Hey all. So as the title says I’m looking for help finding a replacement ballast for my t8 fluorescent lights. Here’s the issue…
Every replacement ballast I am finding online has 5 wires coming out of it and connects to both ends of the bulb.
Example of wiring diagram for the 5 wire ballasts:
And here’s what my ballast wiring diagram looks like:
The ballast wires only connect to 1 end of the bulbs and the other ends just have a little jumper wire that runs in between the 2 bulb sockets.
More pics of my ballast. It has 4 wires. 2 wires run to one end of the bulbs
And the other 2 wires connect to the power and on/off switch
I have been unable to remove the ballast wires from the bulb sockets.
So my plan if I couldn’t remove the wire was just to cut + strip the wires, leaving some sticking out of the bulb socket and then I’d splice it to the wire on a new ballast.
But that plan was for a direct replacement ballast that was the same as mine.
Every ballast I am finding online is like the one below with 5 wires
Does anyone know of a source for the 4 wire ballasts like my old one? I’ve contacted 1000 bulbs .com and ballast shop .com and neither had the 4 wire ballasts.
I know i can probably just use a 5 wire ballast like the one above and wire it to both ends of the bulbs like the diagram shows. But then I think I’d also need new bulb sockets because I can’t get the old wires out and I’m not sure how I’d wire up the new ones without removing the old wires.
I’m also not sure which terminal(s) on the sockets the wires would even connect to because it doesn’t show it in the wiring diagram.