Lamp life test: Arlen EFS600 vs Osram ST111

A couple of years ago I ran an experiment to see just how much difference there is between an electronic starter and a traditional glow-bottle starter in terms of starting performance.

For the test I used a Coughtrie SFB16 with two Sylvania F8WT5 lamps. Each lamp is running on it's own control gear with one lamp using an Osram ST111 and the other using an Arlen EFS600.

In order to remove normal run-time from the equation and to maximise the number of starts each lamp makes I rigged up a timer set to run the lamps on for 15 minutes and then off for 15 minutes on a continuous repeating cycle. That means each hour the lamps clock up 30 minutes run time and two starts.

The lamps in the photo is shown after 4128 hours which means each lamp has clocked up 8256 starts. Total on time is only 2064 hours so you can see the effect the high number of switch-ons is affecting the lamp with the glowbottle starter and how it isn't affecting the lamp which has an Arlen EFS600 electronic starter at all! The lamp still looks brand new.

The lamp on the glowbottle starter failed a few days after this photo was taken and began the endless flashing while the lamp on the pulse starter still looked brand new!