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Classic Tape-Job-Gone-Wrong
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Apparently the whole guts and everything came loose in this fixture. The sockets and ballast must be mounted to the channel cover, which I personally hate but anyways, something must've broken. But hey, at least the fixture works, as there were plenty here that didn't!
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BTW, all the high-up lights were single lamp F96T12 slimlines and the wraps mounted low down were single lamp F32T8s.
At my school, we have all Lithonia wraps in the main building. They were installed around three or four years ago and have Sylvania /741 F32T8s. One of the wraps in one of the bathrooms is missing its diffuser (and these lights are less than five years old!) and today I noticed the lamp was out. Slowly, the lamps have been beginning to fail one-by-one, and they're less than five years old too and they're all on programmed start ballasts! And in the votech building we have Lithonia three-lamp parabolic troffers from 2006 (have Quicktronic instant-start ballasts) with GE SPX35s. The lamps are all original; the only replacements are a couple of Sylvania /741s. There are quite a few dead lamps, but the GE are on IS and are almost ten years old, so that's fantastic IMO. The Sylvanias don't seem to be as great. I'm sure every manufacturer has duds though, and I wasn't around there when the GEs were put up so IDK how long it was before the GEs began to fail. There's one ballast in the new wraps that's dead (4-lamp ballast inside an 8ft 4X F32T8 tandem wrap; those 4-lamp ballasts seem to fry most often). Apparently it lasted a day before dying according to my math teacher (it's in his room). There's a troffer in the votech bathroom from 2006 with a dead ballast too. The cover is removed so you can see that the sockets melted. They relamped the bathroom and gave it new lamps even though the ballast is dead lol.
Those GE EcoLux F32T8s (at least 3500K ones) are actually pretty good IMO. I don't see Philips ones anywhere near as often but yeah they seem to like to go starved...I know a grocery store with lots of them, they were all starting to dim out making the whole store seem dingy!