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Switching shop lights to LED

Larry Dickman

Titanium
Joined
Jan 30, 2014
Location
Temecula, Ca
We've got quite a few fluorescent bulbs burned out, so I think it's time to take the plunge and switch them all to LED. They're about 25 feet up, so we'll have to rent a lift and do them all at once. (couple hundred bulbs). Looking about for a good deal, I noticed just about every website showing a lot of negative feedback. It looks like there's a common problem with them crapping out after 5 month or so. That would really suck since they're so hard to get to. Anybody experience this?
 
Check with your power company for energy saving rebates. Most states have money available for upgrades that reduce power consumption. You might be pleasantly surprised.
 
One item to be careful of is that you are replacing fluorescents with equivalent Led. I have 40w T12 fixtures from many years ago. I thought I would replace the lamps with LED's. The carton said that the lamps were interchangeable with the old 40w lamps, but when I opened the box, surprise, they were replacements for 32w T8's. The lamp current is different. The LED's will work in the 40w T12 fixtures, but the lumen output and consequently the current drain will be higher which will lead to a shorter life.

Tom
 
Some of the LED fluorescent replacement bulbs are designed to use the existing ballasts, others you remove ballast completely. The ones that use the ballast come in 2 types iirc, and you have to get the ones that match your ballast type, otherwise they burn out in short order. We replaced the lights in Tx shop a few months ago with a 50/50 mix of the hard wired/ballast wired bulbs, so far no issues with either.
 
Absolutely check for energy rebates, we changed over to LED about a year ago. With the rebates reasonable, fixtures prices low and all around IMHO a better light wave.
 
My high bays were never flourescent, but rather HID. I swapped them for LED and they've been perfect until about 2 weeks ago when one of them failed (hopefully under warranty electrician will be after it in a couple of weeks.)

Mine look vaguely like this (but NOT this unit, this is NOT a comment on quality of this unit):
LED Classic Hi-Bay, 15 Watt, 12/28/24/277 VAC - M7151 | Warehouse Lighting

None of them failed at anything like 5 months....

This quite a different effort than swapping in an "LED replacement" for an FL tube.
 
This is probably on a much smaller scale than you're doing and maybe a completely different type of LED..but, I just replaced all the 8 ft lamps in my shop fixtures with LED tubes and while it was a easy task, I sure learned a lot about different color spectrum lamps. The first fixture got 6000 kelvin lamps and they were beastly..a very stark color. The next two fixtures got 5000 kelvin lamps and they were quite a bit better.

If you have never worked under LED fixtures you're going to have to get accustomed to it, it's quite a change from traditional florescent or even incandescent lighting...it's will mess with your eyeballs for sure.

I wouldn't dare go above 5000 kelvin in color..!

Stuart
 
I have some high bay LED fixtures in my shop. They are 220W, and have prismatic reflectors. The prismatic reflectors allow for backlight, and hang down far enough below the emitters that you don't accidentally see the emitters. The emitters are painfully bright.

For my $.14/kwh electricity the payback between T5HO florescent and LED was about 3,000 hours of run time.

I bought my LED and florescent fixtures from here: Replaces 4W | 3, Lumens LED Round High Bay | 5K | e-conolight
 
I found 7K LEDs bright/harsh at first, too, but got used to them. After all, they are the color of daylight.

Photographs turn out a lot better under 7K lights, too.
 
The relationship between light intensity to distance is not linear



The intensity or brightness of light as a function of the distance from the light source follows an inverse square relationship

The closer the better

If you half the distance from light to work, you 4x the intensity at the work.


So the normal LED in the fluorescent fixtures 25 feet up loses a lot in that situation.




Up to 85% of light is reflected by white paint.

If your walls are dirty - they are sucking up all the electricity and light.
 
This subject came up in this forum several years ago. At the time we had just had one 8' double-tube HO fixture replaced with an LED fixture as an experiment, at a cost of $500. It has now outlasted two to three changes of fluorescent tubes. Walking under it holding a sheet of paper, the paper is still lit much brighter—even compared to brand-new HO lamps. Since then, prices of LEDs have fallen dramatically and we have replaced almost half the lamps in the shop with 8' 5000K LEDs from Hyperikon. From Amazon Prime you can get a dozen for about $300, shipped free. They come with replacement tombstones and you can throw away your existing ballasts (uh, well, be sure to follow your local regulations on disposal and don't toss them in the dumpster concealed in something else) and never have to buy any more. The quality of light is better, it's cheery to walk out in the shop.

I favor 5000K for overhead lighting and 6000 or 7000K for close-work lamps where you have to read a mic.
 
Check with your power company for energy saving rebates. Most states have money available for upgrades that reduce power consumption. You might be pleasantly surprised.

They came into my shop about five years ago and replaced all my hi bays with LED's for FREE! Made a difference on the power bill too.
 
Good info from Oldwrench on replacing just the tubes on existing fixtures.

The tubes that work without a ballast are called bypass tubes. IMO, that's the way to go. First, if the goal is to save energy, getting rid of the ballast does that. Also, if you buy tubes made for use with a ballast, you'll find that they will generally only work with specific ballasts. The general knowledge says you need electronic ballasts, which is true, but the reality is that they won't work with all electronic ballasts.

Another point is to buy frosted tubes rather than clear ones. The clear tubes generate shadow patterns that will drive you nuts.

There's an option to convert an 8ft 2 tube fixture to use four 4ft tubes. Comes as a kit with sheet metal parts and tombstones for about 12 bucks. This was a worthwhile option when 8ft LED tubes were $40 apiece or more, but now that 8ft tubes are more like $25 each, the savings of using 4ft tubes isn't there if you consider the extra labor in adding the kit to the fixture.

Re the lumen output of fluorescents vs LEDs, you don't need LEDs with higher lumen output to have more useful light than you were getting from your fluorescents. This was explained by a lighting engineer on another forum. FL lumen output is measured under lab conditions with a perfectly matched ballast. Real world output will be in the 90%+ range with average ballasts.

A FL tube emits light 360*. With a clean white reflector, about 30% of light is lost due to less than perfect reflectivity and the fact that the tube itself blocks part of the reflected light. LEDs don't rely on reflectors and are available in different beam angle spreads.

Also, within a few months to a year, the output of a FL tube will level out at around 70% of rated lumens. Combining the 30% reflectivity and blocking loss with the 30% loss of tube output over time, and you have approximately 50 to 55 percent of the rated FL tube output available as useful light. The better LED tubes such as the Hyperikon Oldwrench mentioned are rated to put out 90% of rated lumens across their life span.

In my own home shop I've seen firsthand that an 18W 2200 lumen single LED will put out as much useful light as a 2 tube F40t12 fixture with tubes a couple years old.
 
One item to be careful of is that you are replacing fluorescents with equivalent Led. I have 40w T12 fixtures from many years ago. I thought I would replace the lamps with LED's. The carton said that the lamps were interchangeable with the old 40w lamps, but when I opened the box, surprise, they were replacements for 32w T8's. The lamp current is different. The LED's will work in the 40w T12 fixtures, but the lumen output and consequently the current drain will be higher which will lead to a shorter life.

Tom

Tom, AFAIK there is no reputable supplier of LED tubes who claims that they will be a direct replacement in a T12 fixture regardless of whether the ballast is electronic or transformer type. The ballast has to be the T8 electronic type, and some of those won't work either.

Simplest thing is to buy bypass tubes and eliminate the ballast. I've done that on 20 4ft T12s, all from the 1970's, with good results. Takes about 5 minutes to remove the ballast and do the necessary wiring changes. In the 4 foot ones, I've used Sunco tubes from Amazon at about $70 for a box of 10.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I really like the high bay lights, however since I'm leasing the buildings I'm in I don't want to modify things. I was planning on going the plug-and-play route for simplicity and if and when I move I can take them with me. It appears that the problems with longevity of the bulbs is related to the ballast problems. So I think I'll go with the bypass tubes. Need to do something quick as it's getting darker in here every day.
 
I've used a bunch of the Hyperikon brand LED retrofit tubes I bought off Amazon. No issues whatsoever.

I don't recommend using the ones you retain the ballasts with. there's no energy savings there. Only buy the led's that let you gut the ballasts.

The ones I bought are real bright and need atleast a 12' ceiling height. 25' would be perfect I think.
 








 
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