He was riffing on the Pos/Neg part of your post. AC power doesn’t work that way. For 1 phase it is hot and common or neutral.
DC is pos/neg.
Yea! Sorry, my bad. Left over from my auto engineering days.
Do all fluorescent fixtures with magnetic ballasts need starters? In my house growing up in the 1980s we had four different fluorescent light fixtures of varying ages in the basement. The oldest one which definitely had a starter took four bulbs that were either 18" or 24" long and had fluted chrome covers over the sides where the electronics were. It looked like something from the 1950s, and was the type where each bulb would blink randomly a couple of times before starting up fully. The other fixtures weren’t the instant start electronic ballasts like we have now, they still had magnetic ballasts, but when you’d turn them on the bulbs would sort of fade up to full brightness in one or two seconds, longer if one of the bulbs was going bad, but there was no blinking. Those were more typical 48" fixtures with one or two bulbs. Would they have had starters too, just of a different type, or something else?
I installed several tube and circle type florescent fixtures in the early 2000’s and none had starters. I don’t believe any fixtures made in the last 25 years or so have them.
Explanation of starters at Lightbulbs Direct
Ok but that’s after the time frame I’m looking at (electronic ballasts started coming on the market in the 1990s and quickly took over). I understand how starters work but was asking about when certain technologies related to them came into and out of use.
You can now get electronic units for fluorescent lights.
If you want to keep the more gentle warmth of say a fluorescent warm white just remove the old fluorescent fittings, ballast and starter and replace with an electronic unit.
You still keep the original glow of the fluorescent and have the benefit of “instant on” no more flickering on startup.
Example of electronic unit for fluorescent circular light.
Sorry won’t let me upload an image, but a Google search should give the general idea of what the units look like.
Web link seems to work:-
https://www.lamptan.co.th/t/TYPE/Electronic-Ballast-&-transformer?price_high
Why are you suggesting this?
It would be far easier and cheaper to replace the unit with an LED fixture.
LEDs come in warm option. That should duplicate everything your talking about and far simpler.
I’m not really suggesting anything, just putting options out there.
In my case I have several warm circular fluorescent fittings round the house with a box of spare tubes somewhere, so it makes sense for me to keep the existing tubes but use electronic units rather than throw them all out.
Each to their own.
No, there’s a newer (but still obsolete) ballast tech called rapid start, and there’s also instant start magnetic ballasts - those were more commonly used on the 8-foot monster tubes used in warehouses and stores as those tubes only had a single pin contact at each end. Neither used starters.
Since I started this whole discussion, I guess I should tell you how it turned out. I took down the ancient fluorescent one and got a simple LED shop light from Lowes and put it up in its place. It was super cheap and easy to do, so thanks to whoever it was that first suggested the LED light.
Your welcome, (first reply in thread)