Garage Lighting Planning

[miska_man]

This may or may not be your typical garage lighting thread. I am looking for input on circuit/switch design on my 1,000 sq ft garage. I am using it to mainly work on cars, but also for parking.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Interior
Two zones:
Zone 1 - front, for general parking. Set on a Lithonia CMR10 motion sensor (Cooper LHBS high bay, 24,000 lumen with T8 lamps for task lighting)
Zone 2 - rear, for work area. On regular switch. (Cooper LHBS high bay, 24,000 lumen with T8 lamps for task lighting)


Exterior
-Floodlight to illuminate driveway (Feit 15,000 lumen LED flood)
-Soffit lighting (Halo HLA @ rake, similar Halo model at eave)
-Light by walk-in door (undetermined model)


Questions:

• Does anyone have thoughts/previous experience on if I should have the walk-in light on the same switch as the soffit lights?
• Should I put the soffits on a timer?
• Should I put the floodlight on a proximity also?
• Should I put a switch in Zone 1 to bypass the motion sensor if I don't like it?
• Does my switch plan make sense? Or is there a more efficient/smarter way to do it?

Attachments:
-PDF garage plans that I drew
-My proposed light circuits
-A photo of where I'm currently at with the project

 

[Stuart in MN]

An initial thought about the exterior lighting, is it for security, or accent, or both? If you have neighbors close by they may not appreciate a lot of lights, especially if they're on all night. My personal opinion is a floodlight should only be used when necessary, like if you're working on a car late, or maybe if you have friends over for an outside gathering, or so the kids can play basketball, stuff like that. You could put it on a photocell if you have concerns about intruders and burglars but that's up to you and what your neighborhood is like.

I'm a retired electrical engineer and did a lot of lighting design for commercial and municipal projects, we often used fixtures made by Rab over outside doors and for general exterior lighting (I think they have soffit fixtures but don't remember for sure, you can look at their website). Really all you need is enough light to able to see the door lock so you can stick the key in, with modern LED fixtures one that's 15 watts is plenty.

For the interior, many manufacturers have a configuration tool on their website where you plug in the dimensions of the space, how much light you want, and it will spit out a plan showing how many fixtures you need and how to arrange them.

Also, you may already looked at them but at the top of the lighting section here on the board are a couple useful threads about light fixture arrangement and what fixtures to buy.