Understanding LED Tube Lights (Size, Types, and More)

Selecting the right LED tube lights for your lighting project can be a confusing endeavor. This is due to the many variations in length, color, operation, and more.

We recently interviewed an electrician and project manager to break down the different types and sizes of LED tube lights and which ones you should choose based on your individual lighting needs.

This interview features Kevin Kohlert a marketing expert for LED lighting products, Charlie Kughn the CEO at Commercialledlights.com, and Jacob Boyd, a project manager and LED lighting specialist with Serve Electric.

In this episode:

[0:46] Fluorescent v.s LEDs - What is an LED Tube Light v.s Fluorescent Tube Light, which one is better, etc.
[2:55] Types of LED Tubes - Breaks down Type A / Type B / A+B Hybrids.
[8:12] LED Tube Sizes - T12 / T8 / T5, and different lengths.
[11:00] Color Temperature (Kelvin) - Explaining the difference between the different kelvin temperatures of LED bulbs (3000K, 4000K, 5000K, etc)
[15:50] Brightness - Wattage/Lumens/Foot Candles
[23:30] Wiring / Retrofitting LED Tubes
[26:18] Common Questions about LED Tube Lights

Full Transcript

Kevin
This is Kevin Kohlert and Charlie with the first episode of our LED lighting podcast at commercialledlights.com. Today we are here with Jacob Boyd, a project manager and LED lighting specialist with Serve Electric. He has a lot of experience in the LED lighting world.

Today we're gonna be talking specifically about LED tubes since there's a lot of confusion, you know, you have different types like type A and type B. You have different sizes, you have, there's all different classifications of LED tubes. So we're gonna try to break this down a little bit for you to make it a little more palatable.

Charlie
Thank you Kevin, thank you Jacob for coming to join us on our first podcast. And I guess the best way to kick off here is we can talk a little bit about why LED is better than fluorescent.

Jacob
Yeah, absolutely. #1 you're gonna get a better quality than fluorescent tubes, you probably notice as they get older, start the yellow, get a little bit dimmer.

So with the LED, It's gonna stay that bright white or whatever color temperature that you choose to go with for the life of the lamp. So it's not gonna get yellow, it's not gonna get dim, you're not gonna see different, you know, colored lights in the same fixture or throughout your shop or office.

They're a little bit safer. They don't have mercury in them, like the fluorescent tubes do. So, you know, if a maintenance guy or girl drops them, there's no hazardous waste or anything like that. So it's a little bit safer for the environment as well on disposal. You know, we're not putting that mercury back into the ground and what not.

Kevin
Yeah, I dropped a fluorescent once when I was installing tube lights in my garage and it was definitely an explosion and stuff and it looked like some of those chemicals could certainly be harmful and glass goes everywhere and yeah LEDs that don't actually break if you were to drop it.

Jacob
Yeah, some of them have glass tubes, there are glass ones out there. A lot of plastic so they're very durable relative and they're a lot more energy efficient. The LEDs use up to half or sometimes depending on the application, you get a quarter of the amount of energy to power those up and light up, light up the space. And you don't have ballasts. You need to light up the fluorescent tubes. So when an LED light goes out, you know, instantaneously it's the light or the lamp, it's not the lamp or the ballast.

Kevin
Absolutely. Right. I'm glad you talked about ballast because I think that goes into our next one of our classifications of different LED tubes because you have type A. You have Type B. You have, you know, type A. And B. And I think that's where a lot of confusion can come in.

Jacob
Yeah, so like I was talking about with the ballast. Your type A LED tube is going to work with the ballast that you already have in your fixture. So it's basically just an easy swap, you take the old fluorescent lamps out and you put the new LEDs in and they're powered by the ballast. So that's the quickest easiest. Maybe not the most energy efficient way, but from a technical standpoint, it's changing a light bulb.

We want to jump into type B. So this is a ballast bypass. So what you would do is you would remove that ballast and you would hook up your fixture directly to whatever power that you have coming in.

And that each individual tube has its own driver inside to convert. You know, whether it's 120 volts or 277 volts coming into the fixture down to the 10 volts that the LEDs actually operate on. You can get into going even further with the dual ended versus the single ended tubes, meaning when you bring your power to your light sockets that are on each end of a T8 or T12 lamp, you can put your hot and your neutral at one end of the tube.

That would be a single ended and then on a dual ended you would put your hot at one end of the tube and your neutral at the other end of the tube. So that's just different ways of being able to hook it up inside the fixture depending on skill level or application amount of wire.

Kevin
What do you find most people have?

Jacob
Most of the shops that we go into, it's better to have the dual ended, because a lot of the light fixtures that have the T8 and the T12’s in them have what are called shunted tombstones which is the tombstone is the piece that the fixture or the lamp actually locks into. And when you have a shunted tombstone you can't put that hot and the neutral on that on that one tombstone by itself.

You would have to replace the tombstones to a non shunted type um at both ends so that you can retrofit those on the, so having the dual ended tubes and LED, makes it a lot easier and quicker to install because you can just make one whole side of the tube still fixtures hot and the whole other side is neutral.

Charlie
I know when you order and look at a lot of these tubes, some are single and double ended and some are single or only double ended. So it's really important that you understand what, what you have and what you're working with, make sure you order the the right product when you do that.

Jacob
Absolutely. And I think you guys have on the website, kind of a little description of the different types of tubes, how they work. So you can look on the website and say, ‘hey, this application is going to work best for us and Commercial LED already has the tube. So I just gotta make sure I order the right ones.’

Charlie
So regarding tubes, there's type A and B. And then there's also A/B Hybrids. So a B hybrid, you can either use it with your ballast or you can direct wire it. Usually, I mean it would just depend on the manufacturer as to whether it's single ended or dual ended. You would just have to look into which, you know which manufacturer you're ordering from what brand and just look at the instructions and see how those ones are, need to be hooked up.

Charlie
So is there a benefit of going with type A/B. Because I know sometimes they can be a, you know, a buck or so more buck or two more. But what's the, what's the benefit if you went with the type A/B.

Jacob
I would say off the top of my head, the best benefit would be if you've got multiple people in your facility that are retro, that are changing lamps, B It's a mistake free, right? If somebody accidentally plugs one into about or to a fixture that hasn't been bypassed, it's not gonna affect that lamp, Right?

So let's say your maintenance guy retrofitted half of them and ballast bypassed half of them and he quits or retires and you've got a new maintenance personnel coming in, or you've got just a random office person who's, you know, they're on a weekend and and their lamp goes out or their light fixture goes out above their desk and they just go grab some lamps from the storage room and and throw them up in there, they're not going to have to determine what the difference is.

Charlie
Gotcha. Thank you. That makes sense.

Kevin
Other than the actual operation of the tube, type A versus type B versus hybrids. you also got different sizes. I've seen T8, T5, T12, and I've seen different lengths. I believe the T refers to the diameter of the tube.

Jacob
Yeah. And actually Charlie taught me this a while back. T12, which is your older, thicker style four Foot tube, dinosaur, is actually, what was it? It's 8/12” in diameter. 12/8” so be an inch and a half. So the T8 is 8/8, 1 inch and then T5, 5/8ths and then you have 8/12ths for the T12, so it's an inch and a half. And so as long as I've been doing this and hundreds of thousands changed, I never knew that over the last a little fun little fact, you know.

Kevin
Yeah and then with lengths I think most of them it seems like most of them are 4ft T8s.

Jacob
Most of them are four footers, some specialty applications, you know, you've got the perfect square in the office would be a 2ft lamp, your elongated ceiling drop ceiling fixture in your office is a 4ft by 2ft fixture so that's got 4ft tubes in them. And out in the shops are typically 4ft. Some real older buildings might have some 8 footers in there, but typically we retrofit those will put a divider in the middle and we'll make it a 4 lamp 4ft fixture instead of 2 8 ft. So most everything these days is 4ft.

Yeah I know there are some 8ft LEDs out there, but then there's you tend to get heavy and sag and a little more challenging to work with and ship and handle. And so I know you guys, lots of other folks just stick with the 4 footers, it's a lot easier to handle. And they're easy to find. I mean LEDs have a very, very long lifespan, but they do go out. In the case an 8 footer goes out in a critical area. You're not running to the local hardware store and grabbing an 8ft LED tube, you're gonna have to have them on stock or special or something like that.

Kevin
Absolutely. I also have seen the U-Bends as well.

Jacob
Yeah, yeah, a little harder, a little harder to find special order to, but they do make them.

Charlie
So we covered the types, you know, which I think is the biggest thing because that's something, you really want to understand when you're buying when you're buying the tubes. But other things that take into consideration is the kelvin temperature. What are you seeing out there in terms of the most common kelvin temperatures and the look and the feel.

Kevin
This would be important too because it's the actual color of the tube. Like, I see most of the time it's as far as I know, it's 5000K, which is like your normal LED, your bright LED light. But if you want to just talk a little bit about the differences between 5/4/3.

Jacob
So you're 5000k is going to be the most popular fixture in, let's say a shop or a warehouse area, it's a little bit closer to the temperature color of the sun, so it's going to give you that brighter, whiter, pure kind of daylight feeling like you're outside, so you're gonna be able to see things a little bit better.

Your 4000k is a little bit of a, I call it a yellow looking light, and it's better for office spaces, so it's not as bright, it's not as hard on the eyes. Typically in your offices, you know, you've got, you've got light fixtures at 8ft, so they're in the line of sight, whereas in a warehouse, you know those light fixtures are usually, you know, 14 to 20 ft in the air and your, your, your eye isn't catching them, you know, on the, on the same, you know, horizontal plane, so 4000k for offices, homes even, you know, stuff like that,

5000 for warehouses and it even goes up to 6000 if you really want to get into white, almost pushing that blue tinge, but kind of like a scientific lab feel to it, it's pretty kind of sterile feeling commercially delights that customers like that before we've had some labs call us. Oh yeah, so we had one that we wanted, I think 7000k or something. Yeah, that's unusual. Yeah, I think I've seen them all. We have to 7200.

Charlie
High tech paint applications, you know, they might be looking for that, even some explosion proof products. We've had some high high Calvin requests for that also going to paint applications. It seems to be kind of where they're landing.

Kevin
Yeah. And then I guess you know then you got 3000k which you know, I think you see a lot of restaurants correct me if I'm wrong,

Jacob
It gives you that ambiance of the low lit Italian restaurant and impresses your spouse and take her out to a nice dinner. And even later at night in your house. I know a lot of these, I've got them in my house now where they change temperature based on the time of day and you set it up through Alexa or Google Home or whatever, and program it and when it's daylight outside you need that extra bright light, it comes on at 5000k. And as the night gets later and it's darker it automatically switches to like 3000k and you just kind of get that softens up a little bit yeah, that warmer light to sit and watch TV.

Kevin
Sometimes police lights. Anyways, I'm glad you brought up that technology because you know there are a lot of modern technology stuff, a lot of calls are getting a lot more calls now for color selectable.

Charlie
The CCT selectable where you can select between, whether it's a toggle switch, or smart light, or whatever it might be. 3, 4, 5000 Kelvin.

Kevin
Yeah, if you don't like the color, you know, if you want to change it to something else then you can just switch it. It's easy and practically speaking.

Charlie
That really helps if it's even whether it's a high bay fixture or a trough or fixture a little outside the tubes, but it allows, you know, like you could just buy one lamp and they could just, going all the offices, you can't please everybody, you know, someone says ‘I want it warmer’, ‘I want it cooler’. It's as easy as just going up flipping a switch and away you go.

Jacob
We've retrofitted so many offices and you've got half the office that it's too bright, and half the office it’s to dim, can you undo two of the lights that are in this lamps that are in this fixture because it's too bright and hey, can you add lamps to this picture in one day? Someone's like the heck with it,

Kevin
Let's create this new technology to get rid of the problem. Okay, that makes sense. I'm glad we were talking about tunable and that kind of leads us into the brightness you have with different tubes. Another way to classify them as, you know, your watts, lumens, which are slightly different. Both both deal with brightness relatively, but if you want to just talk about different wattage and lumens and what's the two of you commonly see that will fit most applications.

Jacob
So I think Charlie's gonna be better at answering that question. That's, that gets into, I mean, I get pretty nerdy on LEDs, but I mean, he's got that niche over there dealing with the power companies and the, you know, the wattage per lumens, and lumens per watt

Charlie
I think that the big takeaway is most people correspond wattage how many watts? How much power is drawing to how bright is the light? So you can take, the tubes are typically 12, 15, 18, even 20 watts are the typical ones. But if you buy a really cheap 18 watt tube, that doesn't mean it's as bright as a high quality 15 watt tube because the watts really is only how much power is that light using. Whereas if you go to lumens, lumens actually measure the light output that is being used.

So if you have a very efficient, high quality 15 watt tube, it's very conceivable that it's going to be putting out more lumens, more light, than the 18 watt tube.

So when you're shopping for any LED tube, even if it's not Or any LED, even if it's not a tube really, take a look at the lumens and you might find that you can go to a 15 watt and not go with an 18 watt and it might be 50 cents or a buck or whatever more, but you're gonna be saving more electricity just because it's a much more efficient tube.

So typically our product at commercialledlights.com we focus on the commercial market. So you know, the likes of you, Jacob and other electrician groups, property managers or homeowners too, I guess, you know, they buy from us, we are really focused on that high lumens per watt. So it's a high commercial grade product, so they're all going to be very efficient generally speaking.

So yeah, I, I would just, I would really look at the lumens before the wattage when you're, when you're shopping.

Jacob
Yeah, absolutely. And especially if you're doing a big retrofit in an office space or in a warehouse. That wattage is really gonna add up fast on your payback, for completing the project.

Charlie
Exactly, yeah, I mean, you might say 3 to 5 watts times four per fixture, times 50 fixtures, 100 fixtures, 200 fixtures. I mean it just depends on the job. So, you know, that goes a long way, especially when you're talking about how a lot of the rebates around the country are based on kilowatt safe. So if you can achieve the light level that you're looking for with less watts per lamp. Now you can save more on the electric bill. But you might even be, you might even stand getting a greater chance of getting a greater rebate for the power companies, for those that offer it.

Jacob
And while LEDs are getting more efficient and a little bit more realistic in prices to what they were a couple of years ago, we all know labor is not getting cheaper.

So the cost of that project is that it used to be that the light fixtures cost three or four times the cost of labor to install. And now it's, it's really starting to even out, you can save a couple of bucks on the wattage because the fixture is cheaper. But you're still getting that light output, you're, you're saving, you know, you're getting your payback faster on your project as well as getting a brighter light and you're getting more kickback from the power company.

Charlie
There was the ratio, the lumens per watt is another important one that kind of touched on. But remember 78 years ago, you know, if you got 100 lumens per watt, you know, that was considered a very efficient product. Whereas nowadays 100 lumens per watt would is not a very efficient product in most tubes, especially high bays, it's 135 to 150 lumens per watt is really the products that we're seeking out to sell.

So again it's that high quality, high efficiency product. But yeah I mean if you see 100 lumens per watt on a lot of products it's just it might be cheap but that's exactly what it is. Yeah.

Jacob
And I think the power companies with the rebates now are even requiring the fixture to the lamp to be a minimum lumens per watt to provide a rebate for them.

Kevin
That's right, yeah rebates is a big topic right now, you know commercial led lights is a Michigan based lighting company but most of our customers use DTE energy. I think you were actually telling me Charlie that recently someone almost saved like half their bill when they did.

Charlie
It adds up to you know hundreds or many many times several thousand dollars. And we worked with Jacob on several jobs and you're doing all the time and doing bigger jobs, you know bigger commercial manufacturing facilities, large offices and so on. So those rebates are a real number and we worked with people in California with their rebates.

So you know all these utility companies need similar information. Some are you know some some require more than others but they all need to know what the product is and they all need spec sheets, they all need some of the technical details, they all need a few other things, but we can provide that to really any customer and assist them with the rebate if they send us the forms so

Kevin
Try to do the groundwork for them and as easy as possible.

Charlie
So while they're all different, I wish they're all the same frankly because it is kind of a pain even here locally in michigan from DTE to consumers, which is, you know, you drive an hour from here, you're in consumers territory, and they have an entirely different rebate program that DTE does and that's pretty similar across the country with all the utilities. But we help, we haven't sent it to us, we fill in all the information, we can we get it back to the customer and say, hey here's just a few things you need to do, ship it off to utility and get your money.

Jacob
That's what's great about having a partner like Charlie for us is I can go in and I can look at a job, I can get the square footage of the building, tell them how many lights there are in there currently, what their output is and I can kick that to Charlie and say, “I need you to tell me what light fixtures I need in here. Here's how much I want to brighten it up and I need you to tell me what the rebate is and I need it tomorrow. I gotta get the quote to the customer”, and he can make all that happen and it makes my job a lot easier not having to research and do all that now even though we're capable of it, you know, having a partner like Charlie that can provide us the fixtures and handle the rebate for the customer, take that off your plate, it's a win win for everybody.

Kevin
And you just handle the wiring and all that fun stuff.

Jacob
Just let me put them up.

Kevin
I wrote down actually to talk a little bit about retrofitting versus replacing the fixture; different situations where one is more efficient than the other.

Jacob
Yeah, that I mean in my mind that comes down to the facility, the type of install, the type of the existing fixture, right? A lot of these fluorescent tubes and in the shops that we go in that have oil in the air, and this and that and the other thing, they have those plastic tombstones that actually hold the light. The tubes will rot out from the heat and from the elements that are inside the warehouse.

So in a case like that it's going to take my guys a lot longer to retrofit that fixture because they're replacing more than just the lamp and doing a, quick rewiring inside the fixture, they're now having to replace individual parts and in that case it is it is quicker and easier and cheaper to just replace that whole fixture because now, like I said earlier, with the pricing coming down on the fixtures as opposed to the last, you know, 6 to 8 years. The labor is more expensive and me coming in and parting out that fixture to retrofit it than it is to just swap it. And then it depends on the facility, how much room do we have to work? Are they over top of machines? Does it make it harder to get to to retrofit that fixture as opposed to just replace it? Now in an office space where you've got, a drop ceiling, like your grid ceiling. Sometimes you've got three or four different sets of wires coming in there from other fixtures are from switches, and to take that fixture out completely and unwire it and put a new one up there and rewire it. It's quicker and easier for us to just retrofit the fixture.

Charlie
The fixture is in good shape. You know, it's kind of like why replace it, I've seen, if you have an old fixture, old prismatic lenses that are yellowed, and there's been moisture in the building and that sheet metal can tend to rust and, then you really want to replace the fixture, and in another case.

Jacob
In that case it's on a case by case basis, your best bet if you're not familiar with it is to have somebody come in, and take a look and give you a recommendation or give you a quote for doing it. As long as you buy the fixtures and lamps from Commercial LED.

Charlie
Of course, of course, absolutely.

Kevin
So yeah, I guess we're getting ready to kind of just wrap up this here. We do have a few common questions that I've seen asked out there and I figured I'd just take a moment, there's about four of them here to ask you, and your take on it. So we have talked about some of these earlier, but how do we wire LED tube lights without a ballast?

Jacob
So I'm gonna use the quickest and easiest example, that you've got 120V coming into the fixture, we're gonna we're just gonna take that ballast out, and what you are left with is typically, don't quote me on this, it's not the same in every situation. Don't use this as an instruction guide by any means whatsoever. There's my disclaimer.

Kevin
Disclaimer, use an electrician!

Jacob
Exactly, hire a qualified electrician to make sure it gets done properly, but for this example we're gonna say we've got 120 volts coming into the fixture and you've got a black wire, which is your hot, and you've got a white wire which is your neutral. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take the wires that are coming out of those tombstones. And on one whole side we're gonna take those wires and we're gonna hook them to the black wire, and on the other side of the fixture, we're gonna take those wires and we're gonna hook them to the white wire, the neutral. We're gonna tie everything up, put it back together, nice and clean and put in our ballast bypass tubes. It's that simple on paper.

Charlie
Exactly.

Kevin
Some of these may or may not be redundant, but how do you convert fluorescent tubes to LEDs? And there's a lot of people looking to finally make the conversion.

Jacob
Yeah, so that's I mean that's as easy as taking your old, I mean if you get one of those hybrids or you get the type A, it's as simple as taking that old tube out and putting the new one in.

Charlie
It's important with those, the plug & play or the ballast compatible tubes, that they're typically, there are limitations to that product still, in terms of T12s, magnetic ballasts, there are very few. I don't think we even don't even think we carry any that we'll be able to remove a T12 with an old magnetic ballast without getting the details of that. That's just a really old technology that and you won't be able to buy a ballast compatible tube for that product, generally speaking, so you do need to make sure that the ballast is compatible.

T8, with electronic ballasts, you're usually in pretty good shape, you can just pull it out, put a new tube in, away you go.

Kevin
Right. In this next question. How do you retrofit LED Tube Lights? I almost feel like that was answered in the previous question.

Jacob
Yeah. Kind of a same question, worded differently.

Kevin
Yeah. So I guess that's the best way as retrofitting essentially means replacing. You're keeping the same fixture, but you're putting LED tubes as opposed to fluorescent correct? Makes sense to me. And then finally, how do you dispose of LED tube lights, or do you even need to dispose of LED tube lights? I mean, I assume at some point you do.

Jacob
Yeah. At some point you do, like I said earlier, everything fails, right. Everything’s got a life expectancy to it. It's generally 50,000 hours. That's what, five years at 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Charlie
You're looking 5-15 years on LED products, depending on your runtime.

Jacob
You can throw it right in the trash.

Kevin
Right. Not like fluorescent tubes, where I'm under the impression, how to dispose of fluorescent tubes is a little bit more.

Jacob
So what we do, when we do a retrofit or we take out old fluorescent fixtures is, those all get recycled. There's companies out there like Granger, who you've probably heard of or, U-Line, they will actually sell a box that will hold, I think it's like 144 lamps, T8 lamps, I think it's like 100 bucks. They ship you the box and then you fill it, and you call in, some recycling company comes and picks it up. So it's pretty simple, but at the same time it's much more involved.

Charlie
That's, it just touched on earlier. It's not only because they're glass and you can recycle the glass, but it's the mercury that needs to be captured properly and not just let out into the environment.

Kevin
Alright, well thank you very much, Jacob and Charlie for all of your insights here. This is a lot of good information and I think it will make LED tubes a little bit more understandable for those who listen into this podcast and especially once we go viral.

That's about all, that's our first episode here. LED Lighting Podcast and stay tuned for when we do it again. Thank you Jacob, thank you. Glad to be a part of the first one guys.