How UV Light Works And Why Does Your Ultraviolet Light Keep Beeping?

Posted by ff on December 27th, 2019

Contemporary UV lighting for HVAC systems looks like fluorescent lamps typically utilized in commercial office buildings. The two kinds of lamps have similar form and operate using indistinguishable electrochemical processes: a electrical discharge via argon gas strikes mercury vapor to generate a photon with a wavelength of 253.7 nm (typically called UV-C), which is invisible.

Unlike fluorescent lamps, however, UV-C lamps' glass sheeting is a highly engineered, translucent glass, allowing the 253.7 nm wavelength to carry unfiltered (fluorescent lamps use ordinary glass that's coated with phosphors on its inside surface).

A typical germicidal ultraviolet light for cooling and heating systems produces about 90% of its energy at the UV-C wavelength. Approximately four percent of its energy is given up as heat, and the remainder (~5% ) is in the visible light range that's medium blue in colour, which results in the argon gas at the envelope.

The similarities between UV-C lamps and fluorescent lamps give many benefits. Both can be assembled on the same type of machine and at the exact same form factors, decreasing manufacturing, packaging, and transport costs to cancel much higher material prices. They can also be saved and recycled in precisely the exact same method. UV-C lamps are usually warranted to supply more than 80 percent of their first output over a 9,000-hour period.

Trying to conduct UV-C lamps longer than 9,000 hours produces individual lamp outages, therefore maintenance personnel should monitor them regularly to know what to substitute. Replacing lamps as they burn requires a larger stock of replacement lamps for when they begin to fail in larger numbers.

Why Does My UV lighting Maintain Beeping?

Your Own UV or Ultraviolet Disinfection System is beeping because there is something incorrect, so one of these things has put it into alarm.

1) The timer has triggered since it's been about a year since the lamp has been changed and now it's time for a brand new one.

3) The lamp burned out or is defective.

4) The controller is defective.

5) You have a monitored system and the sensor has triggered the alarm as your water quality is below the acceptable level.

6) There was a power failure and the ballast triggered the alert once the electricity came back on.

You want to see that the alarm is on for a reason and it perhaps that, if you have a monitored UV system, the alarm is telling you your water has gotten so discoloured or murky the UV will not be able to kill any germs present. Your detector might also be dirty, so check that first.

The next step to do, assuming that your ultraviolet light ballast does not have an LED readout with gesture, would be to push the button on the front of the ultraviolet light ballast to see if this stops the beeping. If it does, it means you are nearing the conclusion of this lamps 9,000 hours or one year of support life and it's time to replace. This will shut this up for one week, but if you don't replace the lamp after one week it will begin beeping again to remind you. After one month you won't be able to stop the beeping if you don't replace the lamp.

Resetting the timer varies by manufacturer and you can take a look at my other UV videos to show you how you can do it for your own brand. But generally, the ribbon change reminder timer is reset by disconnecting the UV power supply in the AC source, waiting for fifteen minutes and reconnecting to the AC source with all the timer button depressed. You can confirm that it's reset by pushing and releasing the button and counting the number of times the red indicator light flashes, when it strikes 12 times, that usually means the timer is reset and there are 12 weeks of life left before the lamp needs to be replaced.

Incidentally, if your Excelight or UV Dynamics UV process isn't in alarm mode once you replace the ribbon you will not have the ability to reset the timer so you need to place it into alarm mode by unplugging the device for 5 minutes, then removing the old lamp, and with all the older lamp removed, plug the ultraviolet light ballast back in until it begins beeping. Then unplug and install the brand new UV lamp and then reset.

Sometimes, following a power failure, you may get beeping, unplug the controller, wait 1 minute and plug it back , if that doesn't fix it try to reset the ultraviolet light ballast.