A business customer happened to comment the troffer lights in their realtor office were flickering, giving them headaches, and making their skin look green.
I said we could do something about it, probably recessed halogen. Then I looked above the drop ceiling and saw a maze of plumbing and HVAC crammed into the 14" space. The troffers weren't going to come out without major destruction of the ceiling. Then I talked to a guy at our supplier who know lighting inside and out and he suggested replacing all of the magnetic ballasts with electornic ballasts.
It was a great idea. We generated a lot of work out of that job, and the client got a huge refund back from the state's energy dept. (CA in this case) The light color was much better, the flickering and buzz were gone, and everybody was happy.
One minor nuisance was rewiring the ballasts. The color-coding of the wires is right out the window. I finally took the tombstones apart and made a schematic to work from. Also, my neck feels like a tree trunk from reaching up for so many hours. Those magnetic ballasts are heavy after awhile.
End of the story is that this whole thing started a word-of-mouth thing going that's generated more work.

Whenever I'm in an office now I always float the question- "Boy those fluorescent lights are kinda buzzy huh?"

Electronic ballasts? Never heard of such an animal. Sounds interesting, what are the benifits? We are required to use the "environmentally safe" low mercury tubes now. How do they work with those?

Really? I think the T8 bulbs, which require electronic ballasts, have been around for at least ten years. Now there are T5's, though I haven't installed any.

I think you can read up on the benefits over at the Lithonia website.

[This message has been edited by royta (edited 09-16-2004).]

Did a whole school a few years ago. Retro-fitted electronic ballasts w/T8 lamps. Did a developement center once and used 5000K lamps to simulate daylight. The head shrinkers said the light from the lamps would help prevent depression. I put 5000K compacts in all the lamps in our house. My wife saya they make her feel better in the winter. What ever works!

I'm the maintenance supervisor for a small city school district. We always install electronic ballasts and convert to T-8's whenever we need to replace a ballast anywhere in the district and we probably replace several a day.

we did a chruch this winter that had T-5's in the valance around the main hall. they seems brighter than the T-8's. VERY fragile thin bulbs.

Was going to ask if they were Lithonie or Motorola ballasts - both of them have screwy color codes IIRC.

Big Ed,
The Electronic Ballast is the perfect fit for the new Low mercury/Tri-phosphor tubes.
A lot of my work involves Fluorescent lighting and the newer tubes not only give more Lumens/Watt, but they have better colour rendering properties than the older type tubes.