My semi-finished basement has a drop ceiling with about 4 florescent lighting fixtures that operate at 50% of capacity, mostly with some significant flickering. I’ve replaced the bulbs, and it’s still semi-operational.
The guy at Lowes says I likely need to replace the ballast. I’m just handy enough at electrical work to make my wife nervous (for good reason), but this seems like something I can do - I just need an okay from someone the dope on the better end of the bell curve on this to say it’s a relatively easy operation.
It’s something not that hard to do. Is the time, labor and expense of locating and buying new ballasts worth it? Replacing the fixtures might be a better idea.
It’s easy, especially if you’re comfortable doing this kind of work. I’ve changed more than my fair share of ballasts over the years. A trick I learned is to cut all the wires a few inches on the ballast side of the wire nut. That way, you can pull the old ballast out, install the new ones and use the little pieces of wire as a color code to get the new one hooked up. Does that make sense? To be clear, the little pieces of wire aren’t going to be used, you’ll remove them as you make the new connections. Granted, it only works if the new and old ballast have the same color wires, but in general, at least IME, they do.
Replacing the bulbs in the fixtures with ballast bypass LEDs solves your immediate problem without having to track down replacement ballasts or replacing the entire fixture (if you’re OK with the existing fixtures’ location and function).
I hate fluorescent lights. The damn things go wonky and start flickering all the time.. And they don’t seem to last any longer than incandescent bulbs anyway.
I’d say replace them with LEDs and be done with it.
I think this is the way. One of the videos linked from @PastTense gave that suggestion and showed how, and that seems both the cheaper, easier and more efficient solution.
I just recently had to do this as well and chose ballast-bypass LEDs. They provide much better light quality, are instant-on, flicker-free, and require much less maintenance (likely many years/decades). Strongly recommend those as well. Look for something with 80+ CRI if you can, and something close to 3000k temperature if you want a warmer light.
You can either replace just the tubes with a ballast-bypass LED, or if want something sleeker looking, you can replace the entire fixture (the housing around the tubes) with something prettier. The actual LED emitters themselves are tiny compared to tubes, so you can find ceiling LED fixtures in many different designs.
It’s not too hard a job, even with no electrical background. Just make sure the circuit breaker to that fixture is off (the light switch shouldn’t be able to turn it on). You can YouTube the rest.
By the way, if you’ve never used them before, Wago wire lever nuts are a huge improvement over the older wire nuts or other splicing methods. Totally worth it.
If your fixtures are ancient (pre-1979) be aware that the capacitors in the ballasts may contain PCBs. If they do, you have a very hazardous waste to dispose of.
This. LEDs are cheaper to run, the good ones produce better quality light, and the bulbs don’t use mercury and don’t need to be treated as toxic waste when they die.
I second this. The higher the CRI the better. I like 4000K in my basement, for a “sunnier” feel, but 3000K is a popular color. If you want a really warm color, you can even go to 2700K.
Even if the ballast is still functional, I think its just wasting power when wired with an LED. Other than the extra wiring involved for installation, bypassing the ballast is the way to go.
Well, you have to anyway in order to replace the ballast, no? It’s not usually that much more work (like 5 min) to just get rid of the ballast altogether. Then you never have to worry about it again.
If you do strongly prefer the ballast still, you can still get LED tubes that work with ballasts. (But your existing florescent ones might be fine if it’s only the ballast failing)
Right, so I have two fluorescent fixtures with lighting issues. One was conveniently located and had a bad ballast, so I removed the ballast and went with ballast-bypass LEDs.
The other was in an annoying spot, but still had a good ballast, so I went with drop-in replacement LEDs.
To the OP – if you can just remove the ballast and get ballast-bypass LEDs, go with that.