Hi, it's rent time. What idiot invented the T4 Fluoro tube? You may have seen these in a light fitting like this which I comes out of our bathroom and it is basically failed and the tube has gone. You can tell by that you know the ends are starting to blacken on them, so that's caused by our sputtering from the filaments. and well, they don't sort of.

you know, like over as they should. and they're certainly on their way out. This one's like a twelve years old or something like that. and I I didn't know this when we actually got this.

but these T4 fluorescent lamps are standardized width. Okay, that's what the T4 is for. It's a certain width like this, but they are not a standard length. Unbelievable What Idiot invented non-standardized legs apparently I only just found out when I went to go buy another one actually I tried to buy a LED replacement cuz we've got LED lights all throughout our house and this is the only one left in the bathroom that didn't have it cuz the wife didn't want to change it.

she really likes this are fitting that matches our Antarctic themed bathroom. don't ask anyway and we went to replace it with LEDs No, couldn't find any LED Fluro replacement shoes like you're kidding, the teeth, eyes and the T8 for example that I've got here in the lab. but I couldn't find anything 44. So I went now.

All right I'll just go buy another fluoro tube. and why? Nope! Every manufacturer has their own standard length I am a world their own length depending on the product and for the life of me I could not find another length full of T4 fluoro tube that fitted. so our bugger it. I'm going to change this thing over to LEDs and so that's what I'm going to do here.

It'll be very quick and simple. What I've got is one of these LED strips one of these aluminium backed adhesive LED strips I got it from Jake Oh, it was fairly cheap and it has a nominal output rating of I Think it's 360 or 390 lumens or something like that if you believe their figures. Anyway, this is a 12-volt our constant voltage strip. It is not a constant current sweat strip.

You can tell because this suckers got resistors in there so it runs off at 12 volts DC constant voltage and if I was actually to wire in my own LEDs in there I'd drive miss constant current, it's more efficient way to do it. There's less loss and things like that. I've done a video on that on the past how I lit up my back deck which I'll probably have to link him down below with that LED lights and they used constant current drivers for those because I manufactured my own LED strips with um star LEDs those those Luxy and star LEDs Anyway, it didn't want to make my own. This was practically the exact length.

Look at this so the wires can just go down in there And the way this strip work. this thing works as it's got glass plates top and bottom and then it's got these glass rods which then go in here on the top like that so it's all sort of diffused so it should work really well with these. um, these spot LED strips like this and your typical blue rose for example. I'm not sure about the T 4s, but like a typical real high efficiency fluro might be say a hundred lumens per watt.

So a ten what tube might be a thousand lumens up. for example I'm not actually sure what wattage this one is. If anyone can read their read their Chinese is it then yeah. I don't know what the wattage is I know it might have been like eight or ten.

Watts So and this wouldn't have been a high-efficiency one, would have been a cheapy so it would have been in the order of you know. I I'm guessing maybe eight watts or something like that lumens? probably you know, 80 lumens per watt, perhaps. But even if it's a hundred lumens per watt, let's say 800 lumens, this one won't be. shouldn't be as bright as that Fluro tube in theory at three hundred and sixty lumens.

but the difference is is that it's all coming out from it's all coming up. But whereas these fluro tubes like this, okay, it might be producing a thousand lumens or 800 lumens or whatever, but sort of. you know half of that's going to be coming out the bottom and bouncing off the mirror is going to be some loss and all sorts of stuff like that. So this one, hopefully it'll do the business if it doesn't know I can get in there and always replace it with some lucky and star LEDs on my own, you know, my own custom higher power solution.

But anyway, I'm going to give this a bell and install it. I've got one of these constant voltage drivers is as I said, not constant current. so this outputs a constant voltage of 12 volts. This has a 10 watt capability, so more than enough to drive the strip we've got here.

If I want to drive a higher power one later I might go to constant current. Took a little bit of finding to find one that fitted nicely inside there, but yet that's all I have to do was stick this sucker in and hook this up and hopefully that'll do the business. And yeah, if you want to see in comparison between this is a T5 bulb which does come in standard lengths and and of course the T8 switch are having the ceiling. Of course there the big fat ones.

but these T4 what a mongrel it invented. non-standard link. Floros doesn't seem hugely bright, but yeah it's You know the eyes have a massive dynamic range in compensate. It's impossible to do a comparison like this.

We have to just go in there and stick it in and light up the room and see if it works. And there you go. It's stuck on there like that. - easy double sided tape I think I was wrong with the aluminium backed comment on this.

It's not. It's just relying on the regular copper strip on there all the excess copper to dissipate the power. It's not a hugely high-power one anyway, but it should work reasonably well. I mean we don't need a huge amount of light from this thing, So yep, I think it's probably gonna be adequate.

There we go. that'll sit in there nicely. Got some double-sided tape on the back of that and interestingly, this one is not a complete universal voltage ie. Undred + 10 - 240.

It's 170 - 240, so it's only designed for you know, nominal. You know, 220 to 240 volt operation with some you know, brownout built into there. Why are they doing that? Well, It's going to be more efficient when you design a wide input voltage range from you know, the 90 to the 240 you might be used to on most sort of products. They're not very efficient at all because you've gotta cater for over the whole range so it's harder if you have the wide input range to optimize the efficiency over there for this thing based on that entire input range.

If you have a narrower input range, then you can more carefully design your converter, your components you know the turns ratio, z-transform everything else inside. Here you can more carefully control and get a higher efficiency. When you have that narrow input ranging because this is a 10 watt in a relatively small, completely sealed brick like this, then well, you know that thing that's going to matter. So if they had the universal input voltage there, it most likely would have had to have been a much bigger brick and it wouldn't have fitted.

But as it turns out, these are kind of like a pretty much, um, standard size it seems. I Found that when they're a whole bunch and this particular range here was available in different wattages available in like five or six watts or something smaller, but they're the same physical dimensions, width, and height, but the length is different on them. so I think it's available up until 20 watts or 25 watts or something and they just get longer and longer. So I'm and this is basically the exact dimensions of the old electronic starter which came out of this.

We didn't use an old-fashioned knob ballast. we had an electronic starter in here, but yeah, it's They seem to be a standard size nice, unlike there's pain in the ass T4 tubes. And there's our completed light. We've got our glass rods on the front and the diffused glass top and bottom, so that should work.

a treat. Yeah, we're going to get some fair beetle loss thrilled of course, but hey, it's gonna be better than nothing. And the wife gets back her favorite light fit into because you know it matches the entire theme. Bathroom: Oh goodness.

And here we go. let's switch it on. I'm using my variable frequency converter here which allows me to generate any mains voltage I like up to I think its 264 volts. there it is and any frequency as well.

I can do like 50. It's got presets here for different frequencies, but of course we don't need that. So let's switch it on and 50 Hertz 240 volts. Tada.

look at that. Bob's your uncle. it's a Bobby Dazzler It works. So whether it looks bright enough, whether or not it does what we want only won't know that until we actually install it in the bathroom.

So there you go. That's a we know though. and here it is installed. Yes, this is the Antartic bathroom, so let's switch it on see if it works.

Whoa. Bobby does luck and yeah, you can see the individual LEDs in there, but that's not a huge like are both reflected on the bottom there and also reflected through those glass rods on the front. It kind of looks groovy. Nothing wrong with that.

So there you go. We did get out. we can't tell what you know how bright it is because it's daylight here as you can see and so we won't know until tonight. but that anyway should be a reasonable upgrade.

And yes we did get the high color temperature we got. oh I think it's you know 6,000 K or something like that I don't know is so the it'll have like a bit of a blue tinge to it so that it'll highlight the the other Blues in the room and things like that. That's what we had before it actually had. It was a high color temperature before so should work really well.

So there you go, little upgrade. catch you next time you.