Stop Fighting Your Oven: Better Replacement Lamps for Sidel SBO and Matrix
If you’ve spent any time on a production floor, you know the headache of a PET blowing machine that just won’t behave. You see that stress-whitening or thin walls, and you know exactly what the culprit is: your heat profile is off. Whether you’re still running the old-school SBO lines or you’ve moved up to the Matrix series, the lamps are the heart of the operation. We make replacements specifically for Sidel and Krones systems that actually do the job. Let’s talk power. We build these to match your OEM voltage and wattage exactly. Why? Because you need that high-voltage punch to hit the glass transition temperature of the PET quickly. That’s how you keep your cycle times fast. But here is a pro tip: if you’re pushing high wattage in a cramped oven, your cooling blowers are working overtime. If your vents are clogged with dust or debris, your lamps will burn out way faster than they should. Keep them clean, and they’ll last. No “fiddling” required. There is nothing worse than ordering a “replacement” part and then spending three hours trying to make it fit. We hate that too. We use heavy-wall quartz glass so the lamps don’t crack when they heat up and cool down rapidly. Plus, we use halogen-filled filaments. It keeps the tungsten from evaporating, which just means the lamp lives longer. As for the fit? We’ve already done the homework. We mapped out the dimensions of the SBO and Matrix racks. We use standard R7s or Sk15 connectors, so you can just pop the old one out and slide the new one in. No rewiring. No modifying brackets.Just a direct swap. Getting the heat right. The goal here is shortwave infrared. You want the heat to soak into the preform wall fast, but you don’t want to melt the neck finish. It all comes down to the focal length. If a lamp is off by even a few millimeters, or if it isn’t seated perfectly against the reflector, you’ll get cold spots in your bottles. It’s frustrating and wastes material. We build our lamps to fit the reflector geometry perfectly. You get uniform heat across the entire run, and your bottles come out looking exactly how they should.