Hello to all I have a 20X24 garage with 9 foot ceilings that is wired with 4 wall plugs one is a gfi and 2 lights hanging from ceiling.I am now ready to light this thing up with proper lighting and dont know what type of lights to get or how many just do normal maintenance on cars but like to light this garage up.
First, is this an attached garage, or a separate structure?
If the former, how many separate CIRCUITS do you have coming into the garage, and are they dedicated to JUST the garage? (As a general rule, you don't want the lights on the same circuit as the outlets. You also don't want to share the garage circuits with anything inside the house proper.)
If the latter, do you have a sub-panel in the garage? And if so, what is the capacity of the feeder cable serving it?
With regard to the lighting arrangement itself, there are literally HUNDREDS of threads here on this very topic, at least several dozen of them within the past month or two. You would do well to review the prior art before re-inventing the wheel.
I use the inexpensive shoplights, they have two 40 watt tubes each. The last ones I bought (several years ago) were from WalMart and were about $10 each.
Those are now completely obsolete. The F40T12 tubes are now next-to-impossible to even find (they were effectively legislated out of existence); and the so-called "Energy Saver" F34T12 replacements **** in terms of both total output and overall efficiency. With 9-foot ceilings, surface-mount twin-tube "strip" or "wrap" fixtures which use F32T8 tubes are
THE way to go.
I installed switched receptacles (Outlets) and plug the light fixtures into them.
Per current codes, this would require that the outlets be GFCI types (or at least "GFCI protected", via an upstream GFCI outlet or a GFCI breaker). This is problematic because many fluorescent light fixtures (or, more specifically, their ballasts) do not "play nicely" with GFCIs. Hence, I strongly recommend that general garage/shop be hardwired. Besides, this makes for a neater, cleaner installation anyway.
