Fluorescent ballasts anyone?

And you expect to get taken seriously now ?

Graham

Best I can find is two Philips products...

G36T6H and G36T6VH.

The G36T6H is a nominally 39 watt lamp with nominal length 36 inches and supposedly a germicidal lamp with "high" ozone production. Philips product number is 046677-28888-6.

The G36T6VH is a nominally 39 watt lamp with nominal length 37 inches (including lampholders for this one) and supposedly a germicidal lamp with "very high" ozone production. Philips product number is 046677-28887-3.

Maybe ask bulbs.com if they can get you any. Both are supposedly "slimline" single pin models, presumably "instant start", and I recommend getting an engineer at Philips to recommend a ballast for you.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Yeah, they're fine and I do also have two of those but unfortunately my, sorry for an expression, "ozone generator" is 33-1/2" long so they don't fit in it. The original bulb was called UWQ-825T5/40W and it's 30" long.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I don't believe in exclusive ballasts for $150 each and Philips engineers to buy a mere ballast. This is NOT rocket science, it's just a low pressure bulb that's only difference from a regular fluorescent bulb is lack of luminophore. I don't want Philips, Sylvania, GE etc. bulbs and matching ballasts because one never knows when they start caring of our health and discontinue those bulbs or replace them with something "even better". A want _a_ bulb and _a_ ballast that I can buy in _a_ department store.

They do on sci.engr.lighting.

Thomas

I don't see germicidal lamps in department stores or home centers, and rarely in any hardware stores. Also, the ones more interchangeable with ordinary fluorescent lamps appear to me tend to be made with a kind of glass that passes the 254 nm main germicidal line but blocks the 185 nm ozone-forming line.

I *would* check to see if either of the lamps that I mentioned above are current product of 2 or better still all 3 of the "Big 3". That would indicate it being a more "industry-standard" lamp with availability likely well into the future, although still being a specialty one.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Yep, _all_ those interchangeable with regular fluorescents are of "non-ozone" variety.

They are. But, unfortunately, they are longer than I need :((

However I'm seriously considering building my own ozonator with those lamps. They seem to be available and they are relatively cheap.

Sergey,

I was under the impression UV couldn't make a very strong ozone concentration, and you needed corona discharge to reach 3% or more. Is there a special reason you want to use lamps besides cost and availability? Regards,

Mike Monett

I can't imagine how lamps can make ozone in liquid water, no matter what the wavelength, or transparency of the envelope. Maybe it's just germicidal lamps and the water goes through the chamber and gets disinfected by the UV on its way through.

The fact that he says he had to start digging, just to replace a couple of germidicadal lamps, sounds a little suspicious to me.

Thanks, Rich

You are right, UV germicidal lamps are used to treat the water directly. Unfortunately, the combination of low power and short contact time means they are often not very effective. I have seen the cartridges you have to replace periodically jammed full of bacteria. Apparently they were sunbathing in the light:)

However, Sergey's application appears to be different. According to this url, air is passed over the bulb then the ozone is injected into the water:

Regards,

Mike Monett

FWIW, I have a bulk EPROM eraser, with about a 9" "germicidal" bulb, and when it's running, I can smell the ozone. I can also sometimes smell ozone when I'm walking past one of the weldors, but since they're using inert- gas shielded arcs, I'm surmising that the ozone is made by the UV from the arc dissociating some O2 in the air, like in the stratosphere. :-)

Cheers! Rich

UV lamps don't make ozone in liquid water. You've never seen a pool, have you?

Ozonator is a simple closed box with one or more ozone producing bulbs. It has a hole at one end where it takes air and a fitting with a pipe on the opposite end. Something (pool pump, venturi injector etc.) sucks air through that pipe and injects it into water flow. So when pump is on it makes air flow through the ozonator and to the water. Ozonator is connected in parallel with the pump. Two 30" 40W High Ozone bulbs generate something like

Exactly. That direct UV treatment with UV-C might be enough for an aquarium or may be a small spa. It doesn't work at all for big pools.

Nope, they are fine. And this is not supposed to be a "shock" treatment, it's a long process... Pump runs for circa 12 hours every day so does ozon generator so after a couple of weeks there is enough ozone in the pool to prevent algae appearance.

Well, I'm glad you are happy it seems to be working. But there is no ozone in the water. The half-life of ozone in water is measured in minutes.

Many municipalities now use high concentrations of ozone instead of chlorine to kill bacteria in drinking water. Since the ozone decomposes back into oxygen so rapidly, the ozone has no residual disinfecting power.

As a consequence, the EPA has dictated that municipalities must start using chloramines, which is chlorine combined with ammonia. This is a long- lasting disinfectant, but it wreaks havoc with boilers and other processes that require pure water. Ontario limits the chloramines to about 4%. Some other states have limts that may go as high as 6%. This is a lot of chloramine. Ordinary household bleach is 5.25% by weight.

The problem is chloramines are difficult to detect unless you use a total chlorine test. The are difficult to remove, and distilling and ion exchange has no effect. Apparently the only way to remove them is with fresh activated charcoal, which doesn't last long and is very expensive. Regards,

Mike Monett

I haven't seen a trace of algae when this thing were working. And I even wasn't that hard on chemicals. Now, when it's dead for something like 2 months, I have a substantial algae growth, with green spots on pool wals that I can't even remove despite weekly chlorine "shock" treatments, heavy algaecide usage and lot of other efforts.

Yes, I do know ozone is unstable. But injecting ozone in the pool water for a couple of weeks gets rid of that nasty vegetation. I had not read it in advertizements, I can clearly see it in my own backyard.

As you mentioned earlier, you are pumping the water through the ozone injector. This kills bacteria and algae that come in direct contact with the ozone. No problem with that. It obviously works.

I just took exception to your statement there was ozone in the water, and explained why that was not true. The half-life of ozone in water is very short, and it decreases with temperature. Regards,

Mike Monett

Sure. But it also takes water a fraction of second to go past that injector into the pool. That means most of ozone does make it into the pool itself where it becomes oxygen and atomic oxigen that is extremely strong oxydizer. It not only kills algae, bacteria and viruses; it also cleans water of various organic contaminations.

Yeah, I didn't mean that pool's water is saturated with bubbling O3, I meant it reaches some equilibrium where that constant sip of ozone is enough to sustain it clean of further contamination. That's also how chlorine works in the pool--you put a tablet in a floating chlorinator and it slowly releases it into the water.

And unlike drinking water that is running water, pool is a big pond where the same water stays all the time. It constantly circulates through the filter, gets ozone etc. So one does _NOT_ have to pump lots of ozone to instantly kill everything alive in the water. It's OK to put just enough to kill those microorganisms faster than they multiply. Even a little bit faster. There is no rush, it may take several weeks until pool environment stabilises, that's OK. It's a long process to get the pool properly balanced...

BTW, that ozone does not exclude chlorine usage. It just reduces it. And they work very well together. One should've had to use so much chlorine to kill algae that it would've been impossible to get near the pool without a gas mask. And ozone alone can not kill everything, those ozone generators are not powerful enough.

If it is hard to get 220V ballasts in the US then I would suggest getting some ballasts from a European E-bay seller or something like that. There are some German guys selling lots of interesting lighting equipment. As far as I know, the fluorescent tubes are the same, just the ballasts are different for 220V-240V countries and 120V countries. Perhaps someone else could confirm or deny this.

Chris

If I understand your discription correctly then you might try this as a silly idea.

Go and buy one of those carbon fiber brushes that they sell for cleaning dust off vinyl records, I'm sure they still make them. Make sure it is one with a metal body.

Build a box around it using balsa wood and attach some of that aluminium mesh that is used to repair holes in car body work. Build something like a

Presto, your own ozone generator. I built one once and accidently left it running in by bedroom overnight. When I woke up the next morning the room stank of ozone and I had swollen eylids. Wicked.

DNA

And AFAIK ozone and water turns into hydrogen peroxide - H2O2. Which you could just add to the water.

Thomas