Replacing fluorescent tube with LED

[Dave Plowman (News)]

No reflectors in your neck of the woods? Ceilings all painted matt black?

[ARW]

To reflect the light back into the tube?

Ceilings painted black - I once did make a post several years ago about that!

Longer life and little reduction in lumens output after a couple of years? LED wins every time.

[T i m]

I have 4 x 6' flouro singles in my workshop and apart from being a little slow to warm up in this cold weather, do seem to give off a lot of light (in all directions. I have stuff in the roof above them so some up lighting isn't such a bad thing). ;-)

So, can you actually get 'replacement' LED 6' tubes that 'are' as bright as the traditional flouro? (Phillips daylight 70W from memory).

I ask because a mate replaced 4 in his shop (with LED) and the definitely aren't as bright as the flouros (quite noticeably).

However, he doesn't get migraines any more so is worth it for him. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[DerbyBorn]

jim wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Good way to go - who needs to have old chokes and stuff in the ceiling!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

LED tubes ain't been around long enough to know how long they'll last. Hours running continuously in a lab isn't the same as domestic use.

[Rob Morley]

Only the very top of the tube is emitting light that will be obstructed by the tube on reflection. Obviously reflection is not 100%, and is diffuse, but you're not losing half the light.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Of course not. Ever seen an LED car headlamp without a reflector?

[Johnny B Good]

The half century old "Quickstart"(tm) transformers certainly managed to start up in something like 250 to 330ms (about as quick as the four

12v35W halogen downlighters in the shower room, each fed from their own individual "electronic" transformer) and the tubes would last many years in the kitchen fitting.

Unfortunately, the days are numbered for the one remaining 40W 4 foot "Quickstart"(tm) fitting in the basement (and the other 7or 8 spares in the attic) since *suitable* T12 tubes have become as rare as rocking horse shit. In any case, whilst producing plenty of light, their 51 watts of total energy consumption versus the 36 watts of a modern electronically ballasted T8 tube is incentive enough to "upgrade" from a "Quickstart"(tm) ballasted fitting.

The "cheap" B&Q electronically ballasted 4 ft slimline fitting we bought two or three years ago to replace the "Quickstart"tm) kitchen fitting instantly started the T8 tubes but the Chinese ballast housed inside of a rectangular plastic tubing proved a bit rough on tube life (the first, supplied, tube expiring in less than a year with a quality tube lasting little more than 12 months). The last tube, after turning it end over end in the fitting to get a few more hours of life, eventually caused the ballast to literally go "Phut", necessitating a replacement ballast *and* tube to effect a repair.

I managed to locate a Helvar ballast on Amazon for less than a fiver delivered. This was about the same physical size but in heat dissipative metal and didn't route the pvc insulated tube connection wiring internally against the heatsink tabs of the power transistors like the Chinese ballast had done (the most likely cause of the failure as the insulation had melted, shorting the conductor to the power transistor heatsink tab).

Also, the Helvar unit had published specifications on max ambient temperature and hour lifetime ratings and (missing from the Chinese unit) microprocessor control which stopped it trying to run both failed tubes (hence the purchase of a replacement tube I had hoped might not have been necessary).

The Helvar unit doesn't attempt instant start, taking a good 900 to

1000ms of pre-heating to strike the tube from switch on (the Chinese ballast took about 300ms of flickery (25 to 50Hz) ignition attempts before lighting up to full luminance unlike the "Quickstart"(tm) transformer which applied some 250 to 300ms of preheat before springing into full luminance sans flicker).

I do miss the startup characteristics of a "Quickstart"(tm) ballasted fitting which doesn't compromise tube life. The full one second's worth of pre-heat used by the "modern" electronic ballast strikes me as being needlessly protective of tube life imo (and, therefore, an irritating reminder of just what has been lost to the Gods of efficiency and microprocessor technology "advances").

I did briefly consider the expensive "LED Tube" fitting option until I saw just how low their lumens output was and how directed it would have been onto the kitchen floor and away from the ceiling and worktops. Unless a LED based lighting manufacturer considers the need to use the full 360 of the tube's circumference as a light emission surface for domestic kitchen lighting duty at better than 100 LPW, I'll be using a fluorescent tube based kitchen lighting solution for the foreseeable future.

[ARW]

I have no shame in admitting that I make money from swapping fluorescent to LED. Not my design and not my warranty, no matter what office, factory, school or hospital.

The domestic stuff is still doing well.

[Adam Funk]

Have you gone mostly LED at home? (Honest question, not looking for an argument.)

[Huge]

FWIW, I have. And I've mostly been replacing CFLs with LED. IIRC, we have virtually no CFLs, about 90% LED and a few GLS.

[Rob Morley]

[Dave Liquorice]

Well both the Aldi and branded Philips replacement tubes I have are only marginally less omnidirectional than a standard tube.

I don't buy LED unless it is >= 100 l/W. OK the Aldi tubes are (on paper) 91 l/W close enough and better than most LEDs out there.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I have colour matching north light tubes in the workshop. Is there a LED equivalent?

[Adam Funk]

I'm still using up a stock of CFLs in multi-lamp fittings (the one hanging from the dining room ceiling takes 3 lamps, so CFLs are sufficient) & security lights outside, but otherwise going with LEDs too.

[NY]

We've got daylight CFLs (mostly 25W or 30W, equivalent to about 150W or 175W tungsten) in wax-paper lampshades on pendant fittings in several of the bedrooms to provide general room lighting; likewise for the hall and landing lights. I find for single-fitting ceiling lights, CFL provide a much brighter light. For rooms where multi-bulb fittings are available, a group of LEDs provides enough light.

My bedside light and my wife's (*) bedside and pendant ceiling lights are coloured Philips Hue, as are some of the GU10 mini-spotlights in the kitchen and bathroom, with white versions (2800-6500 K) in the remaining GU10 fittings in those rooms. We also have an LED strip light (a flexible clear strip with LEDs embedded all along its length) under the wall cupboards to illuminate the worktops.

These are supplemented by a dimmable tungsten photoflood uplighter in the dining table part of the living room, and by a conventional 3x tungsten-candle-bulb ceiling fitting in the centre of the living room; the latter has a mixture of 60W conventional tungsten and 40W halogen tungsten bulbs (the 60W are replaced by 40W halogen as they fail).

We've got the Philips Hue bulbs controlled by a Hue hub from an Android app and an Amazon Alexa voice control; this also controls a switchable 3-pin plug for the photoflood uplighter so we can ask Alexa to turn on "downstairs" (living room uplighter, kitchen 5x GU10 fitting and kitchen worktop LED strip) or "living room" (just the switchable plug for the uplighter).

My wife has a dimmable LED-array desk light in her study and I have an ancient U-shaped fluorescent tube (warm white) desk lamp in my study - the sort of tube that has a flash-flash-on bimetallic starter in the fluorescent tube base.

The LEDs on "concentrate" setting and the CFLs appear to the human eye to be fairly close to cloudy daylight, though to a digital camera on fixed white balance setting rather than auto-white-balance, the LEDs appear fairly warm compared with the CFLs which the camera sees as white when on its cloudy-daylight setting; the LEDs appear white on the camera's warm-white-fluorescent setting if they are on "concentrate" or else as white on the camera's tungsten bulb setting if they are on the "reading" setting which looks slightly warmer (though still less orange than a tungsten bulb) to the human eye. In other words, a camera sees the LEDs as warmer than the human eye when compared to daylight or to tungsten bulbs. The auto-white setting on the camera seems to sort it all out very well: the days of any fluorescent light reproducing as sickly green went out with the demise of slide film.

I did some comparison photos of a makeshift colour chart, with the camera white-balanced under various lights, and the results are fairly consistent apart from a slight dulling of reds under LED and, to a lesser extent, CFL:

- illuminated by daylight in the shade (ie not direct sunlight) - illuminated by "daylight" CFL - illuminated by "cool white" GU10 LED - illuminated by "white"

4-foot fluorescent tubes

(in all of the above, I white-balanced the camera from a sheet of A4 printer paper illuminated by the relevant light source)

- same fluorescent tubes, with camera on "cloudy" daylight setting, showing that it is fairly warm compared with daylight

The red plastic box of screws (left of the face in the photos) was a fairly vibrant red which is a bit dull in the artificial light. The blue box of drills was dark royal blue. As expected, both of these have reproduced most faithfully in shady daylight

(*) I snore, so we tend to sleep in separate rooms - mostly :-)

[John Rumm]

Do you know the actual colour temperature of the tubes?

[Dave Liquorice]

Dave might be using the term "north light" as derived from TV lighting as he combines it with "colour matching". So it's not just colour temperature that is importnat, the spectrum is as well. Now where is the toy spectroscope? I've not looked at what these LED tubes are like.

[Huge]

I have loads of the free CFLs the energy companies were dishing out. I suspect I have enough to last me the rest of my life.

[John Rumm]

There are some tubes advertised as North Light, e.g.:

That claims to be "daylight" colour and 6500K (so presumably a CRI of 80%)

The Daylight version of:

is also 6500K