HID Lighting

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wiringthegorge

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I regularly perform maintenance for a commercial building that has an U/G parking garage that has a number of 150W MH canopy style fixtures. They currently are wired to remain "on" 24/7 - 365. I have been (not surprisingly) experiencing some rather violent lamp & ballast failures. Resulting in the replacement of a couple of fixtures entirely. During that process I noticed in the accompanying paperwork w/new fixture stating...
"In continuously operating systems(24/7), turn lamps off for at least 15 mins/week. Failure to do so increase the risk of violent lamp failure."
My question is, Being a U/G parking garage area needs to be illuminated 24/7, and it is a post-tension concrete structure, very difficult to discretely alter wiring, Can anyone think of a effective solution?
 
HID Lighting

Garage & 3-floors.
Main level commercial storefront, 2-floors residential (the parking garage is primarily for residences)
 
wiringthegorge said:
I regularly perform maintenance for a commercial building that has an U/G parking garage that has a number of 150W MH canopy style fixtures. They currently are wired to remain "on" 24/7 - 365. I have been (not surprisingly) experiencing some rather violent lamp & ballast failures. Resulting in the replacement of a couple of fixtures entirely. During that process I noticed in the accompanying paperwork w/new fixture stating...
"In continuously operating systems(24/7), turn lamps off for at least 15 mins/week. Failure to do so increase the risk of violent lamp failure."
My question is, Being a U/G parking garage area needs to be illuminated 24/7, and it is a post-tension concrete structure, very difficult to discretely alter wiring, Can anyone think of a effective solution?
Click to expand...

Preemptive relamping. Restarting the fixtures regularly just changes the failure mode - the lamps will simply fail to re-strike instead of exploding. They will last longer overall if you leave them on continuously, but when they do fail... it may not be pretty. So, how about setting up a replacement schedule at the rated lamp lifetime? They are unlikely to explode before the rated lifetime is up (violent failure usually happens well beyond the normal lifetime), and you can just go through and get it all done at once.
 
So you are saying, the solution will be that simple! from 1-10, what is your confidence level on this?
Building is rather new...(approx 4-5 yrs) just started experiencing the problems last year. Been operating on the "if it isn't broke - don't touch it"
premise to this point.
 
wiringthegorge said:
So you are saying, the solution will be that simple! from 1-10, what is your confidence level on this?
Building is rather new...(approx 4-5 yrs) just started experiencing the problems last year. Been operating on the "if it isn't broke - don't touch it"
premise to this point.
Click to expand...

4-5 years of continuous operation is 35,000-44,000 hours! Normal life for MH is 12-20k hours. If they are running way beyond that, you can expect failures to be ugly. Have all the lamps been replaced at least once?

MH lamps normally fail by not striking properly when turned on. They either fail to strike at all, or they cycle (repeatedly extinguishing during warmup). This striking problem can only happen if the lamp is turned off and back on! If the lamp is always on and always hot, it will just keep on going until it has deteriorated WAY more and burned for WAY longer. It may stay lit for thousands of hours after it is no longer capable of re-striking. The quartz wall erodes, and the arc tube fails eventually.

I bet if you turn off that whole installation, let it cool, and turn it back on you'll find that a significant number of lamps will not re-strike.

Relamping on a schedule will prevent this (except in the case of a defective lamp that blows up early). It also gets all the work done efficiently, with fewer calls, and on a schedule the owner can control.
 
I love it when stuff explodes. lets see some pics. tell the owners of the bldg that they are getting 2x their money's worth on the lights, but eventually they might have to face the possibility of buying someone's car or getting sued by a person in the wrong place at the wrong time, so they just need to weigh their chances and decide for themselves what constitutes negligence (?)

(its hard for me to believe that it would be impossible to shut off portions of the lighting at a time for maint ? )
 
wiringthegorge said:
I regularly perform maintenance for a commercial building that has an U/G parking garage that has a number of 150W MH canopy style fixtures. They currently are wired to remain "on" 24/7 - 365. I have been (not surprisingly) experiencing some rather violent lamp & ballast failures. Resulting in the replacement of a couple of fixtures entirely. During that process I noticed in the accompanying paperwork w/new fixture stating...
"In continuously operating systems(24/7), turn lamps off for at least 15 mins/week. Failure to do so increase the risk of violent lamp failure."
My question is, Being a U/G parking garage area needs to be illuminated 24/7, and it is a post-tension concrete structure, very difficult to discretely alter wiring, Can anyone think of a effective solution?
Click to expand...

So how long does it take you to replace the ballast? Isn't it at least the same time as the lamp would of required to be turned off?

Let's say that you had a lousy design and the adjacent lamps are not wired on alternate circuits which would allow you to turn some circuits off and provide reduced lighting and then turn the next one off and so on. So let the company bite the bullet and shut each floor down @ 2AM on alternating days after searched the floor for people and have somebody stand at the entrances for that 15 min.
 
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