Lights in a 30'x40' barn

[xtremek]

So I want to finish the insulation, but I'd rather finish wiring the outlets for the lights first. The barn is as the title says, a 30'x40' with one 16' garage door on the west side. I plan on doing quite a bit of fabrication on the north end. There's a retractable drop light in what I would call the "bay" you drive into. The barn has 11' walls and I'm finishing the insulation, wiring, air lines, and gas lines before I start on dry-walling the ceiling and putting plywood on the walls. Eventually the ceiling and upper part of the walls will be off-white and the bottom 4' will probably be a medium blue or gray. The drawing is off in scale a little. My plan is 2' between the lights for the North-South lights and 1' between the East-West lights. The lights on the east and west walls are 16" from the walls. What do you folks think?

 

[astroracer]

What kind of lights? You could probably live with one E/W between the N/S rows. I have my 8' fluorescent cold starts running N/S on 4' centers and they provide plenty of shadowless light.
A pic taken while I was hanging the lights. You can see how dark it was in the middle of the shop.

After, lots of light and no shadows.

Mark

 

[xtremek]

I'm probably going to use 2bulb 4' fluorescent fixtures. The current ones hang down about a foot.

 

[2ManyProjects]

So I want to finish the insulation, but I'd rather finish wiring the outlets for the lights first.

That's the right approach. You don't want the insulation in the way when you're running wires; and if this is subject to inspection, they'll need to be able to see EVERYTHING.

The barn is as the title says, a 30'x40' with one 16' garage door on the west side.

Do you mean at the bottom of your attached image? BTW... That image is SO small that I can't hardly make out any detail at all; by the time I blow it up enough to see things, most of the text labels have become illegible. If you're going to bother with a separate attachment (as opposed to an inline image), you might as well make it big enough to be useful (and crop it so as to avoid having all that "wasted" blank space around the portion of interest).

I plan on doing quite a bit of fabrication on the north end.

If my guess above regarding what was "West" is correct, that would mean the fab areas is to the left of the image. I suspect you meant "South".

There's a retractable drop light in what I would call the "bay" you drive into. The barn has 11' walls and I'm finishing the insulation, wiring, air lines, and gas lines before I start on dry-walling the ceiling and putting plywood on the walls. Eventually the ceiling and upper part of the walls will be off-white and the bottom 4' will probably be a medium blue or gray.

OK, there (finally) are the crucial data points (ceiling height and interior finishes).

The drawing is off in scale a little. My plan is 2' between the lights for the North-South lights and 1' between the East-West lights. The lights on the east and west walls are 16" from the walls. What do you folks think?

I'm still a bit confused on the cardinal compass points; but as a general rule, the smaller you make the end-to-end gaps in any "continuous" run of strip/wrap fixtures, the better. One foot is OK; two feet is pushing your luck.

As for the fixture-to-wall distance, that will depend mostly on what those walls will be used for. If there is any storage shelving, cabinets, or evenjust pegboard/SlatWall, you'll want to move that out to maybe 24"-30"

I'm probably going to use 2bulb 4' fluorescent fixtures.

Good move.

The current ones hang down about a foot.

With an 11-foot ceiling, you can usually "get away with" suspending the fixtures a foot or two below the ceiling; but that doesn't make it ideal. Given that you will have a white-painted drywall ceiling, direct surface mount is probably your best bet.