Fluorescent Lighting Dimming

[confused]

Hi,

Maybe a long shot, but does anyone know of anyway of dimming/ flickering the intensity of a fluoresecnt strip light?

 

Thanks

[Robin D]

If it's a standard tube the most likely answer is you can't do it effectively, (although reducing the voltage will usually dim the output some way before the tube just goes out. (or worse, begins to oscillate).

 

There are some tubes that are more controllable (mainly of the cold cathode type, and some fixtures/ballasts that will work with proprietary controllers from the same manufacturers but as far as I'm aware, little interoperability between suppliers. There are also controllers that claim to dim whole rigs, but in my experience, these are very expensive and not particularly reliable. (One university conference centre I attended recently was fitted with one and as the lights were brought down for a presentation to start it set up a serious oscillation on a couple of tubes resulting in a fellow attendee going into an epileptic fit!)

 

Specialist stuff best avoided in my book but I'm ready to be shot down in flames on this.

 

Robin

[law99]

We recently installed some of these in our venue. It was really simple. You would need T5 dimmable fluorescents (Make sure its the dimmable ballast version - Fixture and tubes).

 

The ballasts take a 1-10v signal input, along with a normal 240v supply.

 

We purchased a mode electronics box to convert DMX to 6 different 1-10v outputs (zones). Each signal output can easily have over 50 T5 ballasts, so as you can imagine you can get alot of units connected up.

 

It is similar to this: https://shop.strato.de/epages/61156296.sf/e...bjectID=7796744 ; just about half the price!

 

The T5's are fairly expensive to start off with but work quite well!

[menghini222]

This might be of help ....

 

http://www.blue-room.org.uk/index.php?show...t=0&start=0

 

 

Menghini222 ;)

[adam2]

Most types of flourescent lamp can be dimmed, not just the newer T5 ones, the use of special dimming ballasts is essiential, the lamps are standard types.

Some types use a 0 to 10 volt signal, others use a digital input signal, different makes of dimming ballast are available but are often not interchangeable.

 

Special ballasts to work with a standard dimmer and T12 lamps used to be available (I used to make them!)

These have the drawback of needing a 4 or 5 wire supply to the fitting, fixed live, dimmed live, fixed neutral, dimmed neutral, protective earth. Now considered obsolete due to the declining availability of T12 lamps.