How-To: T8 to LED conversion / HYPERIKON / 105,600 Lumens!
Good shop lighting is SUPER important. When we bought our house years ago, the garage had only 2 sockets for incandescent bulbs. Later on, I installed eleven 2×4 troffer fixtures that I scored for FREE. Lighting was greatly improved for the time being.
Then, I noticed that the T8 fluorescent bulbs started to get dim over time, the ballasts created some humming, and the worst was the few minutes it took for bulbs to get to full brightness in cold weather.
I have been watching prices on LED tubes and they really have come down in price lately, so it makes sense to ditch florescent when the bulbs or ballasts start giving you trouble.
LED Advantages
- 10% light output improvement over OLD T8 flourescent bulbs
- 42% energy savings (in my case) over T8
- No cold weather performance issues that I’m aware of (yet)
LED Disadvantages
- You have to remove the ballast and do some rewiring
- Takes an extra 3-5 minutes per fixture to convert.
Hyperikon Tubes
Here are links to the tubes I used for this project.
Hyperikon – 5000K – 2400 lumen – 84+ CRI – Single end power
More bulb specs on Hyperikon website
All Hyperikon LED tubes on Amazon
Doubling The Ouput
I decided to take things a step further and convert my fixtures from 2 bulbs to 4 bulbs. This will give me 9,600 lumens per fixture, or 105,600 lumens for the entire garage!
Now with 26 florescent bulbs, I had roughly 47,000 lumens while using 5.7A. Now with 44 LED tubes, I have 105,600 lumens, all while consuming 6.1A.
Here is the harness I used in my trofffers to convert to 4 lamp single end power.
