Tanning bed starters should be replaced every other lamp change regardless. If you feel that you have a starter that is bad, you're probably right. A starter's job is to ignite the lamp. If you have a lamp that is taking long to start up or flickers a few times longer than the other lamps before it turns on...then you might have a bad starter. These bad starters will end up causing your lamp to burn out. So, if you feel you have a bad starter, then just replace it. These are fairly inexpensive and you can find them for under $3.00 each or cheaper.
There are several cleaning supplies to clean a tanning bed. The most obvious would be your standard tanning bed cleaner to clean and disinfect the tanning bed after you've tanned on it. There are several different brands of tanning bed cleaners that you can use to clean a tanning bed with, but the most popular are Lucasol brand and Australian Gold brand:
But what if you wanted to take the acrylics off and clean the reflectors, back side of the acrylic, etc? You can still use the above Lucasol brand or Australian Gold cleaners, those are disinfectants and kill off germs. You can also use acrylic cleaner to make the acrylic shine instead. Just remember that the acrylic cleaner should just be used to shine the acrylics and/or to shine the plastic parts of the tanning bed. You can use the following cleaners for this:
If your acrylics had scratches in them, then there is a cleaner that can help remove fine scratches from the tanning bed acrylic. These are Novus Polish number 2 and 3.
When shopping for a tanning bed, you may run across some verbiage that states "buck booster may be required". It doesn't explain what it is and leaves you wondering why in the world you would need such a thing. And you absolutely do need a buck booster if your voltage isn't what the tanning bed specifications are calling for. For example, let's say you own a tanning salon and the incoming voltage to your store is 208 volts. The tanning bed you are hooking up requires 220 volts. The 208 volts is not sufficient. You need to "boost" the power to the voltage that particular tanning bed needs.
A buck booster is a transformer that can either "buck" (which is to lower voltage) or "boost" (which is to increase voltage). These buck boosters come in a 12/24 or 16/32. These numbers mean that you can buck or boost voltage by that number. So, in the above scenario where you owned a tanning salon, you would need a 12/24 buck boost transformer so that you could boost voltage by the "12" number. 208 volts plus 12 volts = 220 volts! The required voltage for that bed.
I hope that this explanation has shed some light on buck boost transformers and why they are needed for tanning beds.
Before ordering replacements tanning bulbs, you should know that not all tanning bulbs are the same. First of all, there are two different end types called Bi-pin and RDC:
Bi-Pin - These have 2 pins on either side and are installed into the bed by sliding these pins into the lamp holders and twisting the bulb once or twice.
RDC- These have a black cap on either side. These caps fit into the tanning bed's bulb holders which are spring loaded on one side. You push the lamp into the spring loaded bulb holder and just insert the other side of the bulb into the other bulb holder.
Next, there are different sized bulbs as well. The terminology known in the tanning industry to identify these different sizes are: F59, F71, F72, F73, F74 and F79. Most Bi-pin tanning bulbs are usually the F59 and F71's while the others are usually RDC type bulbs.
If your tanning bed has one facial bulb, then it is most likely that your bed will have the one of these, and two sizes of the long tube bulbs. Underneath of the facial square of the tanning bed, you will usually have the shorter tanning bulbs here. The other bulbs that go on the sides of that facial will be the longer ones. Make sure you take note of the existing lamps and if any of these sizes are listed right on the lamp itself. Make sure you also count exactly how many of each your bed has.
