Based on your info, gas-leaking theory sounds reasonable to me. I have a fourteen-tube clock with IN-18's, and they are similar date-code (1991), and similar age (started service Feb 2016) so it's a good baseline for comparing. I start the clock around 7AM in he morning and it runs all day. At 11PM, it goes into a depoisoning run for 1 hour, then turns off (same as your 7-hour nightly shutdown). The 'static' digits (day, month, year) cycle all 10 cathodes. Hours digits also cycle all-10 positions. Tens minutes and tens seconds cycle 6-9 because those are never displayed during the day. The units minutes and units seconds are turned off because they already cycled 0-9 during the day.
My tubes are socketed, but I use socket-pins with very low insertion force, and they are prefitted to the tube then soldered to the PCB to minimize stress. I dont rotate the tubes; they are serial-numbered and assigned to specific sockets. So far, none of my tubes show any noticeable degradation. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/652c5b66-2985-451b-825e-fcf98a904667%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
