I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet but the recent hardware upgrade available to the DR canister H10 light head to a 14 Watt ballast applies to the UK 100 HID Light cannon as well. (This is using the Welch Allyn B10R001 ballast and M10N003 lamp.)
Having recently updated my H10 to this ballast, I decided to update my UK HID as well. Its a simple update, gives a noticeable boost to the light output and makes the light rather NiMh friendly.
My UK is older and when I switched to rechargeable batteries I noticed that there was a 5 to 10 second flicker period during start-up. Switching to the newer ballast made the start-up almost immediate. (Granted its possible my original ballast might have been showing its age.)
I use third party NiMh batteries (6000 mah according to the packaging). Prior to the update I was getting almost 3 hrs in 60*F water. After the update I'm getting almost exactly 2 hrs. This seems to be in line with what UK indicates as burn time for their rechargeable batteries (also NiMh) but with the standard 10W ballast.
Note that this ballast allows you to also wire it to work at the normal 10W mode if the operating duration is more important than the extra wattage.
Anyway, I thought I'd mention this DIY update path for those of us who's UK 100's are past warranty.
Having recently updated my H10 to this ballast, I decided to update my UK HID as well. Its a simple update, gives a noticeable boost to the light output and makes the light rather NiMh friendly.
My UK is older and when I switched to rechargeable batteries I noticed that there was a 5 to 10 second flicker period during start-up. Switching to the newer ballast made the start-up almost immediate. (Granted its possible my original ballast might have been showing its age.)
I use third party NiMh batteries (6000 mah according to the packaging). Prior to the update I was getting almost 3 hrs in 60*F water. After the update I'm getting almost exactly 2 hrs. This seems to be in line with what UK indicates as burn time for their rechargeable batteries (also NiMh) but with the standard 10W ballast.
Note that this ballast allows you to also wire it to work at the normal 10W mode if the operating duration is more important than the extra wattage.
Anyway, I thought I'd mention this DIY update path for those of us who's UK 100's are past warranty.
