florescent Bulb Replacement

philmeup1 · Post by **philmeup1** » Fri Nov 04, 2016 11:29 am

Hello Delica Peeps,,

I just have a quick question regarding the florescent bulb in the rear of my Delica. For the last almost one year it's been working, but sub par. When you open the side door, the light does come on, but it's very dim. When i attempt to adjust the brightness, it doesn't change the strength of light coming off the bulb. So today I decided to remove the old bulb in an attempt of buying a new one at Crappy Tire.

Turns out the bulb is an odd length and not very common. I ended up going to two electrical supply stores in my home town, but they couldn't help me either. One did suggest it might be the ballast and not the bulb, but neither store could help me in sourcing a new bulb.

Does anyone on here have any experience with this? I'm going to try googling the numbers off the bulb and see if I can come up with something. It's the original bulb as it has Japanese writing on it. The English writing says it's a Toshiba FL 20S-D.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks folks:)

msimps · Post by **msimps** » Fri Nov 04, 2016 9:19 pm

philmeup1 wrote:Hello Delica Peeps,,

I just have a quick question regarding the florescent bulb in the rear of my Delica. For the last almost one year it's been working, but sub par. When you open the side door, the light does come on, but it's very dim. When i attempt to adjust the brightness, it doesn't change the strength of light coming off the bulb. So today I decided to remove the old bulb in an attempt of buying a new one at Crappy Tire.

Turns out the bulb is an odd length and not very common. I ended up going to two electrical supply stores in my home town, but they couldn't help me either. One did suggest it might be the ballast and not the bulb, but neither store could help me in sourcing a new bulb.

Does anyone on here have any experience with this? I'm going to try googling the numbers off the bulb and see if I can come up with something. It's the original bulb as it has Japanese writing on it. The English writing says it's a Toshiba FL 20S-D.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks folks:)

I had a similar issue and searched around to no avail. The lengths and diameter of the tubes were just off. Apparently Popeyes in Vancouver can source some? I ended up taking a length of LED strip lights from work and as the van is 12v simply hard wired them in. They work awesome!

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philmeup1 · Post by **philmeup1** » Sat Nov 05, 2016 8:57 am

Thanks for the reply. I'm in Ontario and the only Popey's we have here is a chicken joint... lol. I've been searching the net and found a website called saverpluslighting.com
They are looking into this for me. Your idea sounds good too, probably better than what's originally in there. I'll wait for now and see if I get any other posts.

Cheers, Phil

philmeup1 · Post by **philmeup1** » Mon Nov 07, 2016 7:43 am

Probably not the most exciting post on here, but it's certainly a royal pain not having a light in the rear of my van. Especially when it now gets dark at like 5:00pm. Anyway, the more I thought about sourcing a proper replacement bulb, the more I considered modifying it to something more modern. I picked up a set of two 12 inch LED Light Strips and Installed them yesterday. It works like a treat and is about as bright as the old fixture on it's highest setting. The only draw back is that the dimmer no longer works and the light itself is not as soft as the original. Doesn't really matter though as it's more about the function. I can now see when I open up the sliding door.

Thanks msimps for the suggestion. This is a great work around for this problem:)

joebillhill · Post by **joebillhill** » Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:29 pm

I just replaced my front and rear fluorescence with these.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00AO04V ... UTF8&psc=1

A little finicky getting in on a few of them but work just fine and much brighter (though I do miss the soft glow of the originals)