Decent fittings these!

One of the best - they were rly heavy to begin with

Quite good these, at least the magnetic ballast ones anyway. The Tridonic HF ones aren't great, I had one blow up.

Proper 2D bulkheads. Also if the covers ever go yellow, the covers from Fern Howards Mini-Max 2D (and now made in LED) bulkhead fits these nicely, so are a good source of cheap spare covers!

@Oliver: Ah yes today I had experienced the utter failure of a Tridonic HF ballast in a 58W 2 tube fixture that I rescued

@Beta5: Thanks for the info, I'll keep that in mind and make sure to store them out of direct sunlight in my shed

No problem, they last years anyway but being such a good quality fitting it seems a shame to let them be effectively scrap due to a broken or yellowed cover, so using the covers from a cheap plastic fitting gives a new lease of life to some old ones

Exactly like why do they need to be thrown away due to a simple thing that can be fixed such as a spare cover from even an LED variant lantern that happens to have the same bowl dimensions

Definitely don't want to be buying replacement diffusers direct from Designplan - £50 each those are - just had them quote some for me. I won't be buying at that price....

That is a ripoff and hence why I will be doing my best to preserve them. Come the warmth of the Spring time I will be organising my shed - need to mount the fluorescent fixtures onto the ceiling/roof of the shed

My grandma has them on her council block, except they have black bases instead. Some of them were fairly recently relamped with 16w lamps. However, the ones in the staircases have been converted to LED. Yes, I agree these are robust fittings and they can easily outlast some of the cheap crap we get nowadays.