yourself right here and today we're going to change out a ballast in the fluorescent light a lot of times ballast will fail and the light won't light up properly there it won't light up at all or flicker or it'll be real dim generally when you've got something like that going on and your bulbs are good usually what's wrong is the ballast inside the lamp is bad so what you need to do is remove the cover off and once you get the cover off your your light you just remove the little centerpiece and you're going to have a ballast in there that you need to change out some key points when changing a ballast is to make sure when you purchase one that you get one for the particular bulbs that are in your fluorescent light this one operates one or two bulbs some of them will operate three or four bulbs in this particular light there's two bulbs in there and then you also need to determine if it's a t8 or a t12 or what type of bulb that it is in this case it's a t8 bulb in there and there's two of them so this ballast is going to operate t8 bulbs and also two of them you can pick these up at virtually any hardware store for about 16 bucks the tools that you'll need to change it out are really basic just your standard screwdrivers possibly a drill and then as far as materials typically you'll just reuse the wire nuts that are in there but you may want to pick up some wire nuts maybe some electrical tape and of course your handy dandy flashlight is you're going to be the dark and you raise your knife every do-it-yourselfer should always have these at all times makes every job a little bit easier so basically this is what a ballast looks like it has a wiring diagram on it so you can look and see what you're going to be doing and what you need to hook up essentially you have your input this is your electricity and ground going into the ballast and then you have your output and these essentially go to the other lights and convert the energy over to make the fluorescent light work properly so now we're going to change the light we're going to change the ballet have dinner versus Allwright today we are going to change the ballast in this laundry room light the ballast has gone bad and it's causing a flickering going on in our laundry room so we are going to open it up and change the ballast we're getting ready to replace this ballast in this light here one thing you definitely want to make sure you do is keep the light switch off and possibly turn off your circuit breaker so you don't get electrocuted to access the ballast you need to pull these little tabs out from underneath these little holders that hold this this thing in the center of the light together definitely remove your bolts before you do it so you don't break them and just and I push these things over and then out and what you're changing there is the is the ballast so the first thing you want to do is unhook the wiring to it take the ballast out put the new ballast back in and hook it all up okay so I've got the old ballast out of this light fixture here and I've put the new ballast up in here I just got it mounted up in here and now I'm going to wire it up this new ballast is a lot newer and a little bit different than the old ballast so the wiring is a little bit different for this particular light fixture so what you've got to do is you got to make sure you look at diagram on your new one real close to the old one to determine what what wires can go where and I've determined here that this red wire needs to go over to these two yellow wires so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a basic set of needlenose and cut that wire and shorten it up a little bit and then also I'm going to use the same tool to strip them back typically it's nice to use actual wire strippers but you can also use just your standard needlenose set of pliers when making these connections again always make sure you've got your circuit breaker and switch turned off and then twist the wires together and typically I'll take a set of standard pliers and twist them together a little bit more so you've got a good nice twist there so that the wire is nice and tight before you put the wire nut on so this side here you've got this red wire that goes over to these two receptacles there for the light and then essentially what we're going to do is you have your your power and ground your main power and ground to hook up into these I'm going to trim these wires back and hook them up on this side as well some people don't trim the wire back but that makes kind of a mess underneath there and harder to get that cover back on when you're trying to show the wire or put the cover back on and you've got wires in the way and these main ground and power wires they're going to be of the same color took the white to the white black the black twist them together okay so we've got that side all done now on this particular bow has one blue wire that comes out here one blue wire it comes out here and we're going to run this one blue wire over to this to set and this one blue over to the red being this is an older light fixture you've got to do that with these wire colors you're just going to want to pay special note on the diagrams of both the ballasts so you can make sure you leave is right you can trim them back like that strip them all and put okay so we got the we got the new ballast wired up here we've trimmed up the wires we've got it in there correctly now you've just got to put this cover back on start by wedging the one side underneath the little tabs there them all into place on the one side and then just pinch it and then take your light bulbs twist them into place okay hit switch ah it works no more issue no more crazy flashing works properly