Hi folks-
Today, the local Facilities Maintenance Manager and I did a walk thru of a few of the 17 church buildings throughout the area that I help them out with by volunteering my time in some basic upkeep. Mostly lighting and other simple repairs. Out of the 17 buildings, there are only 2.5 remaining that have not yet been converted over from T12 to T8, and I was just given permission to convert the remaining 2.5 buildings over on my own time frame. My plan is to let the current T-12 bulbs burn out and then I will re-ballast them with Sylvania Octron Ballasts (Unfortuniatly they are instant start and they have boxes and boxes of em) as well as with the new generation of Sylvania Ecologic F32T12 tubes, 3000K color (this is a church environment so a relaxed color tone is essential where as we would use 4100K or 3500K in office areas and what not) Once we use up all the instant start ballasts, they will start ordering delayed/programmed start ballasts after I explained to them that with the type of usage they will get, we'll see much longer bulb life out of the T8s compared to the T8s on instant start that we have now. Until I explained it to him, he was puzzled about why the T8s would not last as long as the T12s and he wanted to keep these buildings T12, however the higher ups in the church, under pressure from the EPA and other energy saving places are requiring the upgrades at all buildings so the T12s have to go. We will be replacing a few outdated fixtures, but for the most part many of the fixtures are still in good shape from when the 1st building I will be doing was constructed back in 1973 that still have many of the original Universal F40T12 ballasts in them. In fact they seem to do better then the Magnatek ballasts we have in the other building that was built in 1989 which we've replaced a few of over the years. I will be sure to get photos of things I think are interesting or noteworthy. I'm also going to be saving as many of the T-12 lamps as I can too
A few of them date back to the 1970s but most have since been replaced with late 80s and 90s and 2000 versions of the Sylvania F40T12 line. I'm gonna hang onto a few of the ballasts as well, however there is still a hearty supply of new T12 ballasts in the light shed. We'll see what happens.
