As our main kitchen light we have a standard fluorescent tube, about 1.5m long. It has always ‘hummed’ or ‘buzzed’ and is now starting to drive us mad. I have replaced the tube and starter to no effect. The fitting is looking very battered.

We are looking at replacing it with an LED equivalent. Ideally I want to remove the existing fittings and replace it with a new one and an LED tube. However I am struggling to find one anywhere. I can find LED tubes which can replace the existing tube, but we are mainly doing this to get rid of the noise.

Has anyone had experience of LED tubes and knows where I could buy one? I have spent ages trying to find anything with not much success, although I do appreciate that I may be asking the wrong questions of Google/Bing.

Search for the various garage lighting threads – lots of discussion on the topic in those.

If the fitting is past it’s best, surely just replace the fitting with some spot lights or something a bit more modern?

Plenty of wholesalers like Edmundsons or screwfix do them and would sell you one. I’d probably recommend replacing the whole fitting if you can stretch to it though. Something like this would do the job http://www.screwfix.com/p/lap-electronic-ignition-led-batten-1-x-23w-2680lm-5ft/1957g

All the LED tubes I’ve seen involve bypassing the starter in some fashion, so should be silent.

Electronic high frequency Fluorescent controllers don’t buzz, hum or flicker when they start and the tubes have a long life and are still more efficient than any LED equivalents you can buy.

See my comments here –
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/man-cave-lighting-fluorescent-or

Expensive though.

I’ve put a few of the British General tubes from Screwfix in our garage and utility room; swap the tube, swap the starter for the included “dummy” starter, job done. They come on instantly, don’t flicker, are silent and are brighter than the supposedly equivalent tubes they replaced. They’re only about £15 or thereabouts too.

In the garage they’re brilliant, I’ve clonked one of them with a ladder that would have smashed the old tube to bits but being plastic the LED one didn’t care.

The only teeny tiny down side is that being plastic they’re not as rigid, so the ones I have aren’t quite straight (even before I clonked one of them); this is only a problem if it doesn’t have a diffuser over it though, so for a kitchen shouldn’t be a problem.