Self Ballasted Metal Halide Lamps

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Chetlaham

Chetlaham

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Does anyone love modern self ballasted metal halide lamps? (technically mercury vapor)

I wish these were used more often, certainly wish they were dominant in the 60s/70s/80s/90s wherever HPS, MV and Metal Halide was normally used.

I remember 20 years ago several major retail stores were lit with coated 400 metal halide lamps. What an experience it would have been having them lit with 1000 watt self ballasted lamps with a light phosphor coating. Enough to let the golden warm halogen light through, while converting some of the UV to pink/red light. A dull greenish envelope, soft pink around center, with a warm orange glow on one side. What a bulb!

I always liked HID lamps, but never liked the fact each individual bulb needed its own type of ballast. Heavy, big, humming, fail prone, and expensive compared to the bulb. I remember trying to make a MH table lamp, price for a 70 watt ballast alone was $160 back then. I remember looking at all the various sizes of HID wondering why they couldn't just tack a linear halogen (like the ones being sold over the HID lamp shelf LOL) right where that thin wire jumped the top of the arc tube to the leads at the base of the lamp.

The US did offer self ballasted mercury vapor lamps, but due to the lack of not using a halogen capsule to solve the fact the arc tube needed a vacuum in stark contrast to a gas fill for the tungsten coil, the lamps were a flub.

Fortunately in the 2000s common sense Chinese manufacturers experimented, perfected, and put such lamps into production with great success. Self ballasted MH lamps are very popular in China and Asian countries.



Anyway, the history with one being lit up:



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Remember the GE Halarc lamp-this was an early attempt at a self ballast MH lamp-the idea was to be able to use it in any incandescent fixture-at the time 80's beleive it was folks didn't want to pay like $30 each for such bulbs.Glad some MH is still with us.They CAN give better lumen per watt than LED and provide better color quality.Today we have another MH newcomer-the Ceramic metal halide lamp.These use a ceramic arc tube and run at higher temp and pressure than quartz arc tube MH lamps.CMH lamps can give longer life and constant color quality over the life of the lamp.They run from electronic ballasts that have lower loss than regular iron-copper coil and core ballasts.Currently we have some STUPID bans on probe start metal halide ballasts and fixtures.Bulbs are still available.And the ban on mercury bulbs is equally stupid.Then California has banned both probe start and pulse start MH lamps and fixtures.CMH lamps are popular with plant growers.Philips originated the CMH lamps-210W and 315 W as replacements for 250W and 400W mercury and HPS streetlight lamps.You can now get a 500W CMH and 1000W CHM lamps adn fixtures from grow light suppliers.Have these.Not only for plants they put out a beautiful MH light!!!
 
I read about those GE Halarc lamps. CFLs ultimately beat them in cost and reduced complexity. But they were still really cool and ahead of their time none the less.

CMH have really nice color, but sadly often driven via electronic ballasts. I personally don't like electronics.

The best color and light for me comes from Venture brand formed arc tube pulse start metal halides. The sharpness and brilliance of the white light is so crisp, so sharp and so cut-through that it must be seen to be believed. I call this a work light, because its so nice to work under such a brilliant sparkly white light.

I really dislike the bulb bans. Yes Mercury vapor is less efficient than HPS and LED, but the longevity of GE and Westinghouse Life Guard lamps, run on a simple reactor ballast, is unparalleled to any existing or modern lightning technology by far. 24,000 hours you say? It was often double/triple that in terms of acceptable light output.
 
Philips Mastercolor CMH

Philips manufactures a 35/39 watt ceramic metal halide lamp that is available in 3000K color temperature with a CRI of 90 and outputs almost 3400 lumens or over 87 lumens per watt! Available in both tubular bi-pin base and PAR style lamps. I've run these lamps in old "gumball" style street lights that were originally incandescent and the light quality is absolutely stunning! 3000K is closer to a quartz halogen lamp rather than true incandescent but it still looks great, especially with the tiny point light source. It really makes the refractor sparkle. And as mentioned, they last a long time and do not color shift with age.
 
That would have been so nice if the majority of street lights in the US were self ballasted halogen mercury lamps.

Globes, gumballs and clam shells down residential streets and typical roadways as no ballast is required, while cobra heads would be reserved to interstate highways where a transformer could be used to step 480 or 600 volts down to 240 volts.

Of course, nothing is stopping anyone from making a 480 volt self ballasted MH ;) 1000 watt H36 ballasted Mercury Vapor bulbs have a stabilized arc voltage of 265 volts and a strike voltage of 375 volts. As such, a 480 volt socket voltage could also be ballasted with a tungsten tube. 1000 watts of power for the arc tube and 1,500 watts across the tungsten to achieve the right amount of current making for a wholesome 2,500 watt bulb.
 
Gumball lights are usually used in downtown areas-They radiate light in all directions.The gumball lens-diffuser breaks up the intense light from a bare lamp.
Mercury lamps give better efficiency and reliabilty than incandescent lamps.Esp if they have the phosphor coating inside the bulb.also improves the color quality.Same idea as phosphors in flourescent lamps.The phosphors can improve some MH lamps,too.I like the electronic ballasts on my CMH lamps-they have a square wave output which gives better lamp life and efficiency.Some electronic ballasts have a high frequency output which works well with quartz tube MH and ceramic tube HPS.The big downside of electronic ballasts is they can cause RFI and EMI.
I have some of the old Westinghouse Silverliner and GE cobrahead mercury lights when the vOA site changed over to LED lot lights.One of my lights had a blown ballast so I put a PS 400W halide ballast in it-NICE light!
 
Neat history about different types of outdoor lighting.

Fortunately anything that uses Mercury needs to be highly regulated and used as little as possible and items like this they can find their way into landfills etc.

And energy efficiency is of paramount concern so unfortunately these interesting forms of lighting have seen their day and will largely be relegated to history.

John L
 
I love mercury vapor, high pressure sodium and metal halide fixtures! LED is ok but it is boring, and the fixtures are basically disposable and made as cheaply as possible. I refuse to buy any fixture that does not have a lamp socket and uses diodes permanenetly mounted on a board so that the entire fixture needs to be thrown away and replaced.

That is hardly saving the environment vs replacing a light bulb.
 
Mercury Bulbs

I fully agree with you on this. I never liked the mass proliferation on CFLs. They were much to dangerous for joe public. Nearly everyone I knew threw them in the regular trash bin and they broke way to often when being replaced or at the end of life when almost universally the cathodes would keep running until the glass cracked on some makes. And of course people using a vacuum cleaner when one of them broke.

In the early/mid 2000s I remember telling people they contained Mercury needing to be handled (and disposed of) with care only to have them argue with me they did not contain mercury or that they could not contain mercury. Or that something so hazardous would not be sold to the public in the first place. Even educational advertising deliberately avoided the word mercury where diagrams would simply call the argon / mercury vapor "special gas".

When the HG and disposal warnings finally did come out (10 years to late) backing what I had been saying all along, I still had people saying the amount wasn't hazardous to anyone or anything, even many recycling adverts calling it "possibly" "trace amounts" "some CFLs may contain..."

Still later on the argument became that yes while most CFLs did contain upwards of 10mgs of mercury, improper disposal wasn't an issue because if 100% of all the Mercury in every CFL was released into the environment, it would be less than the amount that would have be released by burning coal to light incandescent bulbs.

Arguments aside of why that is total BS, the short and long term mercury concentration in a room from one broken CFL is billions of times greater than what any coal burning plant venting into the atmosphere could ever contribute to said room. People will claim the initial room occupant exposure from a broken CFL is that of eating a can of tuna, and while that may be true, what people choose to not think about is such mercury exposure continues indefinitely: a droplet sized bead of mercury now wedge in the carpet/floor board evaporating 24/7, 365 days a year for decades on end as occupants are inhaling its vapor long after the break is forgotten. To give you an idea a 10*F rise in temperature doubles the evaporation rate of Mercury. Over time the amount of mercury concentration in the body silently and steadily increases. Anyone washing the rug in the room wear the break took place contaminates the washer, which can contaminate clothing, in turn contaminating furniture people sit on. Mercury ends up everywhere such that 24/7 human background exposure becomes on orders of magnitude greater than any coal burning chimneys could ever create.


I think as time goes on CFLs will prove to be an environmental failure, with any noticeable ill effects simply attributed to other reasons. Look at any problem discussed today, no one can agree on a cause or contributions while every messenger is insulated or shouted down.

I'm going to go on a limb make a proactive statement that the flyn effect is in part due to lead being taken out of gasoline, paint and toys...

But to be fair to the average joe in the early days there really weren't many places where you could take CFLs for recycling in addition to that fact those pushing for CFLs did everything to deny, cover up and down play the existence of mercury in CFLs.

I myself am no saint however. Before I knew that fluorescent tubes contained mercury I would break them in half and dispose of them in regular trash.
 
I agree on proper recycling of lamps, nobody around here seems to bother to do it, other than maybe the utility companies and electricians. I'm always seeing fluorescent tubes (and fixtures) sticking out of trash cans on pickup day.
 
If you are saying such stuff

At least get your numbers and facts correct.
According to the EPA, an average CFL contains 4mg, not over 10mg.

All coal burned in the US for power production releases about 50 metric tons of elemental mercury.
That's the equivalent of 10 billion CFLs breaking.

Further, there have been studies about exactly your concerns.
Less than half even leaves the bulb, of that less than half evaporates over the next 8h.

The OSHA limit for occupational exposure is apparently 0.1mg/m3 of elemental mercury in air.
If all the mercury instantly evaporated, at a normal ceiling height of 2.3m, you'd need a 22m2 room to be safe under OSHA.
That's about 240sqft.

As said not all evaporates at all, and not all at once.

And you are trying to argue a lamp that contains mercury as well (significantly more, actually), yet can blow apart at any point since it is under high pressures, is a better solution?

Again, your opinion is your opinion, but misrepresentation of information is a serious issue in such context.
 
I stand behind what I said

4mg is an average median number. Any particular CFL will be above or below 4mg in content based on make, model, size, ect.

10 billion CFLs breaking across 30 sextillion cubic feet of weathered air does not produce the same level of human exposure as 1 CFL across 2000 cubic feet of air.

The IMO obscene 0.1mg/m3 number set by OSHA, like many other government limits, are merely successful litigation thresholds, born out of dated findings based on apparent (key word) toxicity outcomes in healthy adults in a world where employers fight against worker protection laws, or when backed into a corner lobby any new law to be as least restrictive to the company itself.

Meaning that while less overt negative health outcomes could take place below 0.1mg/m3 per 8 hour shift it would be difficult to prove beyond a doubt that said worker's health is the direct result of mercury exposure alone.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208288/

The studies done with CFLs are based optimistic assumptions and favorable data being mostly destination science.

(Fortunately I have found studies that are honest enough to point out that 2 foot concentrations are much higher than 8 foot concentrations with children having much higher recperation rates.)

CFLs are a good example of agnotology. Studies and advertising by those subsidizing and pushing for their use have done everything possible to cover up, deny, down play, subvert, obfuscate, mislead, and cast doubt on the environmental and health effects of the mercury inside them.

In no way am I arguing that self ballasted mercury vapor lamps would have been any better in residential or commercial environmental wise. While arc tube rupture in mercury vapor lamps has been historically less common than CFLs cracking at the end of life, the mercury is still there and the world would be better off without it.

ROHS LEDs are they way to go IMO and I think the world is finally taking a step in the right direction.

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I recently had a coiled type CFL fail in my outdoor front porch fixture, which is on the front of the house away from the door and requires a ladder to reach it.  There is no street lighting in most of my neighborhood, so my porch light stays on from twilight until ~ Midnight.  Since the bulb failure happened at night, I didn't bother with it until the next day.  The glass had cracked near the base but I couldn't see the crack until I removed it from the fixture. 

 

I sure hope Henrik is correct.  I put the bulb in a bag to bring to my nearby ACE Hardware for disposal, but now I'm wondering if I can just toss it since toxicity may not have even been a factor by the time I extracted the bulb. 

 

I had been using a small appliance size LED bulb for the porch lamp (receptacle is a standard medium base incandescent type) but it failed waaaaaay before its over-hyped life expectancy.  The failed CFL lasted much, much longer and provided more light for just a bit more wattage, so I replaced it with another appliance size CFL that I had in my stash.

 

I'm not up on the scientifics around mercury vapor, but since this discussion began, I realized the the giant mercury vapor fear lights that used to be commonly seen polluting above garage doors in suburbia have all but disappeared and been replaced with even more obnoxious and unhealthy LEDs that blind you at close range, but at least they usually have motion sensors.  I much prefer the pinkish hue of high-pressure sodium.  The dim yellow low-pressure sodium lamps that wash the color out of everything were a mistake right out of the gate, but LED street lighting is an even bigger mistake IMO.
 
Coal burning powerplants have exhaust gas scrubbers.The mercury is removed in the scrubbers.
Mercury dosage in modern lamps-so small its not worth worrying about.And with HEPA filter vacuums-picking up the debris with such a vacuum is safer than trying to pick up the debris with a paper towel.
Self ballast-think about the arc tube chemestry-in a mercury lamp arc tube its very simple,argon gas and a tiny amount of mercury.Thats it!Ballasting this can be easily done with a resistive ballast like a lamp filament.No with metal halide-the chemestry becomes more complex-you have the argon,mercury and then the halide salts.When the lamp is started the argon and mercury go into the arcsteam fist.Then the halide salts.And these enter at different times becuase some slats need a higher temp to vaporize.This puts an interesting and complex load on the ballast.You will need a ballast that has what is known as a higher "crest factor" that can put out a higher secondary voltage as the halide salt vaporize into the arc.If they don't get this higher voltage the lamp will cycle out and try to restart.And this crest factor increases as the lamp ages.So a simple resistence ballast such as a lamp filament often doesn't work with a halide lamp.So you need an inductive more complex ballast or an electronic one.The early GE halarc bulb contained such an electronic ballast in its base.With todays better electronic ballast technology this should be less of a problem and the ballast can be less expensive.
All forms of electric lighting have their problems-and LEDS have some of these.They do require use of toxic chemicals to make them-and even more so than mercury.LEDS still don't have the color quality modern ceramic halide lamps have.And modern CMH lamps can last for over 24,000 hrs plus-something that LEDS may not be able to do.And that good ole mercury lamp can run for 50,000 hrs +!!!And these can run from simple reactive ballasts.
 
@tolivac- well said.

I personally would refrain from using a household vaccuum of any kind. You need a system, HEPA filter and charcoal filter specifically designed for such to be really able to prevent putting mercury droplets and mercury vapor in the air:

https://www.nikro.com/mercury-recovery-vacuums.aspx

Tiny droplets in the lungs or skin are worse than evaporated vapor itself.

And yes, the mercury is captured and recycled from coal plants and not dumped into the environment like CFL supporters insinuate.

That and the fact coal plants tend to be base load plants, meaning these will be running 24/7 near peak efficiency while the extra load from incandescent bulbs being switched on in the morning and evening in homes tends to be handled by peaker plants. Even still, coal plants can't fully predict actual load demand hours a head of time and tend to over fire their boilers ahead of time when/if anticipated to help out with peak demand.

CFLs have done little to reduce the amount of coal burned in coal power plants or their emissions.

What CFLs have done however is let utilties delay the construction of new lines and substations, hence why they really push energy efficient lighting and appliances.

Now with everything going over to gas, wind and solar the only major down side to using less efficent lighting is CO2 emissions.

Ideally the only real long term environmental solution is nuclear generation, a coast to coast 765kv system, electricity produced propellants for cars and non toxic utilization equipment.
 

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