Fix Your Flickering Fluorescents Forever

Fluorescent lights: They hum, They flicker. They take forever to warm up. But your light fixture was made for fluorescent bulbs, so you're stuck with them, right?

Not anymore!

Now with just a little help from a handyman, you can replace your fluorescent light bulbs with LED bulbs... even if you have the long, tube-shaped bulbs. Check it out:

One of my clients has a big skylight in their kitchen which is surrounded by fluorescent fixtures from the 1980s, with the old magnetic light ballasts. They liked the "light boxes," but the bulbs blinked and buzzed and wouldn't come on all the way. They asked me for a softer and more updated source of illumination.

Nowadays many people rewire the whole fixture with electronic ballasts that don't blink or buzz, but these days that's not even necessary. These LED light tubes were created to work in the fixture with minimal rewiring. Since I hadn't worked with them before, I called in my associate Glenn Keeney, who has more experience in this realm.

The new bulbs can't be used with the magnetic ballast, so Glenn bypassed it. On newer electronic fixtures, it's not even necessary to bypass the ballast... but we recommend doing it anyway because  even the new ballasts are prone to failure.

Fun fact from Glenn: If you ever smell a "burning tar" smell or see something dripping from your light fixture, that's a bad ballast! You'll notice it in department stores sometimes.

But these lights turned out well. At first glance, they're a lot like the original fluorescents, but the quality and color of the light is better.  And they work!

These are super bright! Now that they're LED bulbs, it's possible to put them on a dimmer switch if needed. However, this home already has lots of task lighting on dimmer switches, so we left this one as-is.

If you're ready to get rid of your flickery old fixtures, give us a call. We'll be glad to help.

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