The evidence isn't all in, but I'm inclined to believe it has a bad ballast. The ballast is an electronic module inside a fluorescent light that regulates current to the light. It's essential for fluorescents.
There are 4 options for lamps.
New Real Fluorescent. This old tech has leapt forward amazingly, all the old annoyances are gone, and it's the best light quality (Color Rendering Index) on the market. Many random box-store fluorescent tubes are 90 CRI (near perfect). Many LED "tubes" won't even state their CRI. It's also exceedingly reliable stuff. I've installed a hundred with zero failures.
LED replacement "tubes" come in three kinds. First, the kind just like yours (called "Plug-n-play") that requires the old fluorescent ballast to be present and working. One one hand, you must maintain that ballast, which is a bit silly. On the other hand, it lets you rollback to real fluorescent once you realize that LEDs have a lot of issues.
LED "Direct wire" aka "Ballast Bypass" - this requires that you hack into the fixture to bypass the ballast altogether and shoot straight 120V mains current to the ends of the tube sockets. And different LED tubes do this 2 ways: The better ones want hot and neutral on opposite ends. The cheaper ones want hot and neutral at the same end - it's 0.5 cents cheaper to build, but makes it a nightmare to install on instant-start fixtures.
LED "Universal" - these will work either with a ballast or ballast-bypass. They are double-ended, so if you do direct-wire, they'll be easier to wire into any fluorescent fixture.
There's no way out of this except rewiring
Given the bad ballast, you will be forced to rewire something. A wiring diagram here may be useful.
Replace the ballast with another ballast.
At that point you can run either Real Fluorescent (try the 90+ CRI tubes) or plug-and-play LEDs. This is a 2-step process:
- identify your existing wire colors from the ballast. If you have 2 yellow 2 blue 2 red, you want a Rapid-start or Programmed-start ballast. If you only have 1 red 2 blue, then you want an Instant-start ballast.
- Now shop for a ballast that supports 2 x F32T8 (which will be easy, since most do that). If you think the room has too much light, someone on eBay is selling a fantastic but very dim (only 71% of normal light) ballast for $5 each.
- Then simply cut the wires at the old ballast, swap ballast phyiscally, and hook up wires by number - 1 yellow to 1 yellow, 1 red to 1 red, etc. I use blue (small) wire-nuts for this.
Or, rewire the fixture for direct-wire LED.
Then you are married to LED going forward. And you need to make a decision about "opposite-end wiring" or "same-end wiring".
- Opposite-end wiring. The yellow, red or blue wires going toward one end all get spliced to hot. Those wires going to the other end all get spliced to neutral.
- Same-end wiring, AND your old wiring is Rapid or Programmed Start (2 wires per socket). There you hook hot to 1 yellow wire, neutral to the other yellow wire, and individually cap off all other wires.
- Same end wiring, AND your old wiring is for an Instant-Start ballast: go to the store and buy non-shunting lampholders, dismantle the fixture even further--- oh forget that, return the same-end LED and get an opposite-end LED.
Or, tear the fixture off the wall altogether, give it away on Craigslist, and get a whole 'nother fixture.
