[left]I am remodeling my basement to make it a more welcoming industrial style room. Currently the side that is a bedroom is straight from the 90s, wood paneling, drop ceiling, fluorescent light fixtures, the works! Well, I’m fairly confident with almost everything except the lighting. I’ve changed lighting fixtures before, but this is a bit different. First off, the main cable has 4 wires; black, white, red, and bare copper. The fluorescents are on 2 switches, one on each end of the room. There are 2 fixtures that are wired together. What I want to do is use copper piping to create my own lighting fixtures. My issue is that I just want to use basic light socket and those typically have only a white and a black. I think I would use the red where the black would go to make sure the switches work, but is it safe to just put a nut and tape on the free hanging black? What about the copper, since I’m assuming that’s the grounding wire I’m not 100% sure what to do with that? And what about stringing more than one socket together? Do I have to use 4 wire cable (that is currently existing since that’s what was used to string the fluorescents together) or can I use 14/2? Thank you so much in advance, I really don’t want to burn my house down lol[/left]

I had to replace a dual T9 ballast (the FC12 circular style lights) and went from a 3 wire ballast to a 2 wire. While the light works now, I want to make sure I wired it Safely before I kill myself or someone else. Source in ceiling had black/white/green hot/neutral/ground wires, so I used wire caps to wire hot and neutral to the ballast, then ran the green ground to the mounting bracket screwhole on the ballast case. Ballast states to ensure case is grounded. I'm not not great with multimeters, but tried following points: Hot wire + neutral wire = 120v Hot wire + ballast case = 12.5v Im worried the case is NOT properly grounded. Is this assumption correct? If I understand the basics here, I should be getting 120V on the ballast case. If so, would scraping the paint off better and ensuring contact with bare metal on the case yield a 120v reading? For what it's worth, I still had the bulbs plugged in. Thanks!