Splifferous
New Member
now thats real shit right there, bro! i always try to point out to people that EVERYTHING comes down to the finer details, and those pics illustrate that spot on.Hey Captain!
I was chatting up IG today and asked them if they had any information to share that might be useful on the circular shaped EFDL lamps you bought for reflectors. Darryl told me that the one thing to be careful of when you're building a reflector around these lamps is that the glass has a mercury amalgam tip or spur that comes out of the glass and will often times have a second spur that houses which is referred to as a 'gitter'. The gitter will have a tiny piece of indium in it that is used to help vaporize the mercury and attracts any carbon that might be in the glass from when it was sealed closed.
The biggest issue with inexpensive glass lamps from China can be illustrated in these photo's he sent me where an 'alibaba' 400 watt lamp was brought into their office for what the customer had hoped could be repaired. Of course there is no way to repair what happened to the glass. In this case it was just a very slight bump of the alibaba gitter spur that caused the lamp to lose vacuum and was rendered useless. The pictures below show the glass tube with the magnetic coils having been removed.
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In this picture you can see in the upper ring where the phosphor is missing. This is where the gitter had snapped off.
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What they found in this case was that the glass wall thickness from this manufacturer varied wildly from thick wall of .062" or 1.57mm to a thin wall of .026" or 0.66mm and at the gitter they measured only .034 or 0.87. Inda-Gro has a uniform wall thickness of 1.5mm. Since the gitter sticks out of the lamp this makes for a easily breakable appendage if you're not careful.
The following pictures show the tube variations and why you should be extra careful when constructing a reflector around these glass spurs. In the picture on the far left you can see with the naked eye how much of a difference there is in the wall thickness. Not only is it expensive when these get broken you do not want to get mercury on your plants or ever come in contact with it.
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On occasion you can actually get what you pay for. Quality glass and phosphors may run a bit more but in the end it's one less thing to worry about. Unless you really know the brand assume those babies can break without much effort. Hope that helps.
thanks for sharing that!