3 Car Garage Lighting Layout Help

Background

I have an attached 3-car garage that is in need of a lighting upgrade. When I moved in 8 years ago, there were 3 Edison sockets with 60-watt bulbs installed in each. As a short term fix, I installed 3x Lithonia Lighting T5, 4' strip lights with twin fluorescent tubes (28W each). Those did the trick for day-to-day lighting, since those 3 are wired to the main lighting switch for the garage. I liked them so much that I bought 14 additional fixtures, but for one reason or another, I've never installed them. After about 7 years of regular use, one of the ballasts in those lights is going out.

Over the past 7 years, LEDs have come a long way. I read through "The Best Light Fixture Ever" thread, and really liked the Maxlite LSS2XT8USE4803 fixtures, so I ordered 3 of them along with 6 GLLUSA GL07103-2M (4,000K) LED lights. My intent is to give these a shot at replacing the three 4' T5 fluorescent fixtures. If the install goes how I hope/expect, I'll likely order additional lights to fill out the rest of the garage as I had intended to do many years ago. Those lights will be installed on a separate circuit, likely with a switch for the lights at the front of the garage, and another for the lights that would be covered by the garage doors while they are open.

Garage Details

Size - Roughly 30' x 22', 9'3" ceilings
Finish - Drywall walls and ceiling; light beige wall color (egg shell finish) with flat white ceilings.
Layout - one 16x8 two-car garage door (daily driven vehicles), one 9x8 one-car garage door (my toy/project)
Current lights - 3 x 4ft T5, twin-tube fluorescent strips (28W each tube, 3,000K)
Purpose - the garage serves three major purposes:

1. Vehicle and other random kid-stuff storage (primary purpose)
2. Vehicle/lawn equipment maintenance - usually in the two-car side with the daily drivers removed. I've done heavier things on the one-car side with the project car (clutch/trans swaps, etc.) when I know it will take weeks to do, so that side gets used as well (1-2 times per quarter on average)
3. Vehicle detailing/paint correction (1-2 times per year on average)

Here is a scale drawing of how everything is laid out:



As you can see, things are not really ideal. The work bench has its own task lighting by way of 3, 3' T5 undercabinet fixtures, so I'm not concerned about that. As to why the current fluorescent fixtures are not evenly spaced on the ceiling - well, that's a long story, but was primarily driven by proximity to the existing ceiling junction boxes. I have no problem pulling those and running new wires this time around.

Here's what it looks like in real life (keep in mind that this is relatively clean - it gets worse from here throughout the year with house projects and kid toys piling up):



Shot of the current ceiling fixtures:



From the back corner of the one-car side looking toward the front:



One car side toward garage door:



Two car side toward garage door:



Two car side emptied out:





As you can see from the drawing and the pictures, there are obstacles I have to work around including the support post between the two-car and one-car sides, garage tracks that extend a little more than 8 feet inward, and some pull down stairs that give me attic access. And if that weren't enough, I have limited access to the following area due to where the upstairs bedrooms fall in this layout:



To install lights in the area shaded in red, I'll be having to drill through a large floor joist to fish the wires. I'm not opposed to it, but it will make life more difficult.

On the plus side, I have the two 33"x60" windows that provide some additional light during the day, which is when I do the vast majority of my work.

My intent is to still use the 3 fixtures for day-to-day lighting since that has worked well over the years. What I'd like to know is whether or not I should move them from where they are currently located. My thought was to space them more evenly side-to-side, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not given the obstructions and where the garage door tracks are located. Front to back, they seem to be in a good location.

I'd also like to add additional lighting to have nice, uniform light distribution to about 90-95fc at my working height (call that about 3'). Having additional light available when the hoods are up would be a nice bonus (but not required). I'm just not sure how to best lay these out given the things I have to work around.

I'll be doing the install myself (both mounting and electrical). Current plan is to install a dedicated 15-amp circuit with two switches (front/rear) to handle the additional lights. I was thinking up to an additional 12-15 light fixtures, but that might be overkill.

What say the Garage Journal experts? How many additional fixtures, and what is the best layout that is both functional, but also doesn't look like a bag of *** on the ceiling (at least not anymore than it already does)? My initial thoughts were to mirror whatever is done for the front half of the garage for the back, but if that's a bad idea, please let me know.

I appreciate any help/insight you can offer. I can provide any additional details required that I omitted, just ask.

In my 23x29, I have 16 LED lights, 4’ 5000k 5200L, controlled by 3 switches with dimmers, In an attached 6x15 bumpout, I have 3 more of the same lights controlled by a 4th dimmer switch. I probably overdid it on the 4 switches. 2 would have been fine. I think I did the lights just about right. You can get buy with fewer lights but then might want a portable area light or might want to do your projects in a certain area where the light is best. 15 amps will handle 35 LED 40W lights no problem—15A at 120V is good for 1800W so that leaves a good margin for wire length.

95 foot-candles is alot of light for storing kids toys
A couple thoughts...
if you're only going to be doing mechanical work once or twice a year, do you really want to spend the money to get 15 or 16 fixtures, and then do all the labor to install them? A good task light might be a better choice.
Either way, if I was installing new fixtures, I wouldn't use tubes. Instead, I'd go with a LED fixture, in your case, a surface wrap of some kind. These will throw light sideways and downward to maximize the reflectivity of your ceiling and walls to produce a nice even light.
Good luck,
CD

cybrdyke said:

95 foot-candles is alot of light for storing kids toys
A couple thoughts...
if you're only going to be doing mechanical work once or twice a year, do you really want to spend the money to get 15 or 16 fixtures, and then do all the labor to install them? A good task light might be a better choice.
Either way, if I was installing new fixtures, I wouldn't use tubes. Instead, I'd go with a LED fixture, in your case, a surface wrap of some kind. These will throw light sideways and downward to maximize the reflectivity of your ceiling and walls to produce a nice even light.
Good luck,
CD

Click to expand...

Let me clarify on the intended/actual use - the mechanical work is 1-2 times per quarter...it usually averages out to about 8 times per year that I'm doing brakes, changing oil, etc. in either the cars or my lawn equipment. The 1-2 times per year was detailing, although I'd like to do that more often if given the opportunity.

The reason for the strip lighting was mainly because they seemed like a good deal cost-wise. I'm certainly open to other lighting options, but had it in my head to use the same style of fixture throughout just so it didn't look odd. I'm also not too concerned about the labor...this will be a winter project, so it'll keep me occupied until it's driving season again.

Small update on my little adventure.

I downloaded and muddled my way through learning the DIALux software to do my basic garage layout. I know I'm not using it totally correctly, but I held pretty much all variables the same minus the layout just to see the differences. Since I decided on the MaxLite LSS2XT8USE4803 along with the 4ft, 4,000K GLL LED tubes, I could at least represent the light source pretty accurately.

My original thought was to use 17 fixtures and kind of halo each of my 3 vehicles. I realized this wouldn't be ideal when I started looking at where each of the 3 current fixtures I had was located (pretty much centered over each vehicle, but biased toward the front to avoid the garage doors when up), but I'm glad I laid it out just to see what it would actually look like:



Hmmm...not quite what I was going after for even lighting. I did many, many different layouts just adding an additional fixture to bring the total count to 18. That seemed to be a little better:



And what it would look like with the garage doors all open (I just simply removed the rear lights since they would not be on under these circumstances):



That was getting a little closer. I decided to add two additional fixtures to bring the total count up to 20. The layout seems a bit odd, but this actually works quite well when considering my attic access issues, as well as trying to throw some light under the hoods of my vehicles when they are up. Here's fully lit up:



That's pretty bright...maybe too bright. But what really intrigued me was when you started messing with different iterations:

4th row off:



3rd row off:



3rd and 4th rows off (garage doors open):



These seemed to be pretty useful, and would only require adding an additional switch. I was originally going to use 2 switches, and instead will be using 3 to control the extra lights. The last issue to tackle was figuring out how many I want on for my every day lighting. I was currently using 3 for general day-to-day lighting, so here's what that would look like:



Five seems a little better:



More on this in my next post.

Since I already had 3 of the MaxLite fixtures on hand to try as a basic demo (which shipped very fast from ProLighting.com), I went ahead and installed them where they were laid out above with only 3 fixtures on. After many, many iterations, taking into account attic access and truss placement, I decided on placing them no closer than 12" from any wall. I bought a couple of tripod mountable laser levels to make my life a bit easier as well:







I ditched the plastic anchors that came with the lights and installed 3/16" x 2" toggles instead. They require 1/2" holes to put them through the ceiling drywall, which ends up giving you some nice wiggle room once installed to get everything exactly where you want/need it. As you can see from the pics, I left the T5 strips in place for the time being until I get around to taking them down.

I don't have any pictures of them lit up, but the results in the 3 lights on configuration above is pretty darn accurate for how the lighting looks. It's a decent amount of light, but I definitely have some shadows. It isn't hateful, and works for just general lighting, but I think I will go ahead and wire in the additional two lights in that row on the same switch so all 5 will come on for general lighting. That will be a pretty nice setup IMO...1 switch just inside the house for turning that 2nd row on for general lighting, and then 3 additional switches over by my work bench that will control the 1st, 3rd and 4th rows independently. That should give me good flexibility, and be fairly easy to install and wire.

I'll post an update in a few months once I get everything else ordered and installed.

very cool! Im gonna give that software a shot.

purduecrew said:

very cool! Im gonna give that software a shot.

Click to expand...

I found it to be very useful. Some things should have been fairly intuitive to me, but it didn't really click until I started moving things around and seeing how the results changed.

Final Layout

I finally finished this project up last night...it took quite a bit longer than I originally anticipated, but that's par for the course with any project I do. Time will tell if it was worth it or not...I wanted a lot of light, and I got a lot of light, so it will be interesting to see how often I use these extra lights. This also ended up being a good exercise showing the difference between theory and reality. In theory, I would have spaced these lights perfectly evenly to get nice even light output all around my garage, but the reality of the situation forced me to make compromises due to how my house/garage was built.

I ended up with a slightly different configuration than I originally anticipated. I was going to run the first and last rows perpendicular to the middle two rows (see configs above), but after diving in to this project, I ended up realizing that one of the two ceiling mounted garage door opener outlets was closer to the rear wall than the other, which ended up pushing the 3rd row of lights further back than I wanted. Due to that, I decided to run the 4th row of 5 lights parallel, and only run the 1st row perpendicular to the rest. The only reason I had to do this was to be able to clear the garage attic pull down ladder...otherwise, I would have run them all parallel to each other.

I ran the final calculations in DIALux Evo, the results of which you can see below:



I also wanted to try and capture as best I could the differences in light output as you turn the different rows on. In order to do this, I set my DSLR up on a tripod and kept all of the settings on the camera the same. Those settings are as follows:

Camera: Canon 50D (Manual Mode)
Lens: EF-S 10-22mm (Wide Angle)
ISO: 100
F-stop: f/22
Exposure: 0.5 second



The picture with all 4 rows on was properly exposed...as you can see, the rest are underexposed. This was as apples-to-apples as I could get...unfortunately, I did not capture the original lighting with those same settings, so you can't compare these pictures to what was shown in my original posts at the top of this thread. And just to be clear, the picture of just one row on does NOT do this lighting justice...anyone that has these light fixtures and bulbs knows how bright these are. Your eyes do a great job of compensating for the amount of light available.

The install itself was pretty straightforward. Using the 3/16" toggle anchors was definitely the way to go for mounting, and the laser levels I bought were a huge lifesaver in getting everything aligned.

I hope someone gets something out of this little adventure. I'll also post a very brief summary with just the details in the Light Fixture Layout Collections thread stickied at the top of this forum.

Random update: now that I've had these installed for a couple months, I can say without a doubt that the pain of hanging and wiring these things was well worth the effort. I've used the extra lighting more than I thought I would at this point for various projects, and I have many more projects lined up. The first three rows are probably the most used (and useful)...the fourth row does help some, but since I commonly work with the garage door up, they don't contribute much. I probably should have expected this, but that's why each row has its own switch.