Hello, can anyone tip me on how I can easily convert battery backed-up office fluorescent lighting that are on non-switched circuits to become normal fluorescent lighting on switched circuits? Will it work if I just disconnect the lighting from the battery, and rewire the fixture to a switched circuit?
Thanks
Sure, that would work fine
Are they 120V fixtures running on a 120V AC circuit powered by battery power or are they designed to run on DC or a non standard AC current?
They are just normal fluorescent lighting that you see in most offices. These have batteries in them and are on all the time. They are mainly used to provide normal office lighting, with the benefit of being ON should the there be a power failure. They are AC powered.
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re: "They are just normal fluorescent lighting that you see in most offices."
I beg to differ. They may *look* like "normal fluorescent lighting that you see in most offices" but I don't think that "normal fluorescent lighting that you see in most offices" have batteries.
Most offices will have fixtures that are "always on", not because they contain batteries, but because they are on unswitched circuits for safety reasons. If every other or every third fixture stays on all the time, then the office area will never be completely dark, even in the dead of night. The employee-accessible switches won't turn them off, but the circuit breaker or a power failure will.
Power failures are usually handled by power-monitoring fixtures that have self-contained or remote batteries. These fixtures are *off* when the incoming power is present but if the monitoring circuitry senses the loss of power, a relay will deenergize and the batteries will take over.
I guess it's possible that the fixtures you speak of could be one and the same - i.e. always on via AC power yet also backed up by batteries, but in my experience, that would not be normal. If that is the case, then my guess is that if you modified these to be switched and disconnected batteries, then you would lose both your "nightlight" feature and your power failure lighting feature. If that fits your application...go for it!
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