Alternatives to Commercial Iron Ballasts?
While the circuit diagrams of iron ballasts may resemble those of common power transformers, I wouldn’t recommend attempting to use these as ballasts unless you really know how to implement controlled impedance behavior in a non-current limited transformer. Ballasts are rather special and unless you are willing to blow a lot of fluorescent lamps, transformers, fuses, and circuit breakers, just go with commercial ballasts. 🙂 Even for small lamps using a glow starter or separate starting switche, while it’s certainly possible to use an ordinary inductor rather than something labeled “ballast”, it’s still probably not a good idea from fire safety and liability considerations. • Back to Sam’s F-Lamp FAQ Table of Contents. Specialty Fluorescent Lamp Types All Sorts of Less Conventional Lamps In addition to the boring white ones (OK, well ‘white’ does come in various colors!), other interesting types of lamps include all sorts of real colors (red, green, blue, yellow), blacklight lamps, ger
