The theater is getting retrofitted with all new LED fixtures. I'm scavenging fun stuff. like about 20 ceramic steel commercial "pie pan" pendants which will be my new house lights.
We had about 25 mercury vapor "bay" lights. They have fuse holders that I scavenged. We're also doing all of our emergency egress lighting so I scavenged the "ear" lights off of them as well as the 6v batteries. The transformers were small and really don't help me much. I don't have much need to drop 120/277v down to 7.5v
Is there any reason I should keep the ballasts from the bay lights? Can I do anything fun with them? What would you guys keep?
Can’t be of much help, but man, that’s freaking COOL!
The ballasts may have some scrap value. Worth checking out anyway.
Actually (since we are a poor-as-heck non profit theater) we negotiated a slightly lower cost if they kept it for scrap. The guys who are here doing the work told me to keep whatever I wanted, so anything I keep is a bonus freebie. With the cost of scrap being so low these days, it isn't worth my time for $25 worth of copper and aluminum. They have bins full of this stuff and they can make a little on it.
So for now I kept the fuse holders, the old 120v pie pans, and the batteries and ears from the exit lights, but I just wondered if there was some cool effect I could get with big ballasts. Like they do with microwave transformers to burn artistic things into wood, I wondered if I could hook five of these together and make a Vandergraff generator, or hook all 25 of them together and alter space-time, or 10 in parallel to make a time machine and save He-Man from Skeletor's wrath.
Ok, not really, just wondering if they had any value as a functional theatrical piece.
Not sure it the mercury vapour ballasts will do it but I made a bad b-movie-esque Jacobs Ladder with a scavenged neon sign transformer and a couple coathangers.
