What lighting are you using in your residential garage

[haris300]

I've got a 2 car garage with 8 twin bulb fluorescent fixtures, 6 standard 60w bulbs, and 2 led flood lights. Gets the job done for detailing and mechanical work.

 

[TTQ B4U]

I have the Lithonia Lighting 2ft LED High Bay Light from Home Depot in the center of a two car garage. It's insanely bright, but I want to get a second and have one over each parking bay. They're a bit pricey, but really worth it.

I looked at those and IIRC they w3ere $150-180 range and put out 3,200 lumens. Those and the other LED's cost per lumen were much much higher than the High Output T5's and still didn't match the brightness overall thus I changed gears from LED's to the well known T5's.

In the end i chose qyt (4) Twin Bulb T5 units that put out 8900 lumens each for a total of 35,600 lumens to light up my garage. I added the diffusors to them and they should work out really well.

I couldn't find a picture from the Home Depot site with the diffusors on them but they end up looking like this:

View attachment 52642

Will post follow up picks once all is done.

 

[kevincwelch]

I have some LEDs I picked up at Lowes. With those and the halogens I have on stands, it's pretty well-lit. After I install a new garage door, I'm sure it will be even brighter.

 

[TTQ B4U]

I have some LEDs I picked up at Lowes. With those and the halogens I have on stands, it's pretty well-lit. After I install a new garage door, I'm sure it will be even brighter.

That's a great shot to help me visualize things. My ceiling is going to be very very lightly textured and finished with an eggshell or flat paint.

The garage is square so I'm not sure if mounting them front to back or side to side is best? Thoughts on that when you hung yours?

 

[yg1829]

I have six of these 4' utilitech leds in my garage. My garage is also 24 x 24. They are 3600 lumens a piece. I really like them a lot. I would like two more in the middle going the opposite way but I'm happy with the light output. I wired them with plugs so I can always easily change them out if I want. I have them on two switches also. One switch operates the middle two and one switch operates the outside 4.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

 

[cyclops]

Have a standard 2 car garage with 2 pair of 4 footers. Ballast was ready to be changed so converted over to LED's last week, could not be happier. Picked them up on amazon, 18 watt (40watt equivalent) claimed 2065 lumens 5000K, so brighter than the fluorescents I had before. Light does seem more concentrated to area above the lights but that could be because they are brighter.

Only downside is any little imperfection shows up in the paint, great for detailing but not for admiring while taking out the trash.

 

[kevincwelch]

That's a great shot to help me visualize things. My ceiling is going to be very very lightly textured and finished with an eggshell or flat paint.

The garage is square so I'm not sure if mounting them front to back or side to side is best? Thoughts on that when you hung yours?

I wanted mine to run the full width of the hood and the roof of the cars. When I wash and detail, there's only one car in the garage - the center. Additionally, if I had them oriented the other way, the garage door might not have cleared the lights... It was definitely close and I didn't want to risk it.

I do have a "vaulted" ceiling area, and I arranged the lighting differently.

 

[nashvegas]

T5HO x a bunch, best investment I've made. I also recommend mixing in some 1600 lumen floods. I run 4 over my buffing area to help spotlight swirls. It's a good mix.

 

[Setec Astronomy]

In the end i chose qyt (4) Twin Bulb T5 units that put out 8900 lumens each for a total of 35,600 lumens to light up my garage. I added the diffusors to them and they should work out really well.

That's a good choice, that earlier LED fixture you put up was still only 70-80% lumen output of a 2-bulb T8. The other problem with most of those LED fixtures is when they burn out after 50K hours there is no bulb replace, you have to change the whole fixture. IIRC the T5HO's have a 30K hour life (unfortunately it seems HD has doubled the price on these tubes in the last year or 2). I know you have already decided, but Rasky had posted some LED tubes which go in a T8 fixture, in fact they sell some at HD but they are rather expensive there.

There are 2 kinds, the ones that use a (T8 electronic) ballast, or the ones that run at line voltage (and some that will do both). I think the output is just about there (for a T8), and being able to run without a ballast and change the bulbs is fantastic, plus they were cheap (the ones Rasky linked, it was in a garage thread somewhere).

 

[TTQ B4U]

That's a good choice, that earlier LED fixture you put up was still only 70-80% lumen output of a 2-bulb T8. The other problem with most of those LED fixtures is when they burn out after 50K hours there is no bulb replace, you have to change the whole fixture. IIRC the T5HO's have a 30K hour life (unfortunately it seems HD has doubled the price on these tubes in the last year or 2). I know you have already decided, but Rasky had posted some LED tubes which go in a T8 fixture, in fact they sell some at HD but they are rather expensive there.

There are 2 kinds, the ones that use a (T8 electronic) ballast, or the ones that run at line voltage (and some that will do both). I think the output is just about there (for a T8), and being able to run without a ballast and change the bulbs is fantastic, plus they were cheap (the ones Rasky linked, it was in a garage thread somewhere).

Thanks for the further insight. I do appreciate everyone chiming in as I got boned-up on my lighting education.

I agree that the LED's I originally chose just weren't there in terms of real-world brightness. No doubt the industry will move to LED's fully at some point. Today however, I'm going to enjoy having upwards of 36k lumens in my garage. I have seriously thought about adding a middle row but am going to go with four fixtures for now and call it a day.

My additional lighting is going to come from the sides as I'm working on my new garage layout which will including side lighting too. I'm investigating how I'm going to set it up so they side lights can be removed easily. Hanging them on a bracket or hook of some sort when needed and removing them when they are not in use. Afterall, this is a suburban dad's garage that gets used for more than just my weekend detailing. I'm confident I'll work it out.

Thanks again.

 

[Setec Astronomy]

I agree that the LED's I originally chose just weren't there in terms of real-world brightness. No doubt the industry will move to LED's fully at some point.

Yeah, I have been (loosely) following this whole lighting revolution for some time. My original interest and usage was original compact fluorescents with the straight tubes, for lights that stayed on for long periods (like the lights you leave on in your house when you go to work in the morning so it looks like someone is home when you come home late). The early LED's were good for that purpose, although they didn't have the high-wattage equivalents, and they were quite expensive, but they did pay for themselves if you were going to use the bulb a lot (not good ROI for a closet).

We recently seem to have hit a stagnation point with the LED bulbs, where the price seems to have stopped coming down, instead the "sell price" is being reduced by offering bulbs with shorter lifespans (10K hours), which again, are good for things like closets where you will never burn out the bulb. But also the march toward achieving lumen parity with high-output incandescent and fluorescent bulbs is agonizingly slow. And perversely, the more successful the industry is in replacing incandescent with CFL and LED, is the smaller the market gets, because these bulbs last so much longer.

I mean look at the life of that T5HO vs. a T12 VHO, I think the T5 lasts 3 times as long, and if it's like a T8, the initial vs. mean lumens is much tighter (meaning the output doesn't fall off as much over the life of the bulb).