Home Page › Forums › Modeling the Missouri Pacific, Texas & Pacific, etc › Mopac or Texas & Pacific layouts › I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011 › Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011
Not a setback exactly, but for sure a big inconvenience…..
During the Gulf Coast ‘winter’ I often leave the lights on in the train room 24/7. Not all of them, but in the corridor at least, sometimes others. I have been known to only turn the lights off when I’m leaving town for a few days. This is a bad habit, and during the summer I’m conscious of heat buildup (even though these are T8 fluorescents) and try harder to turn them off. I think I got started this way with the T12s in the old train room which had the older style ballasts and often took an hour or two to start if I’d turn them off. The T8s don’t have that problem but….
So I got bit, big time. We had a lightning strike somewhere nearby at 2 am yesterday. I slept through it, like I slept on the floor of the hallway during the last hurricane. My wife, of course, didn’t. I’m aware of the damage that other lightning strikes have done around here, blowing up transformers and a few other things. I think it was a lightning strike that caught my gas meter on fire and almost burned down the house, starting with the train room, several years ago.
This lightning strike knocked out a few things around the house, like the living room radio, but no actual damage. Except…
I’ve blown nine T8 fixtures. All the lights in the corridor, where I’m currently working on scenery, and about half the lights in the other rooms. The storage room has CFLs, no damage there and none to the couple of incandescent floodlights, which of course were all on also.
Took a fixture apart, no of course there’s no reset on the ballast. I’ve seen a site that shows how to check if a ballast is dead, so I should do that next. But, at least I can identify the manufacturer of these ballasts and looks like I can order some online. If I can replace the ballasts, I’m definitely not taking down nine fixtures and replacing them.
Will I learn from this? Ask me later. Was I expecting a lightning strike in January? This is the Gulf Coast, I should have known that anything can happen here.
(Author’s note: I ended up replacing nine ballasts with a GE one, seems to be better than the OEM one in the fixtures originally. I also installed a whole-house surge protector, which mounts on the main junction box. Still lost a few hours of modeling time to this.)
Ron Merrick
