A long time ago I bought four 4' single bulb florescent light fixtures at a home improvement store that was going out of business. So a few months ago I put them up in the garage, wired them in parallel, and the last two have problems coming on. I don't know if it's a problem with the light fixture itself or what, but it seems a bit too coincidental that the first two (closest to the switch) come on every time. If I flip the light switch a few times the third one will usually come on, and the last one takes a bit more to get it to fire up. It will sometimes come on by flipping the switch on the wall, but works best if I flip the switch that's on the housing back and forth until it finally fires up. Certainly there couldn't be enough current draw from the first two lights to keep the third and forth light from igniting, could there? These lights should be run in parallel, and not in series, right? Am I doing something wrong, or are they just crappy lights?
Try swapping the tubes between the last one and first one. You might have a bad tube.
I have that exact same problem with Flouro lights that are plugged into sockets vs. wired into a line.
Zomby woof wrote:
Try swapping the tubes between the last one and first one. You might have a bad tube.
I actually thought about trying that but haven't gotten around to it yet. They're all brand new, so I doubt that's the problems, but it's worth a shot. Thanks for reminding me.
Brett_Murphy wrote:
I have that *exact* same problem with Flouro lights that are plugged into sockets vs. wired into a line.
Weird. I wonder if that might somehow be related to my problem. Although mine are hard wired, my garage isn't wired up yet, so I've got an extension cord that runs from the house to the garage, so the whole garage is powered by an extension cord from the house. Don't worry, the compressor gets rolled to the house and plugged directly into an outlet, and the hose runs to the garage. I don't rely on the piddly extension cord to power too much.
I have similar lights in my garage (8) and I wired them so that I had 4 switches. They are placed on the ceiling in a rectangle around the car. Three on each side and one each in front and in back. I can turn on either the front or back one or right or left side depending on where I'm working.
I have 12 in one shop, and 8 in the other, all wired in parallel to 1 switch in each, and no problems starting them.
Is it cold? 4' bulbs tend to start slowly in the cold. 8' high output lamps are much better at this,but the 4'ers are not. Bad bulbs will do it as well, and I don't care if they are new you still get bad ones from time to time.
