Patent ID: 7429828

Claim:
A system for luminance characterization of a luminaire comprising: a ballast coil; a multi-tap capacitor connected in series with the ballast coil, wherein the multi-tap capacitor has a plurality of tap capacitors integrated into a capacitor housing; a plurality of switches, wherein each switch is coupled to one of the plurality of tap capacitors for selectively coupling the tap capacitors together to produce a multi-tap capacitance corresponding to a configuration of the plurality of switches; a lamp connected in series with the multi-tap capacitor and the ballast coil; a photometer located to measure light intensity of the lamp and to produce a lumen output measurement; and a memory for storing a database having a plurality of lumen output measurements corresponding to each multi-tap capacitance, wherein each multi-tap capacitance corresponds to one of a set of all configurations of the plurality of switches.