i bought two ‘direct replacement’ LED bulbs for a T8 fixture we have in our closet where a flourescent bulb had burned out. . They were advertised as a drop in without need to change the ballast. Neither worked in the fixture.
I didn’t bother investigating further, because when I was changing them I noticed that the original installer had broken off the plastic shroud around the wiring of one of the lamp sockets, exposing the bare connections and creating a possible fire/electrocution hazard. So I removed the whole fixture and replaced it with an LED one, which was far superior.
I changed most of my house over to CFL long before LEDs became cost effective and with good light. CFLs are garbage compared to LED, so now I’m replacing them as they fail (which the CFLs are doing long before their adverised life span)
If you turn CFLs (or any fluorescent lights, for that matter) on and off a lot, it will drastically shorten their life. They probably got that advertised life span by turning them on and leaving them on until they failed. LEDs have potential problems (overheating mainly) but you can turn them on and off without shortening their life.
Yeah, but if you leave your CFLs on all the time, you might as well have stayed with incandescent and just turn them off appropriately. The whole point to saving energy with CFL would be lost if we just leave them on longer. And there’s evidence that this happened - people saw how little energy CFL and LED use, and treat that as an excuse to just leave them on more.
I recently replaced mine in the kitchen and opted for the ballast-less type since it is the ballast that often fails and is the large energy waste in the fixture. The trick is do you research ahead of time what tube you need for your application because there are a few different types of LED tubes and the information on the packaging is not helpful in most cases.
Somehow I never grasped the essentials of AC wiring. I learned DC wiring from being a fledgling auto mechanic and it was simple and straightforward. I probably kept trying to bring what I alread knew and just modify it to accommodate AC, and that didn’t work because they just aren’t the same animal. I once tried to extend the existing wiring from a live light switch to an orphaned plugin. Instead of getting a circuit where you could plug something in and it would work, I got a circuit where if you turned on the light when something was plugged in it would work but the device would not, but if you unplugged it the light would go out. But if you then toggled the switch the light would come back on but if you plugged in a device the light would go out again. Bewildering.
Waiting on delivery of the 36" “bulbs” which will finish the den. There was an extra set of fluorescents that would never come on properly which were the size I acquired for the den, so I tried them there: the LED versions could not light either. allthegood nodded and said yeah, I think it’s “the fixture”. WTF? They’d briefly come on so they get electricity?!?
There’s also a 2-footer in the basement I’d like to replace and I ordered one of that size.
It sounds like either a missed/bad/incorrect connections somewhere along the line that means power can only flow through the circuit when it was a device to flow through or a loose connection in the outlet box that’s in exactly the right place such that the force of plugging something in physically moves the wires around and restores the connections.
I only recently realized that the reason I couldn’t make sense of a lot of fluorescent tube wiring stuff is because it’s different in the USA. The whole world uses the same fluorescent tube length, materials, strike voltage and arc current, and countries that have 110~120V simply wire the ballast differently than countries that have 220~240V,
Received the backordered 2 foot and 3 foot LED tubes and the swapout is now complete. The lighting in the den — a linear array of five, which previously would only flicker to life about 20-30 minutes after turning the switch on and would then shine in cold blue-toned office lighting — now pops on in sunlight yellow and it’s brighter by about 15% or a bit more.
The single two-footer in the basement stands over a workbench which has been usefully lit only by a 60 watt incandescent because the fluorescent would stay stubbornly unlit for over an hour after the cord was pulled. Now the replacement LED comes on immediately and it’s far far brighter and working at that bench is going to be much more pleasant.
If you can do the ballast bypass wiring, then do it. Look for YouTube videos to follow on the subject.
Otherwise the ballast will go bad some day and you will still have to mess with that wiring to replace the ballast.
I had replaced 8 bulbs in my basement with the drop-in-replacement kind a few years ago. The ballast finally died a few months back, I just ordered a replacement ballast from Amazon. When I put it in, nothing worked at all. I triple checked all of the connections and still no luck.
I then gave up and went to Home Depot to buy 8 replacement bulbs, this time of the ballast bypass type (it was cheaper to buy a bulk box).
When I was there, I looked at the replacement ballasts they had, and noticed that most of them had a sticker saying they weren’t compatible with LED lights–even though the bulbs I currently had were the drop-in replacement style, the new ballast didn’t support those. That’s likely why my replacement ballast didn’t work.
It sure would have been easier and cheaper and better all around to have gone with the ballast bypass bulbs from the start.
Once I did the wiring changes and swapped in the new ones, everything worked perfectly. I ended up giving the old drop-in-replacement LED bulbs to a friend, so it wasn’t a total waste.
Here’s an update on what I thought was a successful plug-and-play replacement of a fluorescent tube with an LED tube… The LED tube seems not to be working now, a few weeks after I installed it. Maybe I’ll get a new fixture. Anyhow I thought I should provide an update.