Hello everyone! Soooo, I may have accidentally gotten my hands on 13 18/20W 2 foot striplights from older electrical control cabinets. These fixtures are perfect for putting up along the ceiling and putting different coloured tubes into for fun! They have sockets too, which makes it super easy to daisy chain them. they are relatively easy to move around. However, I was blown away by the cost of coloured tubes, and since I dont have any coloured in my collection I would need to purchase some. Instead I have a lot of typical 830/840, and some 940 and also some older lovely T12 warm white tubes made by LUMA sweden.

I know that there are sleeves available that makes a tube coloured, but I wonder how good those really are. I would like input on it before I purchase any, they are a MUCH cheaper option than buying coloured tubes, plus being able to use any tube I want is appealing But if they produce terrible colour then I will purchase coloured tubes instead. But if it's acceptable then those might be a great option!

To save my colored tubes from wearing out, I use coloured sleeves on spare 36w/40w tubes (I have lots of 4ft fixtures). They do work great, just a little dim. Also, colors like red and gold look good in 827 and 830, while colors like blue are best on 840+ (865 if you can find them). The only difference I see is the colors may be washed out sometimes, or look even better than actual colored tubes.

Interesting! Then I think I will purchase a few sleeves and give them a try! I do have some 965 tubes that would be good for the bluer colours. The 830 tubes should look great with the more red ones, I’m thinking the 4000k tubes would work well with green perhaps?

I’ll give them
A shot!

I know the feeling of not wanting to wear out rare tubes. I have a collection of rare Philips and Sylvania T12 bulbs that are new old stock, I have ran them for a few hours but currently I’m using very newly made Philips and osram T8 tubes, I want to keep those T12’s for the future!

keeping the T12s for the future is a good choice. I did find a lot of colored T12s just by asking shops for old stock. I've found 40w red, green and blue and 20w green, pink and gold. Just for testing I put one of the green 20w tubes on for a day, and it got a dark spot.


From the colored sleeves I got compared to real colored tubes:


Red was darker and less pinkish (similar to red inandescents)
Gold was exactly the same
Green was dimmer, less saturated and worse
Blue was more vibrant (similar to blue led)
Pink was much more brighter and similar to magenta (similar to pink phosphor led)


So the sleeves are usually less bright, but more saturated and vibrant (some people prefer more pastel colors).