How on Earth Did it Fry?

I think it fried last night. I came back from town, and the light was off. I thought well, "loose connection" I looked inside, to see the ballast like this, and burn marks. as you see here.

Was this ballast from the fallen M-250R2?

Yeah. It worked fine until now, now it is fried.

Wow, that's nasty! As much as we love our electrical stuff, we ought to watch out when they malfunction!

I guess the ballast might have overheated and shorted out or maybe water got it the fixture. I agree, fixing it would be kind of hard because it's really hard to take the ballast apart.

I think it has a ticking bomb in the form of two adjacent turns shorted together as a result of impact on the winding surface and/or wated soaked inside. Such ticking bombs are asking for troubles - you are lucky that it only "stopped working" and didn't start fire...

I wouldn't mess with it, I would just replace it.

yeah looks too burnt to fix, even though if it was fixed, it wouldn't last long due to weaker coils......it really looks overheated...may have smoked with that part kinda glowing....then broke short....ive seen nastier looking ballasts though...

I have a 200 watt HPS ballast just like yours from one of my M25R2s that fried the same way.

I have a H38 ballast that is fried like yours (minus the burning marks LOL) and I couldn't do much for it. Now it's a sample for my ballast box project LOL. You can always take it apart for the scrap copper. And at least it didn't cost anything!

Vince....your ballast has no burnt coils...it may not be burnt...it may just be shorted or have a broken coil...that may be easy to fix...Here's the thing, if the ballast is not operating correctly (but it may have voltage coming out of the socket) then the ignitor will not strike....that was the case for my L-150....so I did some experiment...I started the lamp using a BBQ ignitor (while the lamp was warm (warm restrike because I didn't turn it on on another ballast to full brightness) and im telling you it INSTANTLY went on REAL BRIGHT WHITE!!! It could have exploded...because it was EXTREMELY overdriven at about 120 volts instead of 55 volts!!!!!!!!

A shorted probe start ballast will just KILL THE LAMP AND PROBABLY KILL YOU

If the ballast rattles really loud when light hits the photocell and shuts off when it sees darkness, it might be shorted out.

Although this is not about HID, but still related to ballasts, let me tell you something. Today I removed an old 8 lamp preheat fixture from a commercial building, two of the four ballasts were severely fried, with tar and PCBs still slowly ooozing out from one of them. The other fried ballast had two holes burned into the casing, and there were flame marks on the fixture around that ballast. I am still amazed that the building hasn't burned down!

And how about some pictures Dave?

I posted a pic of the ballasts just now, I hope to have pics of the fixture tomorrow.

Didn`t some one on LG say the ballast looked bad, maybe they where right