Need new lights in garage

[Audog]

I need better light in my 3 car garage, what are people using in a ceiling mount type of fixture. I really don't want the 4 foot, noisy ballast old style fluorescents that hang on chains. Ideas?

[NG13]

In our new machine shop we are installing LED fixtures. I don't know much about them but can get more info from my electrician if you would like. I know the cost is more up front but compared to T5 lights the amperage draw is substantially less. In our shop T5's would have maxed out 5 circuits and the LED's are not even using up 2 circuits worth. Also check with your utility for rebates on upgrading to energy efficient lighting. A lot of places will pay the difference from std to the upgrade for energy efficiency.

Edited February 13, 2016 by NG13

[marquez93]

I recently purchased a bunch of 4 foot LED shop lights from Sam's that I am going to put in the basement as a test before the garage. I haven't put any up yet, but they certainly shouldn't be noisy and they should be pretty bright. They do come with chains to hang them on, but you can also flushmount them. I think they were about $35 each.

[teamcrossworks]

2 - 4 tube 8 foot fluorescent fixtures with 5000K bulbs. no noise, lots of natural light.    

[stripesace]

Marquez, I'll be curious to get your thoughts on those when you get them up.

[Dan@Adams]

I recently overhauled all of my garage lighting back in September. I had 4 not-bright CFL's in the ceiling of a 24'x24' garage and a dual 500w floodlight on a stand that I would use for detailing, as well as the natural light that comes in from 2 windows.

 

I now have four linkable 4-foot surface mount LED fixtures, 4000k color temperature, on the ceiling, with 3 more linkable chain mount LED fixtures that I'm going to suspend in the middle between both vehicle bays. I also have six 18" LED under-cabinet fixtures mounted onto my side walls, 3 per wall, and a 40W LED spotlight. They have completely transformed the garage and make things much easier for me while paint correcting. Lumen output on all of them is great!

 

I will post some pictures with product names and specs tomorrow...falling asleep right now. Haha.

[LFairbanks]

I, and a couple others meet for breakfast every Friday.  One of them sells light bulbs and fixtures for a living, and has done so for about 25 years.  I asked him what was the brightest light available in a fluorescence tube was.  His response was that he recommended 4 foot T5 High Lumen.  T8 if your looking for brightness but also looking for efficiency.  However not as bright as the T5's.  Daylight Deluxe is just a color.

[hemi1300]

Installed 4 t5 high output fixtures in my 3.5 car garage and they are almost blindingly bright! Also have 6500k daylight bulbs in them. Wanted to go led but the t5 high outputs have a higher lumen rating than any of the led fixtures I was looking at

[Ricky Bobby]

I, and a couple others meet for breakfast every Friday. One of them sells light bulbs and fixtures for a living, and has done so for about 25 years. I asked him what was the brightest light available in a fluorescence tube was. His response was that he recommended 4 foot T5 High Lumen. T8 if your looking for brightness but also looking for efficiency. However not as bright as the T5's. Daylight Deluxe is just a color.

Agreed. I have twin 4 foot T8 fixtures in my garage (2 bulbs each) and it does all I need in my 2 car garage. I still use a Husky LED spotlight on a Tripod from Depot when detailing to concentrate the area I'm working on. Other than that it's all I need

[Norton]

I went with four Feit 4' LED shop lights.  They were $25/ea, on sale, from Costco.  Instant on.  Good light output.  No hum.

 

Of course, I still have a dual-head halogen setup when needed for detail task lighting.  

Edited February 13, 2016 by Norton

[stripesace]

I just added some recessed cans that could take a 90 watt bulb and put 75watt equaliviant led floods @5000K. But the brightest 32W 5000K t8 tubes in the existing fluorescent fixture, and put the brightest 5000k LED bulbs I could put in the garage door opener.

 

The garage door opener alone is as bright as the flourecents were before I did the upgrade.

[Dan@Adams]

A few months back I decided to do a serious overhaul of the lighting in my garage. My whole house is energy star certified, and I try to keep it as efficient as possible in regards to utility costs, so I decided to spend a little extra and go with all LED lighting instead of the T5HO setup that I had originally planned on going with.

 

To start, I picked up all of these at Lowe's.

 

 

My plan was that the four 4-foot strip lights would go in place of the current 4 CFL bulbs I had in the garage ceiling, and then the smaller, 24" under cabinet strip lights would be mounted onto the side walls. The 4-foot fixtures are 40w and 3600 lumens each with a color temperature listed at 4000k but they seem a little closer to 4500 or 5000 to my eyes. The 2-foot fixtures were magnitudes brighter than every other LED cabinet fixture they had in the store. They are 18w and 1400 lumens each, same 4000k color scale. Ok, enough with the geeky tech specs, onto the pictures! The 4-foot fixtures are hard-wired, and the 2-foot fixtures are plug-in; however both types are linkable using included link cables. I really liked the link cables for the 2-foot fixtures, as this meant I only needed to use one outlet to power 3 lights per wall. The 3000 lumen, 40w spot light is awesome as well and great for paint correction, as it doesn't radiate a ton of heat onto the paint like my old dual 500w halogen setup.

 

Three of the 2-foot lights installed onto the wall, powered on with the brightest setting:

 

 

And with the lights off, they blend into the wall nicely, barely noticeable:

 

 

Before, excuse the messy garage, I was rearranging a bunch of things in the detached garage:

 

 

After:

 

 

Next up was installing the 4-foot overhead fixtures, first fixture in place: 

 

 

Huge difference from the CFL on the GTO side of the garage:

 

 

And with the wall LED's on to show how bright the garage was starting to get:

 

 

Then I put the second overhead light up on the same side as the first light:

 

 

A shot of one side of the garage now fully lit up with the ceiling and wall-mounted LEDs:

 

 

Comparison of the LED side of the garage compared to the dim CFLs:

 

 

Then I had to move big bad blue out into the driveway...can't have any drywall dust falling on the goat...love this car and I don't post nearly enough pictures of it on here:

 

 

Both LEDs now above the GTO:

 

 

Then I picked up 3 of these 4-foot plug-in, linkable chain mount LED's from Home Depot - great price, same 4000k color temperature, 36w and 3200 lumens each, slightly less wattage and lumen output than the Utilitech lights on the ceiling. I purchased some 5-foot link cables for these, and I still need to mount them to the ceiling in the middle of the two garage bays to have more light down the center of the garage. I'm going to plug them into the extra outlets in the ceiling for each garage door opener and then use them with a wifi WeMo setup so that I have a wireless light switch to turn them on and off. This way I won't have to use the pull-chains all of time and worry about drywall anchors pulling out of the ceiling.

 

 

Yes, the lumen output on all of these lights are lower than T5HO lights, but the nice thing with LED is that all of the lumen output is going outward from the casing - none of the light shines back up into the housing like a fluorescent tube, so these do appear brighter to me than their output rating.  

 

I still plan on purchasing 2 more of the 4-foot ceiling fixtures and linking them directly to the 2 fixtures above the hood area of each car. This will give an uninterrupted 8-foot light to cover the hood and roof area, then the second 4-foot light shines on the trunk/bed area.

 

New setup = 416w total with all lights on (not counting the portable work light...that stays in the car with the cigarette lighter plug)

Old setup = 1,104w total with the 4 CFL's and halogen work light.

 

Even after I add 2 more of the 40w 4-foot LED's to the ceiling, that's less than half of the total energy cost of my terribly dim old setup. If I stay in this house long enough, they will pay for themselves, and the garage looks 10 times better now in my opinion! I'll update this or make a new thread once I have the remainder of the lights installed. Let me know if you have any questions

 

Edit: My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that the 2-foot LEDs mounted to the walls do have a very slight buzzing to them when they're on at the full bright setting. This isn't a big problem though since I usually either have a polisher making noise or music playing when I'm in the garage. I hope to have a TV mounted to the front wall above the work bench soon to use as a computer monitor. I plan to have a computer setup in there to scroll through pictures of cars I've worked on, or to display a big checklist of what still needs to be done when I'm detailing a car.

[marquez93]

Great setup Dan! Looks amazing. It appears you have plenty of light, but it's still too bad you have that bulkhead in the center that blocks some of the light transferring from one side to the other.

[Dan@Adams]

Thanks! Yeah the bulkhead is certainly annoying, but that is where the HVAC ducting and other wiring runs for the bedrooms upstairs. I plan to mount the 3 pull-chain LEDs there to help with the light that gets blocked 

 

I could always get 2 more of them to have 20 feet of light going down the middle of the garage 

 

I really wish I could remove the center pole, but it's unfortunately load-bearing...boo. Any votes on what color to paint the ugly pole?

[Audog]

Had a pole like that in old house, warped it in foam mattress pad stuff and then wrapped that with canvas painters drop cloth. Only reason was we kept kissing it with the BMW door. I would paint it white if it were mine, but I'm partial to white in the garage. LOVE the lights, you have helped me make the decision on what to get. Thanks!

[Dan@Adams]

I will add that I've only had these installed for a few months now, so I cannot comment on reliability with long-term use. So far so good though!

[dabirdzR/T]

Dan you should put on each side of the pole up high to shine light in the center of the garage

[Chris@Adams]

I have 14, 2 bulb 4 foot T8 lights, 24 (bulbs) track lights with 65w flood lights......

I am going to start replacing the T8's with 4' LED's.

When detailing I don't think you can have too much light.

 

[flyboy9994]

What's wrong with you guys? You're damn garages are too CLEAN...

 

Making me feel bad. Now I gotta go clean/re-arrange my garage!

 

And get better lights... Geeezzz!

[LFairbanks]

What's wrong with you guys? You're damn garages are too CLEAN...

 

Making me feel bad. Now I gotta go clean/re-arrange my garage!

 

And get better lights... Geeezzz!

 

 

Don't feel bad.  Mine is probably like yours.  My wife thinks it is messy, but I notice if she takes a screwdriver.  And she wonders how I notice.  I do need to organize it some and put some stuff away.  

Edited February 14, 2016 by LFairbanks

[flyboy9994]

Don't feel bad.  Mine is probably like yours.  My wife thinks it is messy, but I notice if she takes a screwdriver.  And she wonders how I notice.  I do need to organize it some and put some stuff away.  

 

Isn't that the truth? I know where every tool is, screw, nut , washer, you name it. Go ahead and take something or move it and I'll know it immediately! Funny...

[Dan@Adams]

Don't worry, my detached garage looks like a war zone of parts, boxes, lawn equipment, junk, etc. I try to keep the attached garage strictly for detailing work.

 

One of these months I'll start organizing the mess in the detached 

[Audog]

Followed Dan's lead and made trip to Lowes, got 4 foot 4000 lumen led lights. Wife said no lights on chains, so got flush mounts. Have 3 of 6 installed so far. Have to put old work ceiling boxes in for last 3, then run romex back to switch. When we moved in, had 3 100 watt incandescents as only lights. Have to wait for weekend to finish install, but liking it so far.

[SJC96GT]

I have 6 of these in my garage, each put out 4,500 lumens. It really lights up the garage, all totaling to 27,000 lumens. And at that price and only requiring 40 watts each, I was all for it.

 

http://www.samsclub.com/sams/4ft-led-shoplight-shoplight-led/prod16460030.ip

[Rich]

I just switched out my flourescents for LED's in the garage yesterday and what a difference!  I only have room for 2, going to try and squeeze in a third, but they sure are a lot better than the old ones.  Picked them up at Sam's Club for $29 each. The boxes look identical to Dan's.  Good stuff. 

[Audog]

I have 6 of these in my garage, each put out 4,500 lumens. It really lights up the garage, all totaling to 27,000 lumens. And at that price and only requiring 40 watts each, I was all for it.

 

http://www.samsclub.com/sams/4ft-led-shoplight-shoplight-led/prod16460030.ip

Those look nice, but wife is insistent about no lights on chains. Her comment was " we spent xxxxxxxx to build this house and we aren't having workshop looking lights" got to admit, flush mounts look nicer, but those SAMs lights are priced right, and wouldn't upset me