Well, here I am in the garage looking up at these old fluorescent lights. Not very good. I mean they've been working for pretty much 20 years and haven't changed a bulb. Now I changed one fixture over to LED and that's a considerably brighter using less energy. So what I'm going to do is document how to change the ballast and upgrade this fixture to LED. It's actually pretty simple. Alright, I've taken down the fixture. It's on the ground here. There's the power cord over there. It's pretty dusty. So I'm going to clean this off before doing anything further with it. There's the fluorescent tubes here. Core to turn it and pull them out. So I'll take these out and then we'll get right to it. A word on fluorescent tubes. So this is a standard old-style 40 watt fluorescent tube. It's got two... Oh, you can see it. It's got two contacts over here for a heater and on the other end it has the same. So what it relies on is the first heats up the end and when it gets warm, it sends the current all the way through the tube to the other end. So there's actually power on both ends. There's two more contacts. Now what I'm replacing it with is a retrofit. There's several kinds of LED retrofits. This is the kind I'm using. It's called a max-led... It's 22 watts. And it's only powered from one side. You see it's kind of marked AC over there. It has those same two contacts here. But on the other end, those are just for holding it in mechanically. There's actually nothing on the other end, electrically. And this only can go in one way because there's a label on the back. This LED tube does not need a ballast. There's another kind of LED tube that does work with a ballast. And it would just be a straight plug-in replacement for the fluorescent. But if I use that, then the ballast is going to be consuming energy. So I don't want that. So I'm using this kind, which you can basically just plug the line current right across these two. So I'm going to rewire this fixture so that the line current is straight across these AC terminals here. It's not really rocket science taking one of these fixtures apart. They all come apart fairly simply. This one has a screw here and one on the other end. So I'll just remove that. With the screws removed, this thing, this reflector will just come right off. And inside, we can see there's... Oh, this is the ballast. This is the old-style non-electronic kind of ballast. It uses some energy on its own. You can see here's the line cord coming in. We've got black for hot, white for neutral, green for ground. This goes into the ballast. And then the ballast runs the controls that do everything. Now I could remove this ballast completely. But I'm just going to actually... Oh yeah, and the ballast also goes to the other side because it's going to send energy all the way through the tube in the case of the old-style fluorescent. With a new style, all I need to do is connect these two wires and these two wires across the line cord. Pretty simple. And there's already wire nuts provided. So I'm just going to cut this right here and splice it in there. All right, so the wires are cut now. I'm going to move this stuff, these wires away. So the ballast is completely disconnected now. I'll just move these kind of out of the way so they won't touch anything. These are the wires that are way over there. I'm just going to leave. They do no harm. And then I'll connect these. I'm going to leave that green ground connected where it is. And I'll connect one wire from each of these sockets to each of these. And here's what it looks like at last. Not much to it, so I'm going to button it up again. All right, so it's all buttoned up again. And I've installed just one tube. Since these two are in parallel, I can test each side separately if I want to. Should. Yeah. Okay, that side is good. And I'll check the other side. I'm really thinking this is so bright. I probably only need one. And I can get away with even less energy for lighting this garage. Just two tubes instead of four. Oh, all right. Let's see how this works. So I've got just one tube in each of these fixtures. It's made for two. And I guess I could put two in. But it looks like with one, I have pretty good lighting here. So I'm lighting the whole garage basically for 44 watts. What used to take 160? So seems like a good deal to me. I can always buy some more tubes if I need some. They're kind of expensive now. The type that I got are they were $35 each. The price is slowly going down. A couple of years ago it was $50. So it's getting better. I wouldn't be surprised if the price keeps going down. Anyway, how to change a ballast. Pretty easy.