Any light retrofitting companies?

[LarryFine]

Well, yes, I do it. Typically, by the fixture or ballast.

I want to be the one who benefits by my working harder.

 

[hurk27]

Anyone else work for companies doing this?

I'm in the process of replacing 14, 8' T12 f96 60 watt single pin two lamps a fixture with T-5, 54 watt HO's two lamps a fixture, took me forever to find a company who made strip fixture with T-5, 54 watt HO lamps, at 6100 lumens per bulb or 12,200 lumens per fixture it will give allot more light for less wattage, I have done many T-12 to T-8 changes and lamp for lamp they always give off more light, just take a few seconds to light fully, always use the motorola electronic 3-wire ballast for 2 lamps or the 5-wire electronic for 4-lamps, Motorola also makes these same ballast for syvlaina, and are 120 through 277 volts so no need to stock a bunch of ballast, if you get ballast that are 120 or 277 they won't operate on 240 very good, and once you have used them on one or the other voltage you can't reuse them on the other voltage, so make sure it has 120v-277v or 120v thru 277v on the ballast, not 120/277 or 120v or 277v

T-5's have the highest lumen's per watt availble as of right now (not including LED's), but the ballast are getting hard to get, they have a chip in their ballast that is also in the I-Pod, and there is only one manufacture of this chip as the other two went belly up, I hope this gets better.

City Electrical Supply is selling a retro kit for T-8 32 watt to T-5 non HO lamps, it's a plug and play type retro fit, with funky lamp adaptors, and while it does lower the wattage, it doesn't really increase the lumen out much, so if your not wanting to get brighter but use less energy then this might be the ticket. I'll try to find a link to it.

I found it:
http://www.ces-us.net/images2/Retrofit%20Spec%20sheet.pdf

 

[Ravenvalor]

Anyone else work for companies doing this?

I know of one electrician who is using t8 841 and 835 lamps on the magnetic ballasts.

 

[BullsnPyrs]

T8 on magnetic ballast

T8 on magnetic ballast

Then he isn't deserving of the the title, magnetic ballasts are not rated for use with T8 lamps. Often a lamp will light with a magnetic ballast but will operate at reduced output and fail prematurely.

 

[Ravenvalor]

Then he isn't deserving of the the title, magnetic ballasts are not rated for use with T8 lamps. Often a lamp will light with a magnetic ballast but will operate at reduced output and fail prematurely.

Can you substantiate your last sentence with documented evidence?

 

[tkb]

I did a quit of few job for some guys out of CT to replace 400w HPS high-bays for 8' fluorescent fixtures w/6-4' T-8 lamps.

They paid $40/fixture and they supplied the lifts. This was for 200 to 500 fixtures per job.

We had to supply the cord, chain and wirenuts.
If all of the cords needed to be replaced, they bought the cord.

The trick was to be efficient.
We had a guy on the ground assembling and prewiring the cords.
We purchased about 20 cord caps to get ahead of the guys hanging the fixtures.

We used a 6' baker scaffold to stock the fixtures and roll them out to where they were being hung.

We had to break down the old fixtures so they could take them away or put them in the dumpsters they supplied.

The lamps were put in large cardboard tubes for recycling.

I made money, but Ihad to stay on top of it.

 

[BullsnPyrs]

I have been retrofitting and running retrofit projects for 15 years. One of the ways we caught retrofitters that cheated by just changing lamps was to find prematurely burnt out lamps a few months after they were installed. They do manufacture magnetic ballasts specifically for T8 applications. The magnetic T8 combination does not provide the energy savings of an electronic T8 ballast. Is the "electrician" in question purchasing magnetic ballasts rated for T8 lamps? I didn't get that from your post, the implication is that they were installing T8 lamps on existing magnetic ballasts designed and rated for T12 lamps.