Lighting - the bane of my life

I put LED square flat panels in my Garage & workshop. But it's a new build, I didn't change.

Andy

A 5ft LED tube will fit into the existing fitting and just requires a small rewire inside the light fitting to make it work (assuming a knackered choke).

Yes, although I see the TLC T8 battenless tubes don't even need a rewire (unless it's an electronic ballast - which I doubt):

It's just that I don't know what state the wiring is in inside the current fittings. If its dodgy in all three I'll have to replace it anyway. And the led tubes have only about 60% of the light output of the same length fluorescents.

I like my electronic ballast for a kitchen light with two four ft tubes. It has not had much use as the cable to the light needs to be replaced.

Previously I was using an electronic starter.

But 50% of it isn't shining upwards ...

Are you sure about that? One of the TLC led fluo replacements claims a beam angle of 330 deg. (

I suppose it varies

Others are 110, 120, 180, 210, 270 degrees, choose what suits your fixtures

The upwards light isn't wasted - it gives an overall illumination that fills in the shadows a bit.

It's still best to bypass the ballast when fitting LED tubes.

Hang on! you forgot to mention the 240 degree option! :-)

I've been making do with a 100W uplighter (14W 1500lm LED) supplemented by a 60W (12W 810lm LED) desk lamp pointed up to the ceiling in my 'man cave' as substitute lighting for a failed 1500mm T8 58W tube for several weeks now, in part because my son had borrowed our 7 tread stepladder needed to access the 9 foot high ceilings of this Victorian house.

He'd returned the step ladder the week before but when he dropped by yesterday (Tuesday now), he was enthusing over the LED replacement tube his G/F's uncle had used to upgrade their kitchen fluorescent light fitting, querying why I hadn't gotten round to doing the same upgrade.

After pointing out to him that the highest lumens output in a LED replacement was only half that of the 4800 to 5300lm rating of a 58W T8

I knew the suspect ballast choke wouldn?t be an issue with a replacement LED tube and was unlikely to waste more than a couple of watts in I squared R losses in this case, so it seemed to be an effective way to sidestep the need to replace the ballast *and* the tube.

In short, despite this 50% reduction in the lumens figures, typically specified for most of these LED replacement tubes over the original fluorescents, I thought I'd put the claim of "58W equivalency" to the test so ordered a CED Meridian LEDT5GS/NW 24W 5 foot glass cover tube from Toolstation on a click 'n' collect basis from my local store on that Tuesday afternoon but they were out of stock, obliging me to wait for them to restock for the next day before I could pick it up.

Considering the lower lumens figure compared to those typically claimed for the original fluorescent tubes, I was quite impressed with the lighting level which seems to match my perception of the original fluorescent luminosity. At around four times the cost of a 3 quid T8

I spent a bad hour trying to track down a proper technical specification ever since I spotted your post, just to verify what its actual beam angle was (240 degrees, obviously :-) ).

It's actually a very well specified tube compared to the 20W 2000lm Philips version being sold by Screwfix for three quid more. The only give away that it's *not* a fluorescent tube[1] being the extended plastic end caps and the lack of light fall off at the tube ends that's so typical of a fluorescent tube (and these days with mercury starved T8 tubes, the warm up period when these 'modern' tubes display patterning for the first few minutes before finally coming up to full brightness - an annoyance that simply didn't exist with the older T12 tubes).

One interesting 'feature' that caught my attention was the operating voltage range which extends from 100v to 265v. The small volt drop in the ballast choke won't be causing any loss of performance if you CBA to remove it (just a couple of watts' worth of waste heat at most in the light fitting itself - hardly worth the effort to remove it from the circuit imo).

You can download the specification from this page :-

and check it out yourself if you're in the market to replace any 5 (or 4 or 6) foot tubes.

They may look as bright as the fluorescent tubes they claim equivalency to but I'm not fooled, just impressed that they don't look as dim as the lumens figures would suggest. They're good enough as fluorescent tube replacements with the bonus that they will provide a 100% ROI in less than 4000 hours of run time (anywhere from one to three years in most cases).

I just removed the tube from one of the two dodgy fluos which when switched on tripped the RCD, took off the batten cover, and had a look at the wiring. Everything seemed ok, but I disconnected the mains cable and switched everything back on. No tripping of the RCD with the cable disconnected, so that had to be the dodgy fitting. Just to check, I reconnected it and switched on. Still no RCD trip. Strange. So I put the tube back in and tried again. Still no trip! In fact, I switched all the fluos on and off a few times, but the RCD still didn't trip. Bloody lighting! It really is the bane of my life...

If I get an RCD trip again new battens will be the order of the day. Too much unnecessary fuffing around otherwise.

Test them for leakage then you'll now which is bad, if any.

NT