Canadian Lighting options

[Mister Laugh]

I'm currently in the process of buying a house with a 26x26 heated garage. It has a single double door, and currently has a hodge podge of what I can only assume are garage sale lights. I'd like to go to a uniform lighting solution and wondering if anyone has any experience as to how much, what layout I should go with, and what fixtures. I'm interested in LED and read through the best lighting sticky but none of them seem readily avalible up here. I'm not opposed to standard t8 flourecent either. I was thinking 2 rows of 4ft fixtures, will that be enough?

 

[Jazz1]

I swapped out 4 8' dual T12 for 8 4' dual T5's. Huge improvement in light. I could stand 2 more 4' duals for painting but easy enough to add on later

 

[Abeo]

I ended up finding used 8' dual T8 fixtures with bulbs on kijiji, and have 4 rows of them (totaling 40 4 ft T8 bulbs in total in my 24x26 garage). I thought it would be overkill, but it's a good amount of light for my garage. I have 8 ft ceilings, so I wanted more bulbs rather than brighter bulbs. Finding the used commercial fixtures was cheaper than using standard consumer fixtures, and the quality is high compared to the consumer fixtures I had in before.

In the future when T8 retrofit LED bulbs become cheaper, I plan on swapping them over. I have a pair of them (1900 lumens each) that I bought just to see, and they work just as well as the fluorescent bulbs (according to my eye and lux meter on my smartphone).

 

[badrea]

Subscribed. I'm in the same boat as OP.

Mister Laugh - I did buy a couple 48" Lithonia LEDs to try out and they are great, but I'm sure there are cheaper options out there. https://www.homedepot.ca/en/home/p.48-inch-led-wraparound.1000721879.html

 

[tfi racing]

Your best bang for the buck right now is still industrial style T8 fixtures in either 48" or 96" at your favourite big box store,just make sure they have a brand name ballast in them such as Phillips,GE or Sylvania-run away from any ballast with "pro" in the name. T5 and LED fixtures should be left for large scale applications,little to no real benefit for the average homeowner. Abeo has the right idea,swap over to T8 LED lamps once the thieves on this side of the border reduce them to the price that our friends to the south pay.

 

[TTTTTT]

I just put in 10 4' T8 fixtures in my 24 x20 x 9' workshop. Got a steal from Princess Auto clearance area. The were $12.50 each fully enclosed with diffuser s. Stock was from 2013 but all new and unused. I made sure I put in "daylight" bulbs. Way better lighting. Eventually I will switch to led, but the light if fantastic. No shadow s, and enclosed for dust. This is the only pic at the moment. For $125 I had all my lighting. My ceiling is osb primed 2 coats and one coat gloss white which helps with the illumination.

Sent from my HTC One M9 using Tapatalk

 

[PhantomEB]

T8 wherever you can get them cheap until the LED market comes down.

I have 12 4x4 t8s sunken into my 24x24 ceiling. No issues with lighting in Calgary.

I only adding in LED strips under the cupboards so no shadows there.

 

[aptdweller]

I'm in the middle of redoing mine and I'm going 3 dual bulb 4 foot T8 fixtures for now and eventually LED when prices are reasonable. This is in a roughly 20 x 22 foot garage.