I have been using the direct wire LED tubes...like them. My supplier has the single ended ones; now I am seeing the double ended ones coming out. I would like to use whatever is going to be the standard. What is that?
If you are replacing T12's that have non-shunted sockets in which single-sided LED replacements will work, it should take about the same amount of time.
But the double sided ones work in more situations, such as common T8 fixtures with shunted sockets.
I just want to expand on this a little since I was getting myself confused and looked into it more yesterday.
You can buy single sided LED tubes which get the neutral fed to one pin and the hot fed to the other pin on the same side. This requires unshunted sockets. I have never used these.
I have always used the doublesided LED tubes. These require neutral to one side and hot to the other side. The nice thing about these is that you can feed either pin, so they will work in both shunted and unshunted sockets. But since the pins are shorted together, you have to be sure to not wire both the neutral and hot to the same side, which is easy to avoid.
I installed a bunch of these today in T12 lights. I used the doublesided ones. The way I see it, those are the best to stock because they can work on either type of socket, as you said jw0445. The one thing I got confused on was that although they will work with both socket types, you still have to rewire them to keep the hot and neutral on opposite sides.
So this post will serve as my guide for the future.
I retrofitted a shop full of 8 foot fluorescents with 4 foot LED kits that included new tomb stones, brackets, and jumper wires. The lamps were single ended with no wires needed on the end tombstones. Only the center tombstones were connected to the 120 line that previously fed the ballast. I left the old ballasts in after cutting all the wires. Easy job, good profit. I can't remember the brand name of the kits but my supply house had them. So does Home Depot. They came with stickers to warn they were LED lamps.
Old thread but I do have a comment. I recently reworked 8' single pin T12 and T8 fixtures for keystone led lamps. The increase in light output is significant.
You could stick them on the maintenance man's coffee cup, he might notice the sticker then.
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