garage lighting

[steveo2155]

I have a 25x26 attached garage with 4 regular screw in light bulbs. Looking to make it a little brighter. Anyone have any recommendations for lighting? I'm debating between screw in replacements or wired in led tube lights. As far as the screw in light replacements, I'm not a huge fan of the look of the panel lights that seem to be popular. It looks like Home Depot has a stonepoint screw in 5000 lumens bulb that looks better and seems to have good reviews - anyone use this? Or any other screw in light replacement?

 

[ptabatcher]

Same. Not a huge fan of those folding light until I saw them at my parent’s house. My dad found some that have one light pointing down and then three articulating panels. The fold up and down and also twist along their axis. He had them folded up (tips closer to the ceiling) and rotated. The two lights lit their two-car garage pretty well. Better than it ever has been. I’m not sure where he got his from. They looked nice. Not like the fins from a space-x rocket like most of them.

It has made me reconsider and I’ll probably be getting them. I have almost no light in the garage so I either need to hang “fluorescents“ or put up some boxes with lights. Was already thinking of those LED disk lights that you can put in a j-box. The panel lights would probably allow me to run less.

 

[mike93lx]

The sticky in this forum and some reading will give you tons of info

Any screw-in bulb will create lots of glare. I would be looking at 4ft fixtures and a whole bunch of them

 

[sparky 1971]

Replace them with strip lights and frosted led tubes. I like 5000k for a shop, but others like 4000k. If it were my shop, I'd start with four 8' four lamp fixtures or eight 4' coupled together.

 

[teamextreme]

Depends on your intended usage. If this is just a garage to park cars and store bikes, then the new screw in LED's are a great option. If this is going to serve as any kind of work shop then I would do as suggested above.

 

[u2slow]

I'm a 4' fixture kind of guy... not afraid to get cheap/free T8 flouresecents from garage sales.

Change one or more of the light outlets into an extension ring, and then run a little bit of conduit to setup say 3 rows of them, If you only do 2 rows with a 2 car-garage, you usually end up working in the shadows.

 

[White Shadow]

This place can get a little nerdy regarding lighting. Personally, I went out and purchased 12 each of the 4' LED shop lights (5,000K was my choice) from Lowes for my 3-car garage back when my house was built in 2016. Six years later and I'm still super happy with them. Super bright and costs very little to power them. I put mine on separate switches, one for each bay, but I still turn on all three switches more often than not.

Anyway, don't overthink it. 4" LED fixtures are relatively inexpensive and you'll most likely need about four for each bay, assuming approximately 20' x 10' per bay if you like things nice and bright.

 

[nadogail]

I have just finished installing 4 of the screw-in LED panel modules. They replaced 4 T12-F40 two tube fixtures. The lighting looks great and I anticipate the energy requirements will be a lot reduced. I will probably be adding more of those LED modules.

 

[Bert_]

The stone point bulbs are decent. I use them often in machine sheds. I don't know what your ceiling height is but a bulb like the stone point isn't going to be great at, say, 8'. A long row of lights just does a much better job.

This place can get a little nerdy regarding lighting. Personally, I went out and purchased 12 each of the 4' LED shop lights (5,000K was my choice) from Lowes for my 3-car garage back when my house was built in 2016. Six years later and I'm still super happy with them. Super bright and costs very little to power them. I put mine on separate switches, one for each bay, but I still turn on all three switches more often than not.

Anyway, don't overthink it. 4" LED fixtures are relatively inexpensive and you'll most likely need about four for each bay, assuming approximately 20' x 10' per bay if you like things nice and bright.

I think it's weird when guys talk about their 50 pairs of pliers or polishing the paint on their bench vise. Decent lighting isn't weird.

 

[dlwilson]

I replaced four fluorescent lights with four LED tube lights in my 960 sq ft garage, and it made a big difference. And it was pretty easy to do.