Today we visited a museum that had these long lines of Fluorescent Lights fixtures. There were a few burnt out bulbs but most interesting was how the switches connected with the lights! #lights #lightbulb #cfl #lights #lightsandswitches
That’s pretty weird the way they set these up. I have heard of that sort of thing being done with 3-lamp and 4-lamp fixtures to provide a bi- or tri-level “dimming” effect, but I have never seen or heard of it being done with 2-lamp fixtures or strip light fixtures in general. This setup would require two 1-lamp ballasts in each fixture too, instead of one 2-lamp, which would be pretty strange. Or maybe they are doing that thing where one (or in this case, two, I guess) ballasts are shared across several fixtures. So in this case, it could be one 2-lamp ballast driving one lamp each in a pair of fixtures, and then another driving the remaining two lamps in the pair. Or the same thing done with 3-lamp ballasts across three fixtures, or 4-lamp ballasts across four fixtures. Either way, very interesting. Also, they seem to do a pretty good job at maintaining these, and still use fluorescent lamps in 2024. Nice.
Thanks for this info, your explanation makes perfect sense. I guess if they set it up from scratch they could do it however they wanted it with the ballasts as you suggest, and this way they can have the option of turning off one side of the fixture for dimmer light pulling less electricity, without any dark spots. We were also impressed that all those bulbs were fluorescent!
