So you know how everyone on here thinks CFLs are a fire hazard...they're not the only ones!
So today I was helping clean out a house that a friend is moving into and I discovered THREE shoplights that used to be in the walk-out basement that had friend ballasts! They weren't fried last week! Now they are all friend. Looking inside the trashed fixtures sitting outside, I saw the ballasts had exposed coils (or had plastic casings) and were totally charred. So much that the outside of the metal fixtures were darkened from the heat! They appeared to be wired up like a regular NPF rapid start ballast, but I suspect they were some kind of capacitive ballast like those weird LOA ones. Anyway, I got five free pre-EcoLux 34w GE Watt-Miser lamps (pre-2003, post-1995 as they had the encircled E logo but no mercury symbol.) There was a sixth one but it broke. Maybe the 34w lamps fried the ballasts. The lamps look almost new, and of the three out of five I've tested, they work. Normally I wouldn't have taken them but they were free, sort of vintage now, and would have been thrown out otherwise...
Did the LOA shoplights ever go up in smoke?