AEI Fleetwood

New to the collection with huge thanks to Claire is this phenomenal AEI Fleetwood for four 30w T8 fluorescent tubes. Installed on the old Burton Market Hall, the lantern would have seen minimal maintenance aside from the odd relamp here and there when the tubes reached EOL, before eventually just being switched off and left abandoned.

It appears as though it started sagging downwards at some point owing to rust marks at the front of the bowl. This allowed water to pool up inside the spigot, allowing the bracket to rust eventually splitting the aluminium completely. I had to cut the bracket off to give me the room to drill down inside the spigot to break the rust and corrosion out, eventually allowing the stump top cleanly fall out.

The wiring is expectedly an absolute rats nest, with four ballasts and quickstart transformers, its certainly been squeezed in, much like a few random conversions I'd done.... Anyways, the condition was poor, crispy and split wires were visible all over. I was informed upon acquisition that only tube lit when power was applied, since these QS units rely on as little resistance as possible, I decided to totally start again and rewired the entire lantern, a task that ended up taking six hours due to the complexity and fiddly ness of the layout. It honestly doesn't surprise me that fluorescent ended up falling out of favour in the end, the fragility and complexity of the wiring being a key reason for their demise.

After wiring, only one thing was left, putting power to it, and as I expected, only one tube lit. After a hell of a lot of fiddling around, I managed to get three tubes out of four lit. I've diagnosed the issue to be the RF capacitors degrading over time being the cause. One had actually melted, and since I've removed it to prevent it turning into a candle, no tube will strike on that circuit. I intend now to replace all four which should return striking reliability to the lantern.