Getting Your Krones S24 and Sidel Lamps Right
Keeping the heat steady in a PET blowing machine is a pain if your lamps don’t fit perfectly. If the physical size or the electrical pull is off, you’re asking for trouble. We built our replacement lamps to solve that—whether you’re running old-school SBO platforms, the newer Matrix series, or anything in the Sidel lineup. The electrical side of things Here’s the deal: a “drop-in” replacement actually has to drop in. If you toss a lamp with the wrong resistance into a Krones S24, you’re likely to either burn out the tube or leave the preform too cold to mold. We spend a lot of time calibrating the filaments. Why? Because if the heat density isn’t spot on, you get “cold spots.” And cold spots mean your bottle walls end up uneven, which is the last thing you want when you’re staring at a batch of rejects. Quartz and the “click” We use heavy-wall quartz glass. It’s tough. It can handle the shock of heating up and cooling down over and over without cracking. And we made sure the connectors match the OEM specs. You know that feeling when you have to force a part into a socket and you’re worried it’s going to snap? We hate that. Our lamps slide right in. No forcing, no loose contacts, and no scary arcing. You just pull the old one out, wire the new one up, and you’re back in business—no need to drill or modify your machine’s chassis. The trade-off (The part most people miss) Now, you might be tempted to go with higher wattage lamps to speed things up. Sure, you’ll get faster cycles and more throughput. But there’s a catch. Higher wattage puts way more stress on your cooling blowers. Your oven’s ambient temperature will start to climb. If you push it too far, your preforms might actually start to deform before they even hit the blow mold. Just keep a close eye on your cooling system if you decide to crank up the power. At the end of the day, we just focus on the physics. We get the dimensions right, the heat transfers correctly, and the lamps simply work.