Magnetic florescent fixtures have always been a nuisance. Especially 2 light
four footers, with all the connections on the ballast, four contacts on each
lamp and eight contacts between the four sockets, there's a lot of week
links. I too have had incidents where I'll change bulbs and ballasts and the
thing still doesn't work. What is nice is the current electronic ballasted
florescent fixtures. They use a 32 watt T8 lamp instead of the 34 -40 watt T
12. The ballasts are in like their fourth generation, and really work well.
Each lamp is in parallel as well so one lamp can burn out and the other work
fine. There's also no blink blink blink before they come on
"Blue" wrote in message ...
I investigated the missing ground theory in howthings work" and was
fascinated by what it said. Seems that the flourescent metal box should be
grounded to give reliable ionization of the tubes. that's a new one on me
and still puzzles me. E.g., I have a two tube flourescent fixture in my
garage with a two prong plug feeding it with no problem.

Well, I lashed an extra ground to the fixtures with no effect. Then I
bought one new fixture as that was as cheap as a ballast, my second
suspect. Bought two new tubes too, just in case. Just for grins I tried
replacing the tubes and you guessed it - lights came on. Problem is that
I only replaced TWO tubes and lost track of whether they both went into
the same fixture or one into each fixtures.
Also, all four of the old tubes had continuity through the filaments on
each end!

I don't want any more problems like this!
"Blue" wrote in message
...
I have two adjacent flourescent fixtures of two 40W bulbs each. Both
fixtures (all four lamps) went out at once. The fixtures are both
getting 120v and there is a slight humming noise from one (or both?) of
the ballasts.

Well, I can understand one of the ballasts going out but not both at
once.