The Lamp Room

https://www.ledlights4you.co.uk/blog/ar ... ire-hazard

"Fitting over 10 years old are all suspect" ...yeah, right
The fitting in the photo has clearly been very severely abused to end up in that state, still didn't catch fire though did it!

They took the 10 year figure straight out of ballast manufacturer's ratings. However they twisted it to their liking. Originally that's just an MTBF figure and "F" does not stand for "Fire"



I have seen a LED fitting which dripped burning plastic into a room. Have seen the fitting at my wholesaler, when it was returned by the customer. It was a TV backlight style assembly (single LED chips under wide angle round lenses) enclosed with a super thin PMMA bowl

The current carrying traces on the PCB strip (powered from a driver that was labeled as SELV which isn't even isolated, and have near 200Voc) arced around the PCB edge (due to grossly inadequate clearance, typical China style) to the metal luminaire body

It was apparently installed on a circuit not protected by RCD, so the arcing went on with the best conditions possible (DC, 200V, current limited) and tracked a lot of the PCB to carbon. Some drip or spark from it then ignited the bowl and burned a nice burning hole in it, with visible drips from the burning of the plastic



Another close call was a whole install with some 20..30 LED panels in a second hand book shop (read : room filled to the top with fire hazard). The drivers of all of them burned out simultaneously with through melting of the plastic case, apparently due to an open neutral or something similar. The age of LEDs is irrelevant, they could have been installed yesterday

I can totally imagine the same happening with plastic PF capacitors in Fluorescents under the same circumstances. Now, Fluorescents do come in a a variety of fitting designs, but most of them don't have gear components laying loose and openly in the drop ceiling air space

I guess such capacitor could drip fire into the room through a prismatic or icepack PMMA diffuser (as well as setting the diffusr itself on fire, which would drip even more) same as with that LED thing, but at least here prismatic diffusers over bare gear were not common, and icepacks rarely had capacitors at all. With the most common CAT louvre made of thin aluminum, the plastic would pool in its folds but probably not come down into the room. However, it would not entirely block any sparks shot from a short circuit

With CAT fittings there is commonly a different problem : Reflectors do get damaged or lost, and often in an office building reflectors from "invisible" rooms like some archive room (read : fire hazard) would be taken to repair fittings in more inhabited areas. This adds to usually bad maintenance of lighting in such rooms, many stuck starters and crispy hot ballasts ready to fail with shower of sparks, only getting some attention (if that) when the last tube in the entire room EOLs

Here too the age of luminaires is irrelevant. Capacitors will melt and explode at any age, with or without being subjected to overvoltage. Magnetic ballasts are rated to survive a stuck starter for a month (once / cumulative over the ballast's life) (official spec from Eltam), where "survive" means it may be crispy to the point where it will short out if disturbed, so just carefully replace the tube and starter without disturbing it (unofficial explanation by Ash)

The trend seems to be that more and more nonsense is being published by "professional" providers.

These statements are very likely to be accepted as fact by an increasing number of people without reservation.

According to the motto: "Yes, the provider (the idiots) wrote it on their website, so it must be true."