Thread: Shop lighting

Tweet

There are, or at least were (young, evolving technologies ebb and flow quickly) ones you could just swap out the fluorescent bulb for the led without removing the ballast. You don't get the economy aspect as you're still powering the ballast which is the energy gobbler. Second issue is that the old style ballasts (magnetic) have been out of production for quite awhile and whatever might be available in the marketplace is old inventory that doesn't get replaced like for like. What you find in fluorescent replacement ballasts is an electronic one. They're smaller, lighter, and supposedly more energy efficient. In my previous shop I ran into this and thought, "okay, I'll just replace them with the electronic ones as they fail". Nope. Right on the packaging and in the paperwork in the box it says "Do not mix magnetic (old style) and electronic ballasts on the same circuit". They were vague on what would happen, but there's some reason for the warning. Second problem I've encountered with the electronic ballasts is that they don't appear to have a very long service life. When we moved into our current house there were a number of fixtures in service rooms and closets. At about 5 years of age the ballasts began to fail, one at a time. I bought a case of led bulbs and just replaced as they failed. Took about a year to get them all. Now, these are probably the cheapest fixtures the contractor could find when the house was built, and there are probably electronic ballasts that live a decent service life, but...…………….