How To Easily Convert Fluorescent Lights to LED | Save Money on Energy Costs

what's up YouTubers Johnny DIY here today I'm going to be showing you guys how to convert your old fluorescent light fixture to accept LED bulbs and really brighten up your room so if you guys are new to my Channel please do me a favor click the Subscribe and notification Bell so you can get all my new videos all right let's get to this one so today we're going to be working on converting these fixtures in the kitchen to led up we already finished this one but we're going to convert this one now it's great to convert to these LED bulbs because not only will you get brighter you'll have lower power consumption and you're not going to have to deal with recycling these old toxic style tubes the first thing you're going to want to do is turn off the breaker to this light fixture then you're going to want to make sure that the light switch is off to that fixture and then we're going to come up here and we're going to take the old tubes out because all you do is grab it and twist it towards you and it's going to pop out of each side so I'll show you down here we just twist towards us and it pops out drop them out okay now if we check under here there's going to be one of these little Clips like this usually give it a twist with your fingers or you can use your pliers if it's stuck then we should be able to remove this cover cover just drops out from the one side so if we look under here we can check out the wiring now this is the ballast this is what regulates the power for the fluorescent lights now if you've noticed that your lights have gone out or they start flickering check the bulbs first but second is going to be this ballast because this is what goes out all the time so one of my ballasts broke on one of these so that's why I'm doing this conversion but we're going to go ahead and take our electrical tester this is just a voltage tester I'll go ahead and put links down in the description to one of these as well as the other tools and supplies and the bulbs we're going to be using and we're going to check all these wires to make sure no voltage is going through make sure that our power is indeed turned off it's always a good idea to double check all right so we know the power's off so we'll go ahead and move these wires out of the way so the method we're going to be using today is going to be bypassing this ballast there is another method where you leave the ballast and use bulbs but the problem with that is you're still relying on this ballast that uses quite a bit of electricity plus with the method I'm showing you you don't have to worry about this going out so what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and cut these wires a little ways off so if anyone had ever wanted to reuse this could and the same thing on this side now you can leave that ballast but I'm just going to go ahead and take it out since we're not going to be using it anyways so we just unscrew one little Phillips bolt right here and the whole ballast just comes out it's pretty heavy so be careful okay so now we'll just pull down this little bundle of wires got four little wires we're gonna take our wire strippers we're gonna strip all four of these little wires pull the insulation right off foreign just need to pull off about a half an inch of that insulation okay then we've got these two yellow ones coming from the end we're gonna strip these and we're gonna strip our power and our neutral wires too okay now the white wire and the two yellow wires coming off the end we're going to take those we're gonna put all three wires together give them a Twist clockwise the pliers then we're going to take a wire net and we're going to put that on and you just turn that on clockwise too you just spin it onto those wires until it gets nice and tight and we've got the two from the end and we've got to go into our neutral it doesn't matter which side we connect to which then we're going to take our black wire we're going to do the same thing but we're going to connect that to those four wires coming out of the other side so see we're just basically bypassing that old ballast all right I don't just ensure it better connection we'll take our wire nut and that goes on clockwise as well that's why we do them both clockwise so you don't back it out when you twist this on tightens it up nice there we go so once again we've got our black running right here to the four wires on that end got them all going to one wire cap then we've got the wires the yellow wires on that one coming to our white wire right here like I said it doesn't matter which ones go into which side then we'll take our wires I'm just going to bend them give them a little twist on it themselves just so that they'll tuck up nicely underneath that cover now this conversion is going to work on either T8 or T12 size fluorescent bulbs these happen to be the T8 size so here are LED bulbs and they do have a clear cover on them now if your fixtures are exposed and they're not covered with a diffuser like I have here in the kitchen you can get these led ones with the white covering as well so the built-in diffuser now there are different types of these LED bulbs these are double ended bulbs that means they have the power that comes in from both sides these are the kind that are going to work with the bypassing the ballast like we're doing so I'll make sure I go ahead and put links in the description to the ones that are going to work with this method for you guys but we'll take one and before we put that cover in we're gonna slip one in and these go in the same way as the old ones the little pins right here let's look then push it up and then give it a twist flip your breaker on and we'll go ahead and test it all right so it's working so now we can go ahead and flip it off go ahead and turn this and pull this back out okay so now we can put that cover on and as you can see this end just slips into the one end slips in and we can push that cover make sure when you put this cover on that you're not pinching any of your wires and you're going to give that little thing a Twist 90 degrees to lock it in okay then we can go ahead and put our bulbs in twist them twist them uh 90 degrees and we can go ahead and test it again all right they are all working and they're super bright so you can get these different brightnesses but you can also get them different color temperatures see these ones are more blue so they're daylight this bulb right here as you can see it's more yellow so that's more warm tone you can get a more warm like that or you can get a more bright daylight like this but that's it guys that's how to convert your fluorescent lights to LED conversion hopefully you found this video helpful if you did give it a thumbs up if you're new to the channel subscribe and click the notification Bell so you can get my new videos if you guys have any questions or comments go ahead and leave them down below and I'll get back to you thanks for watching Johnny DIY keep on doing it yourself guys take care

Channel: Jonny DIY

Views: 698,686

Keywords: how to convert fluorescent lights to led, how to bypass light ballast, bypassing fluorescent light ballast, how to convert tube lights to led, led tube light conversion, converting fluorescent lights to led

Id: TzDA-paae3k

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023