Well I finally got around to hooking up my interior garage lighting last night. Ended up staying out there till midnight to get it all hooked up because I wanted to see it all lit up. There is a little cleanup of the cables left to do, and plenty of trash cleanup to finish up tonight. (ignore the mess...)
First off, here's what the lighting was before I started:
I decided to use 7 of these LED strips. They claim 15lm/led, 600 LEDs/strip * 7 strips = 63,000lm. (Spoiler: Once it's all hooked up, I'm a little skeptical of these claims...)
Starting to hang the strips. 2 down. Hanging each strip on its own truss.
Hanging them via plastic wire "staples". Since the plastic wire staples as they come have a lot more room than necessary for an LED strip (left in picture) I flipped the nails around (right in picture) to get a good hold on the LED strips.
All 7 strips hung! I am mainly lighting the one side of the garage with this project since that is the working area. The other side is primarily storage for Big Red, so it doesn't need too much light at the moment. I may hang more strips down the road so that all the trusses have an LED strip, because, why not?
For the power supply I used an old PC power supply that I had laying around. I didn't take pictures, each LED strip, came with an end for a DC power supply, I cut it off, stripped the wire and soldered on some old speaker wire to put an extension on each strip so I can bring them all into the central power supply.
When using an old PC power supply you have to jumper two pins on the main connector to make it think that there is a mother board attached or else it won't power on. In my case it was these two pins, but I think it varies depending on what type of power supply it is. (Google is your friend!)
Zip ties! Yay!
Originally, nearby to where I was doing this there was a light socket powered from the switch. My original plan was to take a couple adapters and just plug in my pc power supply that way, but then I decided better and took the light socket out and wired in an outlet in it's place.
I did it right! (Ignore the lack of faceplate...)
Wire everything together and it's time for the moment of truth. Let there be light!