On a hot-fill juice line, preform temperature control isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the line between a smooth run and a headache. If the preform wall doesn’t hit the right gradient before stretch blow molding, you’ll see uneven blow-up, stress cracks, or cap-neck distortion. And when the heating lamps aren’t pulling their weight, you spend your day chasing rejects, throttling the machine back, and paying for scrap. What matters under the hood For juice bottle hot-fill preform heating, we stick with short-wave infrared heater lamps. Response is fast, and control is tight. The emitters use quartz tubes with tungsten filaments, typically 2400–2800 K, delivering high irradiance that heats the preform surface quickly without cooking the core. In most side-entry heating tunnels, we match lamp length to cavity spacing and run either 230 V single-phase or 24 V control, whatever your blow molder specs. Power is sized per lamp to hit the needed energy density, so you get repeatable preform temperature across the row. Why this approach fits the job Hot-fill juice bottles need stable preform conditioning so the material stretches predictably during blow molding. Our lamps drop straight into existing R7s sockets and line up with the OEM heating-zone geometry on Sidel, Krones, SIPA, Husky, SACMI, and Nissei ASB machines. That means you can replace a lamp without reworking the tunnel or rewriting the recipe. The payoff is fewer temperature swings, more consistent bottle wall thickness, and fewer restart losses when you change formats. Here’s the thing with infrared heating: it’s sensitive to distance and reflector condition, so lamp positioning has to stay within the original tolerance. Dirty reflectors add reflection loss, and output drifts as the filament ages. Plan replacements around cycle hours, not just when a lamp finally fails, and keep spares matched by voltage, wattage, and overall length. Performance will taper after long runs—that’s normal—and it’s exactly why scheduled maintenance beats emergency downtime.