good morning YouTube about five years ago I'd converted these old t12 fluorescent fixtures over
to LED t8 tubes and I made a couple of videos on that conversion process I did do the frosted glass
coating because these were unfrosted bulbs so I used some of this rust-oleum frosted glass paint
on the clear tubes none of the frosted coating has degraded it hasn't yellowed it hasn't chipped off
I've had a several comments from viewers of that video in that I didn't show all the steps that I
did in converting these fixtures and I've had a couple of other related comments let me turn
off these lights and I'll unplug this one from the wall so we can work on it here yeah got the
power off there and one of the questions I had was did I do anything to these t12 tombstones
and the answer is no that's the original tombstone that came with the old t12 lights and these are t8
tubes and they just fit right in it's the same by pin spacing that you get on the t12 and the
TAS are the same and you can see how the frosted glass coating is still on there I have 10 of these
tubes and I haven't had any failures over the last 5 years they've been running just fine I
labeled these that the ballast has been bypassed for LED type B tubes but a type b tube has live
at one end and then neutral at the other end the reason I did these in place is I didn't want to
take them down the power wires are fed through the ceiling rafters there who would probably
double the amount of work to take these things down to work on him on the ground so I did this
work up on a ladder and I can work with one hand and hold on to the louder with the other hand and
with my third hand if I had one I would hold the camera but I couldn't safely work on the wires and
hold the camera and hold on to the louder to be safe at the same time and I didn't have anybody
to help me film this so that's why I didn't show cutting and you know while you're knotting the
wires together but I'll go through the motions and show you what I did okay there I have removed the
reflector and I used a nut driver to remove the hex head screws that went into both ends here's
the original magnetic ballast that was in there these two yellow wires came out of here and I
took this black wire that comes out of the power cord so here's your live I took the black the
two yellows so the two yellows run down there and then there's a pair of black jumper wires the old
fluorescent tubes were the same way so you can see the yellow wires used to run over here and
they came out of here so I went snip and I took the other yellow wire and snipped it and then I
took a wire stripper and went on to the wire and stripped off a little bit of insulation and then
I took one of the existing wire nuts that was in the fixture already on the black wire and I
just took the black wire and the two yellow wires and stuck them together let's see I guess on this
and the original wires they had two Reds to this side two blues to this side and those came out
here cut those four wires so here's the incoming power cable and the white wire comes back here
and there's the original wire nut with the two blues two rats and the white and that connects
both tombstones on that end together and again it's a Type B tube so this end is neutral the
other end is ha and then here's the original ground connection I just left out in place
so one note on this conversion process I'm not sure if these wire colors are standard so what
you would need to really do is consult the little wiring diagram on your ballast to see
how the wires are connected so you can see here I had black white that's these two wires and that's
your incoming power it says line and then there's yellow goes to one end of the tube and that was
these two wires and then over here it has red red blue blue there's your four wires that go to the
other end of the tube so don't go by these wire colors on my ballast look at your light yeah so
there should be probably two or four wires going to one end of the fixture and two or four wires
going to the other end of the fixture and then two more wires hooked to the incoming power so
originally the incoming hot went to this wire that went into the ballast so I just took the
wire nut off that wire and put it on to these liars and then likewise there was the original
neutral that went to the ballast I disconnected a out and connected it over there and the ballast
is just sitting here it's not doing anything yeah so I actually had left the ballast in place okay
and so yeah it was able to actually remove the ballast it's clipped in on that end and then
it's got a fixed stud here I thought that was a loose screw so I never tried to remove it just
to kind of clean it up I took a cable clamp there and was able to use this stud to hold
those wires in place if having the ballast in there bothers you you can take it out so maybe
people were confused because the ballast was still in there I just left it in there because
it was an extra step okay we've got the reflector back in all the wires tucked inside so let me put
the tubes in and show you that it still works okay there we go light still work the ballast
is gone so inside there is just wires hopefully that helps clear up the conversion process if you
have any other questions host up in the comment section down below I'll put the original video
links over on the left side and in the video description and as always thanks for watching