Driveway Mercury Vapor Lamp Problems

[hucker]

I have one of those Mercury Vapor lights in our drive way that runs off of a light sensor. I set it up to run off of a spare inline UPB dimmer module that I had so I could have it run only until midnight instead of all night. I set it up to be on/off instead of dimming. It stopped working after a few days. Is there some reason why the UPB fixtures might be causing this problem?

 

[ano]

It wasn't the UPB switch causing the problem, it was the mercury vapor light that zapped the switch. UPD dimmers are designed to control resistive loads and very mild inductive loads. A mercury vapor light is neither. Get a UPB relay module, in addition to a surge suppressor, and wire the surge suppressor across the lamp.