I picked up a couple of the electronic ballast from Lowes yesterday.
One of them works on either AC or DC. Voltage from 120 to 277 vac and 120 to 150 dc.
The name plate lable says at 120 volts that 1 F40 bulb will cause .35 amp line draw. Thats 42 watts. That means the electronic ballast is only consumming 2 watts itselft.
How do the small voltage converters in the low voltage CFLs do in eficientcy compaired to this?
I actully conected 2 of the F40 bulbs to this ballast it it works fine.
I tryed the ballast on a 150 DC power supply. It works great and changing the polarity on the power input leads has no effect on its operation.
I us a 120 volt battery bank in my stores RE system so these ballest will work great. Along with my 120 volt DC aircompresor, grinder, vacum, drill, router, bench grinder and more.
Forget the inverter, how needs it and its losses.
Could we design one of these electronic ballast to operate the F40 bolbs from 12 volts?
JK TAS Jerry