Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

fluoresent ballast and inductors resistance calc

Status
Not open for further replies.

kleintoren

New Member
Hi guys

I am learning electronics and want to know how to calculate the current
resistance a ballast/inductor has.

I have google'd the subject but get very high talk and confusing info - sorry
I'm not much of a maths boffin but come right if explained well.

I found many circuits using inductors to limit current and am now curious to its working and calculation.:rolleyes:

This question arose with the finding of 2 Sylvania F8W/T5/BL350 Blacklight tubes and starters and wanting to run them in series- the only ballast I could find in our district that was 16watt and is marked 1 x 16w T 0.200A and 1 x 16w TCDD 0.195A - I cannot find specs on the bulbs as yet, still googling for it.

Thanks for the help.
Can these tubes run on this?
 
Look up inductive reactance. That's the 'effective resistance' of the coil at a given frequency of AC power.
 
That was easy!

Knowing the right terminology helps - that was 123. now I understand.

Thank you very much! Getting there one concept at a time...
 
There's a lot of terminology to take in, once you get it all down though it's no different than talking 'regular' english =) Google and wikipedia are your friends, especially wikipedia, I've spent many hours on their looking up common terms and following links and looking up all the terms in the etc.. etc.. After reading for long enough and studying the plethora of projects out there on the net you pick it up after a while.
 
I have learnt a lot in the last few months - build some amazing gadgets whilst making many mistakes and often frustrated when things go wrong, but i'm a hands on person and it works for me - started playing with PIC Microprocessors last week - Really enjoying it :D- want to try avr's next.

The different capacitors (what they look like) and where and when to use them still confuse me a bit - I know the basic types so far - built a 100watt amp by trial and error - working fine but i'm sure some caps might need changing - started with opamps yesterday - I know I got it backwards - 1st opamps then amps - didn't know til yesterday - makes sense now. :rolleyes:

Got my balast built - tubes are running nicely - my caculations was a few percent out but I think my construction was to blame - thanks for all the info and terminology - its getting easier every day now! :D
 
F8's have a run excitation voltage of about 60 vac. Calculate XL to yield this voltage for given bulb wattage current (bulb watts = bulb run current times 60vac).

Running florescents in series is not advisable. You will have issues when one starts before other that can damage one of the bulbs.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top