I understand how they distil the essence out of the flour and decant it into those glass tubes, but the rest of it confuses me. I've Googled, read the Wiki and had some good practical advice from that nice Adam Wadsworth bloke.
However, fault finding is an embuggerance. As if getting those bloody chrome plastic diffusers in & out wasn't bad enough.
As far as I can see there are three possible failure points; the tube, the starter or the ballast. OK, four if a bad connection is there, but lets assume it isn't.
To avoid confusion; by tube I mean the glass bit that lights up, by starter I mean the little plastic can thingy with two prongs and by ballast I meant a boxy thing with wires going in & out.
For example today. 18 fittings in suspended ceiling each with 4 x 2' x 18w tubes, each tube with a starter and each fitting with 2 Tridonic EC40 A54 ballasts. 12 were fine, but on 6 fittings, either the two inner tubes were out, or the two outer tubes were out.
All were in this state, no 3 working, 1 not. No 2 this end working, 2 the other end not working. Either 2 inner or 2 outer. No flickering, either on or not.
I did notice in each case that one of the ballasts was warm & the other stone cold. Is that because its failed or because its OK but not powering anything?
Is there a simple fault finding technique?
I don't think you can test a tube with a multi meter? Can you test a starter? Or a ballast?
In some fittings with larger tubes you sometimes get flickering or just the ends lighting up. Is this tube or starter?
I could adopt the 'change everything and its bound to work' method - which seems quite common, but its wasteful to replace a good tube/starter when the cause was something else.
Could I build a simple test rig for example? Any books, web sites that would help?
Any help much appreciated.