Walk into any office built before 2015 and look up. Those 2x4 ceiling fixtures with fluorescent tubes are costing more than they should, in energy, in maintenance, and in how the space feels.
This is the most common lighting job we do at Ground Zero Electric. We open the fixture, cut out and bypass the ballast, remove it entirely, and install direct-wire LED tubes. The fixture stays; everything inside it that fails gets eliminated.
There are “plug and play” LED tubes that run on the old ballast. We don’t recommend them, and here’s why: the ballast is the part that dies. Leave it in the circuit and you’ve kept your most failure-prone component while spending money on new tubes. Bypassing removes the ballast from the equation permanently. No more ballast hum, no more flicker as it ages, no more paying an electrician to replace ballasts one by one for the rest of the building’s life.
Energy use drops substantially per fixture. The maintenance line item shrinks toward zero. And the light itself is better: instant on, no flicker, no slowly dimming tubes that make half the office look yellow. Employees notice, even if nobody can say exactly what changed.
Retrofits go fixture by fixture, and we work around your schedule so the office keeps running. Send us your fixture count and a photo of a typical fixture, and we’ll quote the whole project flat. Beyond troffers, we install and retrofit just about everything a commercial building holds: high-bays, wall packs, pole lights, and specialty fixtures.
Call or text (513) 866-8685, or email a photo of your ceiling and your fixture count for a flat quote.