How Long Does Neon Last?

Factual Questions
1

I am a photographer, I work in black and white. Since the late 1980’s I have had one sort of a darkroom or another set up where I lived, from basements to the actual, dedicated, real darkroom-with-a-sink that’s in my house today.

I also worked in the printing business for many years, and while we were closing down one of our shops wound up with a number of neon safelights as excess equipment.

The safelights are a dark red neon tubing, shaped somewhat like this:

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(The braces are the sections that run into the transformer. This diagram is as seen from below, looking up.)

The tubing is 24 inches on the long ends, 4 1/2 on the short end. The housing is a heavy steel hood, with the transformer housed on the top.

I’ve got five of them, they’re great safelights (nice, even illumination) and I was told they cost $500 to $600.00 new.

Now I got them in 1991, and these things were at least five or ten years old then.

So, how long can I expect the neon tubing to last? So long as I don’t break it, that is.

2

Neon is basically inert. The electrodes are probably tungsten. Therefore, the glass being “basically” impermeable, and the electrodes being non-reactive with neon (on any real level) the neon is not likely to escape nor the method of getting the juice to the neon to fail, the power supply will burn out before the tubes go bad. Here’s a link.

b.

3

The main problem with neon is the joints and vibration creating leakage at the glass-metal connections.
Although they run “cool” the glass and metal still expands and contracts. Rubber gasgets and bumpers dry out and shrink, ceasing to cushion.
Outdoor signs can run from 8-20 years. Indoors would be longer.