it cycles than I would say something is wrong. Right now the thermal protection is doing its job but the thermal protection isn't designed to repetitively trip and trip so one day it's not going to trip anymore. I sure hope it fails off but if not, whatever is causing the ballast's thermal protection to trip will happen with no thermal protection to stop it so who knows what's wrong!
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Vince made a good point about this specificaly saying FOR INDUSTRIAL USE ONLY. That was likely put on there because it lacked protected which made it unsafe for residential or even commercial applications. Although I'm not sure that protection was around for any ballasts back then anyways.