In Morrison's - Fluorescent Starters in a Two-Pack. Could be wrong - but not many people have a need for 2. They last ages and how many have several strip lights requiring them to want two at a time. By the time a person would need the second one it would be lost.
Two in the kitchen and three in the garage but I agree that would be better sold singly.
Don't you have a handy box of electrical bits?
Owain
Also in Morrison's, a 2-pin 1 amp fused shaver adaptor is less than 70 pence.
I have 2 x twin IP65 fluorescent lamp units in the garage, although, as I also have several factory units, I normally buy starters in boxes of 10.
Colin Bignell
Presumably glow starters not electronic? I use electronic, none of the flickering start up just a little glow from the filaments then a straight strike.
Glow starters should be replaced when you replace the tube but I doubt many people do. Always worth having at least on in the "electrical bits draw" so you can swop out one on a fitting that isn't working to take that out of the equation.
"nightjar .me.uk>"
As a real user I would have thought that decent Electronic ones would be best for you.
Any down side to Electronic ones - I have had one for about 20 years in a fitting in our kitchen.
Can you expand on that please? I buy starters in boxes of 10 as well. Whats the difference between a starter & an electronic starter?
Electronic starters cost a lot more for an improved life and reliability although, IME, the gain in life is not proportionate to the extra cost. If lamps are changed only when they fail, there may be an advantage to the extra life of an electronic starter. If lamps are changed as part of a planned maintenance programme, it is simpler to use ordinary starters and change them at the same time as the lamps.
Colin Bignell
Perhaps you should try an electronic one to evaluate it. I think you will be impressed.
Electronic starters are particularly useful where you do complete relamping on a periodic basis. This is normally calculated to be at a point where you have a certain percentage of lamp failures, and the electronic starters enable that to be higher because they don't attempt to start failed lamps more than once, so you don't get dead lamps flashing on and off until the glowswitch starter fails too.
Electronic starters are reliable enough that they aren't considered to be consumables. Indeed, (prior to widespread use of electronic starter-less control gear), where luminares where known to be fitted into such a relamping schedule, they were sometimes ordered with electronic starters factory fitted, in which case they aren't replacable items as they're wired-in.
In situations where tubes are replaced as soon as they fail, a glow starter will normally outlast the lighting installation, unless the lamp is subject to frequent switching. Good ones do around half a million starts, and you normally only get that far by leaving one trying to start a dead lamp for weeks on end.
An electronic one doesn't try to start the tube until the filaments have powered for a few seconds. Trying to start a tube before there are enough free electrons about knocks lumps of the filament and shortens the tubes life. With an electronic start you just get a bit of glow then the tube strikes first time, no flickering.
I'd agree with that, we only change tubes when they fail. Which isn't very often even for the ones that are on 18hrs/day every day. I can't actually remeber the last time we changed one so that means it's probably
starter but may have changed the make of tube as well so to many variables to draw any real conclusion. The tune and glow starter that came with the fitting I don't think lasted that long though.
That contradicts what A gabriel says, that the starter will outlast the fitting. Now I'm confused.
MBQ
You keep saying this, but my experience is otherwise.
Nuisance flashing of a failed lamp is also a (nominal) fire risk.
We had one where the glow switch and socket melted into a big gob of blackened plastic worthy of a star role in "The house of wax" and the inside of the fitting was well and truly smoke damaged.
There was nothing within the fitting that would support combustion so an actual fire would have been unlikely unless enough hot gases escaped through holes punched in the fitting to ignite building materials close by.
Derek
At a time I worked for a smallish (~55 person) company where I also ended up doing the lighting/wiring/aircon, etc, as well was writing the software, I guess we went though about
10 boxes (25 tubes each) over the period. I bought one box (of 10) starters during that same period, and probably only used about 4 of them, and I think they were probably all long- standing failures from before I joined. I did change tubes the instant they failed, or someone would have been sitting trying to work under a flashing light (which is what used to happen before I joined).I struggle to imagine what causes you to go through starters so quickly. A wrong starter can cause a tube to have difficulty starting, but that would be obvious by the excessive time a tube took to come on, or failure to properly start at all. In either case, it would be even more damaging on the tube than the starter though. It's not even an area where I've seen grotty low spec imports, although they may exist.
Well, "quickly" is a tad string, but I get through more starters than tubes.
Opinions vary. I've replaced quite a few glow starters, and not in relamping large installations.
FWIW there are also some old retrofit electronic starters around that dont behave like thermal starters, and some of these can be quite badly behaved. I bought some of these when I first found electronic starters at a practical price. They used to scare people.
Also no-ones mentioned it yet, but can supermarket starters really be bargains? ISTR seeing them at about 10p each from... possibly Toolstation.
NT
AFAIK, all electronic starters for last 15-20 years use a fluoractor, which is nothing like a thermal starter. It's like a very much faster glowswitch, but also much more intelligent. It closes the switch and monitors the current ramp up. When it reaches a certain level, it assumes the inductor has enough energy stored to generate a back-emf and opens the switch. A zener limits the back-emf so it won't generate enough voltage to start the tube until the cathodes are heated. This sequence repeats as fast as the ballast inductor can ramp up again, typically many times per half mains cycle, which is very much faster than a glow starter retries. This means that the tube starts pretty much as soon as the filaments are warmed sufficiently. There's an overall timeout on the operation so it quickly gives up on a dead tube, after typically a few seconds. The rapid switching can cause metalwork near ballast to make quite a noise for the half second or so it takes to start the tube. Don't know if that's what you mean by scaring people?
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