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Sometimes you need to take time off from the fun stuff and work on the infrastructure of your life. Cleaning the dishes, or whatever comes under this category, but sometimes there are more long-time-scale things in that category. Some of the lights in our garage aren't working.
Yesterday I managed to get up in time to go to the store in town that stocks fluorescent light bulbs to get new ones. They're fairly long, about 8 feet
and unlike most fluorescent bulbs, they only have one contact on each end:
Putting new bulbs in the fixture didn't help; the whole light emitted a really loud buzz when I turned the lights on. So the problem must be in the fixture. Some googling led me to this page on troubleshooting fluorescent fixtures. I had thought that fluorescent bulbs were self-sufficient nowadays, but that's not the case. There's still a "ballast" device that transforms the voltage somehow.
The fixture in our garage has a flat plate in the middle that ties things together.
The silver things are clips that hold the side covers into the center plate. Removing all the covers reveals the wiring
and the ballast and where the wires come in from the electrical panel.
So the circuit is simple enough, I just have to find someplace local where I can buy a replacement ballast of the proper specifications.
Successful so far: 1) Now know infinitely more about one topic than I did before 2) Exercizing the take-it-apart-and-figure-out-how-to-fix-it part of the brain 3) Add another skill and checklist item to the maintaining-the-house-you-own list.