I have an old 4 bulb 4’ fluorescent light fixture in a nice wood frame that I’m looking to replace with LED. Do any of the new LED lights have replaceable bulbs? The ones I’m seeing are called “maintenance free” so they can’t be repaired but just be replaced. I haven’t had the best luck with LED lights, I know they are purported to last a long time but I’ve had quite a few fail prematurely.

 

You can simply remove the ballast from your existing fixture, rewire and use LED bulbs.

 

I would buy 4' LED dimmable bulbs .
Then if the fixture is too bright you can use a dimmer on it.

Also be aware of the different colorc of the white light which are available and get what you prefer.

 

You can be creative. You can use different color temperature tubes. In my kitchen I have a four tube 4' fixture. I use two 4100k cool white tubes and two 6000k daylight tubes. The lighting is very natural. Bright but natural.

Over my bench I have the same thing but I added a pull chain so that it's two or four tubes lit. Normally only two tubes are needed.

 

I see some bulbs that are supposed to work with a ballast as opposed to going direct wire. It appears that direct wire bulbs are significantly more expensive. The fixture is probably 20 years old, may have a bad ballast anyway. I’m assuming you are all referring to the direct wire type bulbs where the ballast is bypassed.

 

Check around on prices. Check in depot and Lowes.
I got mine from the depot and the with or without ballast tubes were almost the same price.

Direct wire - daylight - $10 each
Direct wire - cool white - $10 each
The ballast type look to start around $6 each

 

Bypassing the ballast is the best way to go. If you do the plug and play you will still be relying on the ballasts to power the lamps which can also fail. There also may be compatibility issues between plug and play lamps and the existing ballast.

 

Thanks for the links, I missed these when I looked on their web site. I plan to removed the ballasts and direct wire. I’ll let y’all know how it comes out. Thanks for all of the help!!!

TF

 

Thanks for all of the input. Worked great! I had intended to use the existing original sockets but noted info in the instructions related to “Shunted sockets” for fixtures with rapid start capability. Both ballasts indicated rapid start so we swapped the 4 “feed sockets” with the new ones provided. Since LED bulbs are only fed from one end we just snipped the wires on the tail end and taped them off. LED bulbs MUST be installed properly so that the proper end of the bulb is on the “feed end”. Stickers were provided to inform of this important polarity. It was very bright so we will probably add a dimmer in the future.

TexasFire