2x58W electronic fluorescent ballast teardown (with schematic) 

Very interesting fixture, seems posh, I really beg you to do the same teardown and repair if possible for the battery-operated ballast, that one seems to be the most interesting one to me. If you can't repair nor replace the battery, you can try to mimic it using a bench PSU, just to check power levels when running on battery.

I worked for a company back in the day that did nothing but florescent lighting in stores. There were stores where I installed full cases of 277v ballasts in the ceiling (often on a 14' wooden ladder in a busy store) without killing the power. There were the old style, heavy ballasts too. Those were the days.

The link/switch option is when the fitting is used as an Emergency Light for power failure known as a "Maintained" (always on) or non maintained (only on when the power goes off) The link in a non maintained fitting will be connected to a power fail relay which will bring the inverter on when the mains vacates. Your examples are an older version because it not only uses NiCad's, but the MOSFETS are jelly bean size. The new ones are all surface mount and normally fail because the electro' caps cook. They can be fixed, but the phenolic boards cook as well. Better to replace the ballast than leave slowly carbon creating PCB's in operation 🙂 As a side note, the SMD FET's in the later units are a GREAT source of prototyping. Have many in use, and the ballasts are free if you ask nicely. Great content as always 👍 Cheers Pete' New Zealand.

Thanks for another video! I always love to watch them! And I'd like to see the comparison between the different ballast types.

The Philips "HF Performer" is their budget cost ballast, built to the lowest cost possible and compete with other cheap ballasts from Osram, Tridonic, Magnetek, etc. Typical for these budget ballasts is series wiring, so they cannot properly control each tube separately. They made other models with much better performance, but these were usually for the commercial specification market, like high rise buildings, where performance, efficiency, lamp life, etc were extremely important. . Note that electronic ballasts slightly under-run the tube, since HF operation gives about 10% increase in efficacy. Instead of more light they chose to save a bit of power.

POZOR! Another great video :D lol When I had a quick start electronic ballast FL Tube in my kitchen (the 3rd fitting in the space of 1 year!) I had enough. I took it apart to find an inductor at the end of the board had completely burnt out with that lovely burnt electronics smell. I gutted the fitting and bought an LED tube, the type that has live one end and neutral the other. Still working 5 years later though at dark when you turn it off, clearly some LEDs are ready for their end as you can see obvious dark spots as they all fade out. Still, more reliable than 2 electronic and 1 magnetic ballast fittings I have had in the past. Always a pleasure to see how these thing work, truly 'the magic lamp' :D x

I love your cat's comments! She is awesome!

It is nice hardware. Love the Rubycon filter cap.

The switch connected between terminals 3 and 4 of the battery backup unit is a momentary type for testing - it simulates mains failure. And yes, these backup inverters run the tube with cold cathodes, shortening tube life.

Back in 2014 at the work I had at that time, I used to replace hundreds of fluorescent tubes each month. In few places they had electronic ballast dual tube light fixtures, and the rest were iron core type. The electronic ones used to eat the tubes at higher rate than the usual type. And I got the fixture working by replacing one tube, but didn't last long. I had to replace both tubes for better longevity of the light.

great video, can’t wait for the episode about magnetic ballasts

Thanks for the explanation! I've taken a few of these apart that were thrown out at work, interesting to see the engineering behind it!

Thanks for the video Daniel!

As always, excellent explanation! Thanks for your good work.

The best thing is the lamps turn on faster than using starters and magnetic ballast

Wow new video!

I put 3 of these lights in my barn last weekend. Light is extremely bright. They were given to me, as they were replaced by LEDs. But still, working light, why not.

Ďakujem ti za toto pekné videjko, priznám sa že túto problematiku príliš neovládam, rád som sa nechal poučiť.

I have some fixtures from "beghelli" (same brand as that emergency inverter) and i really like them, the older versions had some issues with the mosfets, but the most recent are working at least for 10 years by now, i compared the most recent with the typical iron core ballast and its day to night diference, the electronic ballast has a >0.9pf, it draws less power than the power stated on the lamps (almost half compared to the same tubes on a iron ballast), the lamps strikes without flicker and within a second or two, the light is flicker-less, and makes the light more white rather than blue/green. As far as i remember is possible to increase the efficiency of the tubes by increasing the driving frequency, if im not mistaken this ballasts i have run at around 10khz or so. As a side note, i switched to boring led tubes were the light is on more than half of the day...

I really love fluorescent tubes and I have a collection of them. You should actually try this ballast together with both T8 and T12 65w tubes to see how it differs the waveform and specs because due to different gas filling T12 tubes can be much different

I have seen several LED drivers in the 20-40 watt range with no optocoupler - would love to see you tear one down in the future!

Nice! 👍🏻

I have recently purchased the older copper ballast from one store, which was lying with him for past 12 years. They are hard to find and great for testing power factors (energy meter testing).

Nice 🙂

Nice.

I've seen electronic ballast fittings cycle on and off while preheating. Usually, they do it with EOL tubes but eventually it will happen with new tubes as well. I have heard it's due to failing capacitor/s.

12:00 What is the point of R1 in the schematic?

Good memory lane! I am surprised one can still buy them tubes as they actually contain a small amount of mercury.

I have a 2x18 W fixture with electronic ballast and the tubes are operated independently. If I remove one the other still light up.

Our electronic fluorescent ballasts/drivers in the US usually run the tubes in parallel.

Why is it a big no no to touch the circuit with just the tip of the oscilloscope probe?

Philips even made 12000K snow white extreme cool daylight tubes.

È lo stesso schema di un induction heater

Not a fan of those designs, done plenty of commercial electrical maintenance and these don't last compared to an iron core style. If it's not the caps that dry out it's the transistors that cook themselves. Also having the lamps in series makes it not worth retro converting to leds. At least with some led drivers I can wind the power down to give longevity.

Where is the second video about ic 555 😑

c'mon almost 90 lumens/watt is amazing, the average LED is about 100 lumens/watt

I have about 30 of these. Probably gonna scrap them since we've converted all te fixtures to LED.

electronic ballast are boring