How Many Lights?

[noisufnoc]

I'm trying to plan out my garage upgrade. Currently I have no overhead lighting, only a couple of junky fixtures on the walls. My garage is a tandem 3 car, basically "L" shaped, 2 cars wide and one side is 2 cars deep. I use the wide area to park our two vehicles and the extra space as a work area and tool storage. When I'm working on one of our cars, I usually park it in the center of the 2 car area so I have extra room.

How many overhead fixtures would you guys recommend so that I would have adequate lighting? Right now its borderline impossible to work after the sun goes down.

Thanks.

 

[HoosierBuddy]

I was fortunate enough that a lighting designer jumped in and answered when I asked a similar question. I'm not expert enough to answer your question specifially, but for my 3 car garage (24 X 35) we ended up with 20 each 4' long 2-tube T8 flourescent fixtures (40 4-foot tubes total).

That may be a lot more than you are thinking, but it ended up working great.

That's more lights than a single 15A switch can take, so we wired every other fixture to come on for each of two switches. That gives me the option of only turning on every other light if I want to.

It's a lot of light...but not too much.

Phil