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View Full Version : Lamp Life and Failure


alton
Tue, 27th Mar 2007, 04:32 PM
I noticed the other day on my 200 gallon tank that even though I only run my 250 watt Metal Halides four hours a day they had lost some of there brightness. On my other tanks I leave the Metal Halides on for ten hours a day and they last a year. So I decided to contact GE Lamps to get there take on this information. It seems every time a lamp starts it reduces the percentage of the lamp life. So if your only running your lamps a couple of hours a day thinking they will last you longer you may be surprised.
BIGBIRD123
Tue, 27th Mar 2007, 04:53 PM
It's kinda like the NiCad battery effect....I run my halides 10 hrs and they last longer, too but so does my electric bill. I don't mind and neither do my corals.

Steve
JimD
Tue, 27th Mar 2007, 05:22 PM
Why does it matter how long you leave the halides on? Once it starts, its on till it goes off, its still only starting once per day. Am I missing something?
BIGBIRD123
Tue, 27th Mar 2007, 05:30 PM
Hair?
JimD
Tue, 27th Mar 2007, 05:35 PM
LMAO!!!! You #$%^!&*#$%
BIGBIRD123
Tue, 27th Mar 2007, 05:45 PM
Jim,
maybe it's a filamentation memory thingy....

Sorry couldn't help myself...LMAO!2

Steve
alton
Wed, 28th Mar 2007, 06:35 AM
The idea for some is that if you run MH's for 10 hours a day they will last a year. But if I am running my VHO's and or T5HO's 10 hours a day and my MH's for only 4 hours a day then they will last twice as long and this study was to show that this is not true, because MH's wear with every start.
LoneStar
Wed, 28th Mar 2007, 06:42 AM
It seems every time a lamp starts it reduces the percentage of the lamp life.




because MH's wear with every start.


Thats exactly what I always thought ;)

Mythbusters did a experiement on if you waste more energy leaving the lights on rather than turning them on and off when going in and out of the room all the time. Well after testing many different types of bulbs (even metal halides) it was such a small difference in savings that it wasn't even worth turning them off all the time.

Now the revelence of that to this post is that they found almost all the bulbs use the most amount of electricity at the warm-up/start phase before they reach full illumination and level out. So the starting of the bulbs 'can' produce significant wear over time ;)