AGH! too much reading!
Technically it's considered a 10 X 10 room but it's really 9.5 X 10. They round up with the measurements. Our rooms are pretty close in size, but I think mine might have slightly more cubic footage. Since your ceiling slopes from 7ft high to 10ft, I used 8.5 as the ceiling height. Our rooms are both between 700 and 775 cubic feet.
Ah yeah TheUniversalDave has taken some video tours of his house and I have to say it's pretty scary looking lol. Cords draped all over the place, the rooms are all cluttered (that's not really as big of a deal with me since I have pack-rat family members too lol) but I cringe whenever he shows off his latest hack job. I mean can you at least take SOME effort and put into your electrical work?
He could at least run the extension cords above the drop ceiling and not make it look like a rat's nest. I could understand if it was a real ceiling but he's got cords drapes all over the place and could utilize the drop ceiling to conceal them! Not that I condone wiring your house up with extension cords, but I do understand "doing it right" costs money, and I don't always "do it right" either, but I attempt to make it as close as I can every time, even if it's temporary. Running the cables over the tiles to make it less of an eye sore only costs a few extra minutes and makes the job look a little less hillbilly-ish... What bugs me more than anything is that he seems to take pride in his hack jobs, posting all sorta of pics of them, as if he's PROUD that his house is a fire hazard. Yet he appears to put little to no effort into it at all. Whatever. He's only putting himself and his family at risk because god forbid there was a fire, the insurance company won't give his parents a red cent because the house was a fire hazard to begin with.
One of my 175W MV street lights will raise the room temperature a degree or two every half hour or hour (I forget how fast the temperature rose lol) but it's definitely not something you notice unless you either monitor the temperature or leave the room and come back later lol. With a higher ceiling all the heat might rise up to the top too. Is your room insulated? If not that doesn't help either. My house has pretty good insulation. I loose most of my heat (or cold air in the summer) through my windows so if it gets warm in the summer in my room I just pull down my shade so the heat transferred through the window is trapped between the window and shade. It helps a little, but not a miracle worker lol. Never tried it in the winter though since I'm usually too warm in the winter, closing my heat vent and sometimes cracking a window (but being careful to make sure my parents don't find out lol). I ended up cracking my window a lot this past winter since it was so cold (so my parents kept the heat cranking) and I didn't get sick all winter! The fresh air is nice.
What I'd generally do is open my windows about three inches, go sit on the throne and take a shower, brush my teeth, and then come back (usually a 40 minute ordeal or so) and my room would be cooled down to around 64 degrees (from like 75 or so). Then I'd shut my window and go to bed. My door would be shut when I'd do this and I'd stick the rug in front of my door in the door jam and force the door closed with the rug there so that there is tension, preventing the door from rattling because of any wind from outside or whatever. And the rug also helped keep the cold from drifting out under the door into the hallway since if my parents felt a cold draft coming from under my door, they would probably go into my room and find the windows open lol. Not sure what the big deal is since my heat vent is shut so it's not like they're wasting energy but they get all pissed if I open my windows with the heat on lol. I've never opened my windows with the AC on but I'd imagine they wouldn't like that either. Actually, if I'm home alone all day I'll turn the AC down to about 70 degrees (from 74 degrees) and the house would cool down to 68 (which is actually cold in the summer! lol) and then turn the dial back up to 74 when someone pulled into the driveway. My thermostat usually keeps the house about two degrees cooler than what you set it for.
Hmm that's weird. All my HID lights start off loud and then quiet down as the lamp warms up. That's a trend that's consistent with all of my HIDs. The ballast shouldn't get louder. Yep, the wattage should increase as the lamp warms up. Start-up current on a NPF HID is much higher than operating current though IIRC. Doesn't really seem to make sense since wattage gets higher, so current should get higher but I'm pretty sure it actually goes down as the lamp warms up. You bet I'll walk you through wiring it up.
The only connections you will likely have to make are at the terminal block, just two wires unless it's a 240V unit with a 120V PC socket, but I think that was more of a local thing here and pretty uncommon. Most HPS lights with PC sockets are 120V for whatever reason. 240V would actually be cheaper for 200-400W HPS since you could just use a choke ballast (the main reason they used 240V for MV fixtures here and the reason 120V is used for low-wattage HPS). I guess 120V just became the standard voltage for street lighting. A lot of places used 120V lighting in the MV days too because the incandescents were 120V, but here, I think the mercs installed in the 60s replaced series-wired incandescents. A lot of the 120V incandescents remained until the 90s HPS changeout or they just added the second hot wire for the 240V merc.
Ah yeah I have to find a part-time job too since my summer job terminates this Friday (21st).
Yeah MHs are stubborn on MV ballasts, but MH lamps actually get easier to start as they age. That's why a lot of times new MH lamps do nothing for a new seconds, even on a MH ballast until they're broken in since they're just too hard to start. The GE's been broken in so it starts easily. You never know, you could find a 175W MH ballast. I don't have a 175W MH ballast either and I already have three NOS 175W Sylvanias but if you're going to toss it, I'll take it off your hands if you'd like. Personally I'd hang onto it if I were you. BTW, you can probably light it on the yardblaster if you run it for about 20-30 seconds on the 400W MH highbay. Shut the highbay off and then put the lamp right into the yardblaster and turn it on. It might work a little better than trying a cold lamp.
Outbuilding? Like a shed or maybe a workshop separate from the house? Sounds cool! Yeah DX lamps are usually a little pink when new, but the color tends to die off after it's broken in. Sylvania lamps hold their pink light though. GE lamps loose their pink color, though their lamps have reliability issues. Not sure about Philips. My only unused Philips merc is a 100W clear (and my only other philips merc period is a well-used 400W /DX that I've only lit once; I don't remember the exact tinge) /C lamps are nice. I only have one, a 400W Sylvania cleartop from 1967. I wish I had some 175W and maybe 100W /Cs. There's some 80s Sylvania 100W /C lamps but they're like $20+ each. A little ridiculous for a lamp that costs $10 normally, and the 80s 100W MV Sylvanias were really not that great anyways. Sylvania actually made the worst 100W MVs in the 70s and 80s but Philips took that title by the late 90s (at which point Sylvania had left the MV lamp business anyway, outsourcing lamps from GE and Philips before establishing relations in China).
Ah I bet the yardblaster is pretty cool in your office/shop. I wish I had an unfinished basement and had a workbench and stuff. I'd install a fluorescent over the work bench and probably create a street light display on either side of the workbench (with a stick of 1-1/4" EMT conduit like I did in my room sans the box base). The EMT poles would be attached to 4X4s used to support the workbench and then I'd have three switches near the workbench: one for each street light and one for the fluorescent over the bench.
Instead of having a basement workshop, my Utopian idea is to have a separate small building for a workshop. I would like it to have a bathroom, which could be used by guests during a party or something (and for me when in the workshop). There would be an overhead garage door towards the left side of the long side of the building and a walk-in door towards the right on the same side and another walk-in door on the short side adjacent to the walk-in door. The door on the same side as the garage door would open up to a hallway, where the bathroom would be the first door on the right. Said hallway and the bathroom would have sheetrock walls, linoleum tile floor, and a grid ceiling. They'd have recessed cans or recessed squares with PL13 adapters in them. The hallway would continue straight and then end. At the end on the left, another door, which opens into the hallway, would lead to the large shop area. That area would just be for whatever. It would have a workbench an shelves and stuff and a bunch of switches for the lights and stuff. There would be a small walk-accessible loft above the bathroom, hallway, and lawn/garden room (haven't gotten to that yet) where I'd store all my lamps and stuff. There would be a staircase along the back of the main shop room leading up to the loft, which will be open, with a sort of balcony overlooking the shop. It would all be just rough framing, with plywood floors, stair treads made of stock, etc. The loft would likely have a sloped ceiling. The lawn/garden room I mentioned earlier would be accessible from the outside via the side door I mentioned at the beginning. Said door would have a ramp leading up to it. That room would be for the fertilizer for the lawn, grass seed, storage of the lawn mower, and maybe construction shovels, rakes, etc. The ramp would allow the lawn mower to exit the building, since the walk-in doors will be a step up from the ground to limit any water intrusion. The building would have a concrete foundation and floor. In front of the building where the main walk-in door is (where the hallway is) will be a patio with a carport style overhang over it for barbecuing and whatnot. I'd likely install my two vaportight fixtures there.
Quite a vision I have there lol. Not entirely realistic money-wise, but something to dream about lol. And on top of that I want to have a few utility poles around the perimeter of my lawn with street lights on each so I better become an engineer or win the lottery or get some large inheritance from a relative I knew nothing about lol. My vision is not really something realistic (it would look pretty ridiculous having a building and a bunch of utility poles in the back yard, but if I bought a nice rural piece of land it would work fine. I'm sure there are far weirder homes out in the sticks near me that look totally normal from the street lol)