Makes sense, unless they stated a particular ballast. So, I'm still underwhelmed. The overall efficiency might be pretty bad for these with real-world ballasts. I just don't see the advantage over a run-of-the-mill T8 lamp...
Think about this from the perspective of a tenant in a rented space that likely owns the liability of keeping the light fixtures running but doesn't own said fixtures. If you move any time soon, you have the dilemma of expending additional costly labor to recover your valuable fixtures or abandoning them - which will ruin the financial case for acquiring them in the first place. In most cases, lighting is not a critical factor for your business: they're an operational cost but far from a key operating cost, they need to provide light for general business operations and bulk-market floro tubes provide adequate performance (CRI, efficiency), and they're adequately reliable with an annual re-lamp cycle being more than sufficient.
Fixture swaps are painful and typically require an electrician and can cost as much in labor as the fixture itself. Ballast swaps are less costly, but still require more time and skill than replacing bulbs ... and potentially an electrician in some situations.
The appeal of retrofit tubes is that if you can just
swap the tubes like you would during a typical re-lamp, then you ideally pay a one-time cost for light that will ideally go for ~3 years without maintenance, uses less watts for near-identical useful light output, and avoids the need for skilled labor and CAPEX. If you
really want to recover them, it's no more involved than a typical re-lamp operation.
I have some perspective on this dilemma since I volunteer at the
local maker space and assist with day-to-day operations, including remedying failed lighting fixtures. Despite lighting being one of our bigger operating expenses
(something like a third of our electrical consumption), we're not replacing fixtures with LED nor installing LED tubes. First and foremost we're not sufficiently certain of our future at the present location to do anything more than maintain fixtures. If we do move in the future, our
volunteer labor pool will be hard-pressed to successfully move key capital equipment (metalshop, woodshop, foundry, electronics lab, 3D printing, servers, etc) as opposed to numerous low-value light fixtures/LED tubes.
The standard makerspace lighting fixture is a quad 48" T12 troffer. We replace blown tubes as we encounter them whenever the ballasts appear to be in good shape. But since the fixtures are old, failing ballasts are all more common and since T12 fixtures can mechanically accommodate T8 tubes, we perform ballast swaps and install new quad-tube electronic ballasts to replace the pair of failed dual-tube magnetic ballasts without major surgery. A full replacement comes in at around $19 ($13 for the ballast and $1.50 for the tubes), so the savings are going to be far more rapid than spending >$10 per drop-in LED tube powered by uncertain magnetic ballasts; direct-AC LED tubes would remove the ballast liability but require just as much effort as a ballast swap.
For lighting that's critical - electronics lab, creative arts area, digital media, etc - there's higher-intensive, high-CRI task lighting. But those are fewer between than the huge fleet of floros we maintain for general lighting which perform quite adequately with humble 40W (T12) or 32W (T8) "daylight" 5000K tubes.
So, yes, I suspect that for many businesses - likely the dominant market for these products - it's going to be a tough sell until the market answers some tough questions, builds in versatility
(universal ballast compatibility and ideally also able to operate on direct-AC), and drops the price.
Since we're swapping ballasts anyway, we might experiment at the sub-$10 range in the future on direct-AC tubes once they establish some stability in the market. If they were reliable and saved even more on lighting than the ~20% reduction we're seeing with T8 swaps they might have a future for our organization.
