No idea what the white light is you have. The little neon indicator lamps are the amber/orange color with two electrodes in the clear bulb.
Flickering heater?
- Thread starter Brooke Owens
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Hello; Neon is a gas. You evacuate (vacuum out) a glass tube of all air and then replace the air with neon gas, seal the tube and have a conductor imbedded at opposite ends of the tube. High voltage electricity is fed to the conductors. The high voltage "excites" the neon atoms causing electrons to do a quantum jump to a higher orbit (Quantum Physics here in a fish forum). The electron cannot stay at the higher orbit and jumps back to where it was. That jump back releases the energy absorbed before and that released energy is emitted as photons ( basically light). Neon absorbs the energy in discrete amounts and releases it in discrete amounts which for neon happens to be red.
I use to have sets of such tubes in my physical science lab filled with a variety of pure gases. Each gas has a particular color when excited with high voltage electricity.
That bright white light may be the arc created when the contact points open or close. An actual spark of electricity which crosses an air gap. Some heaters use bi-metal strips as a thermostat. The two metals are fused together (bi-metal). One metal expands at a slightly different rate when heated than the other metal and this causes the strip to bend. Water gets too cool and the strip bends over to close the contact points and allow electricity to flow thru the heating element. The water gets warm enough and the strip bends back the other way and breaks the contact. Either right before or right after contact is made or broken, then the electricity can jump a small air gap with a spark. This may be what you see as white. It should be a flash or series of flashes.
