Actually it's not an undercabinet light but it's actually a bathroom light....the outlet is actually purposes for like shaver and bathroom stuff...trust me because I have seen fixtures like this in commercial bathrooms and there are knockouts where outlets are supposed to be and in many cases there is AN outlet in it....
A bathroom light used to be VERY common holding an outlet because before the 50s.....there was no electrical shavers....but as soon as electrical shavers got invented....it was easier and cheaper to have a outlet onto the fixtures than to make a new outlet on an existing wall by buying wiring cut a hole in the wall and sorts like that. Then later new bathroom electrical stuff comes in....
If you go to older houses or older commercial places you won't find outlets if they haven't been added.....that's one of the reasons.....
my college from the 60s has similar fixtures to this one! So this is a properly mounted fixture...the diffuser most likely had some refractor design that would have the light go downward like a milky white top and side but a clear primistic bottom or some sorts like that but I have seen some that are fully primistic that shines the light whole place...
Yeah the outlet is pretty banged up. There's paper towel bits shoved in the outlet and it's all cracked with the contacts somewhat exposed. I'm pretty sure they didn't disconnect the power to the outlet though. If they did, it was when this became T8.
This fixture is gone now. They did a system-wide LED retrofit in this building. I wonder if there are any old fixtures that got missed out... the fixtures did their time though; most were original to the building (1970) and many were pretty ratty like this one. Sure they could have all been repainted and given new diffusers but I really can't complain since they did retrofit them to T8 in the late 90s.
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A bathroom light used to be VERY common holding an outlet because before the 50s.....there was no electrical shavers....but as soon as electrical shavers got invented....it was easier and cheaper to have a outlet onto the fixtures than to make a new outlet on an existing wall by buying wiring cut a hole in the wall and sorts like that. Then later new bathroom electrical stuff comes in....
If you go to older houses or older commercial places you won't find outlets if they haven't been added.....that's one of the reasons.....
my college from the 60s has similar fixtures to this one! So this is a properly mounted fixture...the diffuser most likely had some refractor design that would have the light go downward like a milky white top and side but a clear primistic bottom or some sorts like that but I have seen some that are fully primistic that shines the light whole place...