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    mindofrats
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High Failure Rate

Hi,

I work for an events company, and we've noticed that our source 4s seem to be blowing bulbs way more often than normal. We have a few possible ideas for might what be causing this:

-We usually use alpha packs for control. Can these develop faults that mean that they are pushing more power (I sadly cannot test them and our warehouse doesn't do more then testing they work)

-Are the lights too old (nobody seems sure how old they are, but the oldest are from the turn of the millennium)   

-Is it not helping that we tend to run these for 5+ hours a day at 100% (I just started working here)

Thanks for any help

  • The lamp vendors may be able to offer more insight on the problem than the fixture manufacturer. There's not much about the fixture itself that impacts lamp life, the exception being socket contamination.

    Ohm's law says that power is proportional to voltage and current. The alpha packs would have to be artificially increasing the voltage in order for a lamp to draw more power. There's no such thing as "pushing power".

    Incandescent lamps purchased at the same time tend to fail at the same time since they have a similar life expectancy. All things being equal, lamp failure rate correlates with lamp usage.

    If you have recently replaced lamps in the fixtures and those are failing then it's possible the lamp manufacturer had a bad batch, or the box of lamps got dropped in shipping which can adversely affect the filament or envelope seal.

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