Getting More Out of Your SBO Series 2
If you’re running an older SBO Series 2, you’ve probably noticed the cycle times starting to drag. It happens. As those heating elements age, they just don’t hit like they used to. The good news? You don’t have to rip out the whole oven to get your speed back. Usually, just swapping in some high-density infrared lamps does the trick. The deal with heat density Here’s how it works: the SBO Series 2 uses short-wave infrared to get into those PET preforms. We’ve built our replacement lamps to fit the original Sidel specs perfectly—same voltage, same wattage footprint. But by using a higher wattage tube, you’re basically packing more heat into every square centimeter. It gets the preform to that “sweet spot” (the glass transition temperature) a lot faster. One heads-up, though. More power means more heat around the lamp holders. If your cooling blowers are clogged with dust or just dying, these high-output lamps will burn out way too quickly. Give your fans a look before you swap the bulbs. The nitty-gritty on the build We use heavy-wall quartz glass because it doesn’t bow or warp when things get hot. Plus, the filaments are halogen-filled. That keeps the light output steady for thousands of hours so you aren’t constantly tweaking your settings. As for the fit? It’s a drop-in. We use standard R7s or SK15 connectors, so you won’t be spending your afternoon rewiring the machine or messing with brackets. They sit flush in the reflector, which means the heat goes exactly where it should: straight into the preform. What this actually does for your floor Old, dim lamps lead to “cold spots.” When the heat isn’t even, you get thin walls in your bottles and a mountain of scrap. It’s frustrating. Fresh lamps give you a uniform thermal field. You can push the machine faster and still trust that every bottle coming off the line is consistent. If the oven is the bottleneck holding back your entire production line, this is the easiest way to squeeze more bottles per hour out of an old workhorse.