Shop lighting

I have 47 4' 2 light fixtures in my shop. When I turn them on the meter wants to jump off the wall. I have them switched so they don't all have to be on at once, but it still cost a bunch to run them. While going through Face book I came across an add for LED 4' tubes that require NO ballast. I ordered 25 for $99.78 . Today I'm putting in those 25 bulbs to see if they will give enough light as 47 double bulbs. If that works out I will buy another 25 finish one shop and maybe start the other. Goal --1/2 the bulbs and less than 1/2 the bill with the same light. Green Light Depot at www.greenlightdepot.com I'll let you know
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I'm following along. My 8 ft florescent lights are beginning to die. Also, I need more light as I get older.

For the 8' ones look at Barrys led lights. My friend Jeff put those in his shop and was very pleased. I think he did 25 first and ordered another 25. Happy man with the results.

i converted all my 8ft to led . daylight and dark . i bought the frosted cover ones . 25 for 270 if i remember right .

I think we had some discussion about this in the "shop tips" thread quite awhile back. I did conversions on the 4 ft fixtures that came with this house and love them. When I did the new building last year went with new fixtures already set up for led...…...great light. Don't look back...……

i thought i was going blind until i switched.

I have 4' in my garage and I changed them to LED a couple of years ago but I had to eliminate all the ballasts. Make sure yours are compatible with ballasts or you will be doing a lot of changing, it's not hard but very time consuming.

i'm not sure any of them work with the ballast .

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Originally Posted by shine

i'm not sure any of them work with the ballast .

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I could be wrong, but I thought I found some plug and play though they were expensive as hell.

There may be a significant reduction in the lumens per bulb, with some LEDs. I see $4 bulbs that produce 1800 lumens, or 100 lumens per watt. There are more expensive bulbs that produce around 140 lumens per watt, with around 2800 lumens of output.

My T8 fluorescent bulbs use 32 watts and put out 2850 lumens, which is 89 watts per lumen. That's not much different than some LEDs.

If I was going to make the switch, I'd buy the $8, 20W bulbs with 2800 lumen output to avoid lower the light levels in my shop. That would cost $416, compared to $156 for fluorescent. If I ran all of them for 8 hours per day, it would cost $.75 per day instead of $1.20 per day. The bulbs would pay for themselves in 472 days. Running half the lights would take twice as long to pay off - 2.6 years.

FWIW, with 52 bulbs covering 1800 square feet, it comes out to 82 lumens per square foot, which is adequate lighting for most tasks. I have four switches, so I only light the shop area where I'm working and leave the rest off. I usually have about half of the lights on, most of the time. I can run half of the lights, 8 hours per day, for about $19 per month.

I happened to see some 4 footers the other day in Walmart for about $10 each. According to the box, you can use them either with or without a ballast. I don’t remember the brand name.

the problem with florescent bulbs is they decline slowly.

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...…………….