Salon owners already know to recondition their acrylics a few times a year, but the average home tanning bed owner probably doesn’t realize how important this is, so I wanted to create an article that covers the basics.

Remember that your acrylics are made of acrylic, not plexiglas. That is one the biggest misconceptions in the industry. Plexiglas blocks about 97% of all UV that hits it, so it would be very unacceptable as a sheild for your lamps in a tanning bed.

Acrylic is a great but one of the problems with acrylic is that it breaks down when it is exposed to UV. Yes, the same material that transmits UV will slowly begin to develop an invisible film that blocks UV. Your acrylics LOOKS clear, but in the UV range, they begin getting “foggy” from the first time you use them. To remedy this, you have to recondition them from time to time.

The most commonly used product for reconditioning acrylic material is Novus. This isn’t limited to acrylic material used in the tanning industry either. Actually, it isn’t made just for the tanning industry, it just so happens that it is the best product anyway.

Persons who own home tanning beds need to use Novus #2 on BOTH sides of BOTH acrylics about once per year. Remember, the UV causes a breakdown of the acrylic, so the back side is just as important as the front side. Novus #2 is pretty cheap, well under $10 for an 8oz. bottle, and you can often find it in kit form (ie: tanning bed rebuilt kit) that has other products you need for daily maintenance as well.

Novus #2 is slightly gritty, and the idea is to strip a micro layer off your acrylics. You just use a damp cloth and run it into the acrylic like you would car wax, then clean off with tanning bed disinfectant or water. (NEVER use window cleaner or household chemicals on the acrylic, you WILL mess it up over time!)

What are the results? About 20%-40% more UV output, which is huge! This is like getting an extra 4 to 8 minutes worth of tan in every 20 minute session. Remember, even if the acrylics look perfectly clear, you can’t see in the UV range, so you don’t see what is actually being blocked.

When should you do recondition your acrylics? Every time you change your lamps, and at least once every two years. Salon owners, obviously much more. Be sure to also clean the entire inside of the tanning bed, including the lamps, when you do this for maximum results.

Where can you buy Novus #2? From just about any larger tanning supply company. Try one of the sponsors if you don’t have a regular company you buy from. Look for a “tanning bed rebuild kit” if they have one, which will usually save you some money since it has other products you will need.

Well, it depends on the company you are buying from. For probably half, it doesn’t matter as the prices stay the same year round. For the rest, there are certain times when you can save a little. Under most circumstances, you are not likely to save more than $100-$200, if any.

The worst time to buy is when everyone wants to buy a tanning bed, February through May. It isn’t about price, it is just that often the most popular models are out of stock, or you can expect delays in shipping. Typically, you can expect to add another week or so to get a tanning bed from most dealers. This isn’t that bad, really, but it is just a fact that when the companies are very busy, service is a little slower.

The slowest time for dealers is the late summer and early fall, September and October. School has just started, and people are preoccupied with other tasks, so buying a tanning bed is low on the list. If you are wanting to call and haggle, or find the best deal on a demo or scratch and dent model, this would be the best time.

Another time that may be helpful is Christmas. Most tanning bed manufacturers don’t change models very often, but if they are making changes, they may have incentives to move out the rest of the current inventory of “old” models. Figure it can save you $100, regardless of the claims of discounts. This isn’t extremely common, but it happens.

What matters most is not when you buy, but how you buy. Financing a tanning bed will ALWAYS guarantee you pay the highest price. This is because banks charge the dealers high fees that they must recover by charging you full retail. If you can’t pay for a tanning bed cash or by credit card, your best bet is to find the tanning bed you want, and either use a “home equity” line of credit, or just go to your bank and get your own loan. This way, you are paying cash to the dealer, and you have the ability to work out the best cash price.

Tanning beds generally use one of three available types of electronics to power the lamp: choke, magnetic or electronic.

Choke style are the most common, primarily because they are the least expensive. This is what is found in 90% of 24 lamp or more tanning beds. They use a choke ballast, which is actually a current limiter to only allow a certain amount of current through, capicitors for filtering and lamp starters to preheat the lamp. Choke tend to have a more complex wiring diagram and can be a bit harder to troubleshoot, and is the oldest form of power source for fluorescent lamps still in use today.

All choke ballasts are made in Europe (usually Germany) and thus require voltages to be from 220VAC to 230VAC. Voltages below this will result in the failure of lamps to ignite, while voltages above this can cause damage and premature failure of the lamps and starters. Because most home have 240-245VAC and most businesses have 208-211VAC, a buckboost transformer is needed to adjust the voltage to the proper range, adding about $150 to $200 to the cost of an installation.

Magnetics are a form (but different) of standard electronic ballasts. They are the big, heavy brick like boxes that connect to 2 lamps each. They are much less complex, use slightly less electricity, but offer the worst performance of the available choices. Because of the cost and weight, they are not used very often. In their day, they were considered state of the art. One of the nice features of the magnetic system is that it was nearly indestructible. Thermal protection would allow you to wire it wrong without blowing it up, and you could literally drive over it with a car without hurting it. Magnetics have wide tolorances for incoming voltages, with most being designed to run on 120VAC

Electronic ballast systems are not a single type, but rather include several different types of ballsts that are electronic in nature. They were introduced into tanning in the mid to late 80s with “single electronic” or double electonic circuit board looking ballasts. The original designs, still in limited production, were too sensitive to bad voltage and tended to break often. Kasio introduced a reliable ballast, but it was very inefficient, requiring about 50% more electricity than any other system, and they are very expensive.

The Triad ballast was patented in the late 1980s and although it had a few problems in its initial release, ended up being a very reliable system. They are more efficient than choke or magnetic, very reliable. The Triad is not tolorant of being connected wrong (instant death) but it is remarkably tolorant of low or high voltages and is a strong performer. While the results in a tanning bed are not quite as high as choke ballasts, it is very close and offers a significantly simpler design and is only slightly more expensive than choke.

A newer name in electronic ballasts are the Workhorse series. Very few manufacturers use this ballast because it is such a different beast. If a tanning bed is engineered to use this ballast properly, it provides results better than Triad and almost as good as choke style. Of all the different ballast systems available, it is the simplest to install and is fairly cost effective. I have personally conducted extensive tests with this ballast and learned a great deal on how to engineer system to get maximum results, but can not disclose the information due to a confidentiality clause.

Suffice it to say that these ballasts use the least amount of electricity and operate using UHF rather than brute power, which makes the tanning bed run cooler and peform well, when designed properly. If the system is designed improperly, performance is very poor.

It is possible to replace one kind of ballast with another in some circumstances. Say, if you had an old Suntana with single or double electronics and wanted to replace a failed ballast with a Triad, this can be done IF you are familiar enough to read wiring diagrams. Switching to or from either choke or Workhorse systems is not so easy.

It is pretty easy to see what lamps your tanning bed uses and there are a variety of methods to determine this. Keep in mind that what I am refering to is the size and wattage, NOT the brand name. Most brands of lamps come in several sizes, and you can replace the lamps in a home tanning bed with any brand you choose, so the primary focus should be on the size, not the brand.

The vast majority of modern home tanning beds use F71 / 100 watt lamps. As in 98% or more of them. This is a 71″ (approximate) lamp with two metal pins on each end of the lamp, similar to standard 4 foot overhead fluorescent lamps. Tanning beds that use high pressure facials, (the blue plate over your face that has a single lamp inside) will usually use F59 / 80 watt lamps in front of the facial unit itself, since the reduced space needs shorter lamps. These are just shorter, lower powered versions of the F71 lamp. Typically, a tanning bed with a high pressure facial uses 6 of these F59 lamps.

Often you can look at the lamp itself to determine the size and wattage of the lamp, although this is not so obvious on some of the older tanning lamps, particularly Wolff brand. There is usually a series of numbers under the brand name that looks like this:

F71T12BP50BL

In this example, the F71 referes to the length. T12 is a measurement of the diameter of the lamp, in 1/8th inch incriments. A T8 lamp is 1 inch in diameter, whereas a T12 is 1 1/5 inches and is the most commonly used size in tanning. The BP stands for BI PIN. 50 indicates this lamp has a mix of UV that is 5% UVB and 95% UVA. The BL means BLUE phosphor. PK or PINK would indicate a pink phosphor.

Another method is to read the label on the tanning bed. Most modern tanning beds will have the replacement lamps listed on one of the labels on the front or top of the tanning bed, using similar numbers as above. The most important is the F number and whether or not the bed has a high pressure facial.

If you can’t tell from these methods, you can still physically look at the bed and tell what lamp you need very often. If the tanning bed uses lamp starters, then it is using F71 lamps (or F71 and F59 if you have a facial). Lamp starters are small, usually tan cylinders located toward one end of each lamp. They are about 1 inch in diamter and about 1 1/2 inches tall. They are a switch to ignite the lamp when it is first started and are used on most tanning beds sold.

If your tanning bed does not have lamp starters, it might still be F71, but could be other sizes. If you lamps do not have two metal pins (which you slide in and rotate to install) but instead the ends of the lamp have black plastic caps and the lamps spring in and out of place, then you have RDC lamps, which can be F73 lamps, or less likely, F72 lamps. You need to call your lamp distributor with detailed information about your bed, including year made (on the back label), brand name and model to determine the proper lamp. These are quite rare, and usually only found on older tanning beds, particularly ones built in the 1980s. Some brands would include SunDash, Suntana, Montego Bay and others.

Some brands of tanning beds have always used the same size and wattage, so its very easy to determine the lamp type. If you own a SunQuest, SunMaster (except rare 32 lamp beds),SunVision, SunStar, ESB, Soleil, Virtual Sun, Alpha Sun, Supreme, Alisun, or Sunal tanning bed, you are guaranteed to use F71 lamps, and F59 in front of the facial if so equipped.

Now that you know the size of lamp you need, you just need to pick out a replacement lamps, which may or may not be the same as your original lamp, but I will leave that for another posting.

Although there is not the confusion around this issue there once was, I still hear people who do not fully understand what it means to be a Wolff lamp, or a Wolff tanning bed. First, Wolff does NOT make tanning beds. Wolff licenses technology to others who do make tanning beds.

In the strictest sence, a Wolff lamp is a tanning lamp that is designed by Wolff Systems Technologies, Inc. and usually manufacturer by Sylvania. There are many different Wolff lamps, including the older Bellarium S and Crystal Sun S, to the more modern Dominion, and even a few that are exclusively used by a single vendor. The Diamond Sun and Velocity series are the best examples, with Wolff Systems designing and contracting the manufacture of them, but ETS, Inc. owning the trademarked names of the lamps themselves. This offers them an exclusive on the brands, as well as control over the distribution, and thus, price.

Because Wolff doesn’t make tanning beds, you might be asked: “Then what exactly is a Wolff bed?”. Simply put, any tanning bed manufacturer can license the name Wolff and call their tanning beds Wolff Systems by paying a royalty and using one of the Wolff lamps exclusively in that model. While Wolff Systems enjoys a reputation for quality, it can not, and does not, have any control over the quality of the tanning beds that license the use of its name.

A tanning bed that is a Wolff System (or uses Wolff Systems technology) might be a great tanning bed, or it might be a dud that just so happens to use good lamps. This is why it is important to judge a new tanning bed (or replacement lamp) by much more than a singular name on the label.

When you go to replace the lamps in a home tanning bed, you can choose one of the many Wolff lamps as a replacement if you so choose. They come in all the most common sizes, including F71/100 watt, the most common size and wattage of all time. This doesn’t make your tanning bed a Wolff System, but for all intent and purpose, it would perform exactly like a tanning bed with the logo on it. You also have many other choices as well, including lamps by Philips, SunMaster, Light Sources, Voltarc and others.

I don’t personally recommend Wolff lamps as a replacement, but it is due to the cost, not the quality, which is as good as anyone’s. Because there are royalties involved, Wolff lamps tend to cost more than similar lamps that offer similar performance. If you don’t mind spending the extra money, then this is not an issue. Most reputable replacement lamp distributors will have a variety of both Wolff and non-Wolff lamps for you to choose from.