Bargain - but!!!!

[meow2222]

The ones I got forgot to limit the voltage, so the tube tried to start once per cycle from as soon as it powered up. The intense flashing plus loud ballast noise made people duck alarmedly.

(When I said like thermal starters I meant from the POV of the onlooker rather than the mechanism of operation.)

NT

[Dave Liquorice]

That isn't the electronic starters I use which call themselves "Electronic Pulsestarter":

heat the cathodes for a couple of seconds then strikes the tube. No nasty loud buzz as they start.

Presumably your type is "Rapid Electronic Pulsestarter":

admit the delay can be a bit annoying in the utility store room when you just nip in to get something out of a cupboard. I guess that the rapid electronic starter type is just as kind to the tube as the ordinary electronic one? I might try one for that room but of the noise is too bad revert to the ordinary.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I think they are the same thing, but with different timings. If you look at datasheets for the fluoractor (there's only one of them AFAIK, the Y1112, although multiple manufacturers), you adjust things like any preheat time, and the attempted strike duration, and the back-emf pulse size by selecting appropriate external components. So by shortening the preheat and increasing the back-emf pulse size, you can get nearer to instant start.

I have a garage where we nip in for a couple of seconds to get something out or put something back in the freezer. I have

3 x 58W fittings in there, and I swapped them all for instant start electronic ballasts. The trouble is finding and identifying instant start ballasts (by which I mean starting in something like 0.1 seconds). In this country, instant start is often misused to simply mean electronic, even when it's got a 2 sec preheat time. The ballasts I used came from CPC, but when I ordered another one a year later, the part they had was identical on the face of it, but does 1.5s (IIRC) preheat. I don't now know of any genuinely instant start electronic ballasts except the Philips matchbox blue range, but they only cover power ratings up to about 25W. (The red range are identical, except for being preheat.) Except for these Philips matchbox ones, datasheets have always been too vague for you to reliably predict until you see one actually operating.

[Dave Liquorice]

The EFS300 (second link previously posted) has a 0.3 sec preheat that would be much better for the "quick nip into the utility room" over the

2.4 sec EFS600 that I have ATM.