updating florescent shop lights to LED

[RICH MUISE]

Got a lesson in updating flo. 48" light fixtures to LED yesterday. We have two in our kitchen and I got one refurbished yesterday after some back and forth to Lowe's. If you have florescent fixtures with newish electronic ballasts, you can get 48" led tubes that are made to work with those, just "plug and play", but I found out they will not work with the old standard ballasts. On my way back to the store to purchase new ballasts, I got thinking about why LEDs would need a ballast anyway. The answer is they don't. I hadn't looked at bulb/tube choices enough.

They make two types of LED replacement bulbs. The more common bulb is the type that are made to work with ballasts, but they also make a "direct wire" bulb. My guess is over time the direct wire bulb will be the more common, and gradually ballasts are going to be hard to find.
To convert to direct wire bulbs (as the way new strip fixtures are made), you remove the ballasts and wire one end of all the fixture's tombstones/pin holders together and connect to the neutral feed. The other end of the fixture gets wired to line voltage. The box of bulbs I got recommended wiring in an inline fuse holder to the line feed, so I did. These types of bulbs are marked N on one end (neutral) and L (voltage feed) on the other, so you have to watch which end goes where.
IMHO, this is the way to go when updating your old fixtures........No more ballast replacement, better light, cheaper operating costs, bulbs that are supposed to last "generations".

[KULTULZ]

!!! THANK YOU !!!

I did not know that you could retrofit an older fixture

[57chero]

I just did the same thing in my back garage, I changed out three 8ft fluorescent fixtures that are from the seventies cut the wires off to the ballasts and left them in then used the wires from each end and wired to the in coming power, went to Home Depot and bought three two packs with single pins and popped them in super bright no more flickering, there a little spendy I think they were about $120 for six 8 footers.

[CobraJoe]

I had over 50 8', 2 bulb fluorescent fixtures changed out to LED in my shop for free. The electric company sent a vendor in and they used the existing fixtures, just changed out the ballasts to LED drivers and the tombstones over to accept 4 4" LED 5000k bulbs. This was two years ago and I haven't had to replace a single bulb yet. It's been great, no flickering and it's a much cleaner, brighter light and my electric bill is sooooo much cheaper now!

You can see how bright they are in the background of this picture:

[KULTULZ]

You can see how bright they are ...

Are they harsh to the eyes?

[CobraJoe]

Not at all, it's clean, white light which stopped a lot of the shadows, especially for my old eyes.