Lets talk about shop lighting

I've been doing some reading on shop lighting.  The "industry standard" is 300 lumens of light per square foot of shop space.  The bill on that gets pretty high pretty fast.  If I scale that back to somewhere around 200 lumens per square foot it's slightly more reasonable.

We're still waiting to close on the new house but I believe the shop has 12 foot ceilings.  I do alot of welding and like to see what I'm working on with my welding helmet (autodim).  

What shop lights do you like and where did you get them?

Barrina LEDs from Amazon. Love them. I think I have 16 of the 4 footers up in my 24x24 shop.

Barrina Lights

I converted florescent to LEDs. Brighter, less e bill, sold the old ballasts and recovered part of the cost.

In reply to L5wolvesf :

I still have the florescents as well as the new LED but you can tell instantly the difference. 

bobzilla said:

In reply to L5wolvesf :

I still have the florescents as well as the new LED but you can tell instantly the difference. 

Kinda like night and day :) 

Lots of BARRINA 8' LED lights in my shop and what a huge difference! I have several boxes to do the other 1/2 of the building when I find time. I sold the 8' flourescent 2-bulb light to offset the cost of the new ones.

preach said:

Barrina LEDs from Amazon. Love them. I think I have 16 of the 4 footers up in my 24x24 shop.

Barrina Lights

Just going off the advertised rating they are 2200 lumen each, x 16 is 35,200 lumens total.  In a 24 x 24 shop that puts you at roughly 61 lumens per square foot.  Do you feel like that's adequate?  Do you ever feel like it's not enough?  What kind of work do you do?

If I went with the 8 footers at 9000 lumens each, 12 would put me at 72 lumens or 16 would bump it up to 96.  Does that seem adequate with 12 foot ceilings?

It might be worth mentioning also that there are just open rafters so no reflective lighting like if there were an actual ceiling.

I bought the ones from Harbor Freight - 5000 or 5500 Lumens each 4 footer, since my eyes are old and tired I have them all over the shop but mostly where I do the majority of work - either over the workbenches, vise or engine stand. also over where I store nuts and bolts and over the toolboxes, where they shine directly into the drawers when I open them.

I have a dozen of them in a 600 sq ft shop with 8 ft ceilings, whatever that works out to....

I love the barrinas.   If it's not enough light, just buy some more.  They all link together and they work well.  They are cheap as E36 M3 too.

In reply to Patientzero :

I work in lighting, and I've never heard lumens per sq.ft.. I guess that could give you a rough idea, but the industry uses foot candles at the work surface, since lumens at the fixture can leave a lot of variables open. Here is a good simple calculator...

Elite Lighting Calculator

I plugged in your numbers for a 4' strip fixture set to a 5000 lumen setting. Not sure if what I entered will stick to the link, but you can play with it to get an idea. For a garage, you are looking at around 50 foot candles on the low end, 100+ for fine detail work. Here are the IES recommendations for different tasks...

IES lighting recommendations

I'd recommend general lighting for the space in the 50 foot candle range for general work, and task lighting above work benches for detail work. It would take a lot of fixtures to hit 100ft candles throughout, and would likely be too bright for most work. A safe way to go would be to use an adjustable fixture like the one above, and calculate off of the middle setting. If you find you need more or less light in some or all areas, you could just switch the setting. You could also overnight the area and dim it to the desired level, which would leave you with more light available for finer tasks. 

Edit: It looks like the numbers I entered didn't stick. You just need to add your dimensions and mounting height, and your desired work surface foot candles. You can also adjust the lumens per fixture, as they are switched for 3000, 4000, or 5000 lumens. Or go back to the main site and pick another fixture type. I like strips for garages since they put out a lot of light without taking up a lot of ceiling space. Also think about placement- if you are primarily working on cars, offset them to the sides of the car, not directly above it. 

Boost_Crazy said:

In reply to Patientzero :

I work in lighting, and I've never heard lumens per sq.ft..

That's the first thing that popped up when I googled it so that was my only point of reference.  Thanks for the info.  I realize those lights are cheap enough I can just buy more if I need it but I'd rather put up 12 or 15 fixtures instead of 30 if at all possible.  This is a 30x50 shop and I'll mainly be doing fab work and working on cars.

Patientzero said:

preach said:

Barrina LEDs from Amazon. Love them. I think I have 16 of the 4 footers up in my 24x24 shop.

Barrina Lights

Just going off the advertised rating they are 2200 lumen each, x 16 is 35,200 lumens total.  In a 24 x 24 shop that puts you at roughly 61 lumens per square foot.  Do you feel like that's adequate?  Do you ever feel like it's not enough?  What kind of work do you do?

I have 0ne 4' Home Depot expensive one over the bench. Walls are faded white, floor is not great as it is signs, ceiling is dark. I feel like it is adequate. Will be adding two more for a pair of corners. Think that link was 6 for $48. If I am under the car it requires a headlamp. I mostly drink beer in the shop but I also do mechanical work and weld repairs. Have a pic.

I know the search here is not great, and I am not saying "search noob" (if you did not know the name Barrina it would be hard) at all but if you search Barrina you will find many posts singing their praises here. Bang for the buck they are great. They are linkable up to 3-4, have a very cheesy mounting system, but they do the job very well. They link together immediately or as you can see in my messy wiring above they come with 3' link wires.

8 ft barina knock offs from Amazon in my 30x50, plenty of light.

I buy used 4' flourescent fixtures on Marketplace for next to nothing and put LED tubes in them.

Another vote for the Barrina's.  They have worked great in my garage and the price is low enough to add them until it's super bright in there.

Barrinas for overhead. But if you want and need better lighting for welding and close-up stuff, can't beat a spotlight or work light. I got the craftsman work light LED from lowes for like $40, 4000 lumens, bright as all hell, good adjustable base and can even mount on a tripod, and not as hot as the old halogen ones, still warm though. 

I'm thinking about mounting a light directly on my welding helmet though, I always seem to get shadows, even outside. 

In a previous garage-lighting-megathread, someone cited 130lm/SF. 

Also, I'm pretty sure somewhere I saw someone had stuck one of the "Lightbar" style (thin flat flexible COB strip) LED headlamps to their welding helmet.  Clever, low-profile, and didn't require drilling holes in the helmet.

I am not arguing against using Barrina/ strip lights in general.  However as an alternative in a weird situation, I have a 1ft x 2ft LED "high bay" fixture (100W, claims to be 15k lumens, the exact one is NLA) hanging from the vaulted ceiling of the upstairs bedroom I use as an office/ hobby area.  I could have made something to suspend a bunch of Barrina strips, but this was just 'easier' to replace a surface-mount incandescent b00b light.  It looks like a DIY installation but I don't really care.  It should be code adjacent if not 100% compliant, and the intent was there.

Anyway, it measures 9ft 9in from the floor to the underside of fixture.  The room is 10.5 x 12ft, which works out to ~119lm/SF.  The walls and ceiling are all flat off-white w/ knock-down texture.  I got one of the free Lux Meter phone apps, zero idea if it is accurate.  The app says it is generally 600-1100 lux at table height around the middle of the room, which converts to 55-100 ft-candles.

Therefore, with +/- 100% uncertainty, the lumen per square foot approximation has been shown to accurately predict the expected worksurface ft-candle measurement.

For a reality-check, I held 6 of the 4ft Barrinas together in the same location as the hanging fixture.  Both seem about equally bright, both subjectively and with the Lux Meter app.  The math is close (6x 2200lm = 13.2k lm).

I'm happy enough with this light fixture , although I don't think the split/pivoting design was really worth the extra few $ over a normal rigid one.  I would not want any less general light, but I also don't think I'd want 2x as much, unless maybe for doing body work?  I have enough light to work on most AR, RC, or 3D printer stuff down to about M3 hardware size.  At the same time I also can still work at the computer with the overhead light on, for a short while.  I would not want to do it for a really long time, and mostly I use a desk lamp instead.

Sleeperdude just built a dream shop and a lighting company called hyperlite gave him some LED lights. Took about 8 for a 12 ish bay shop. I intend to go buy some of them. 

I honestly lucked out.  I haven't installed them yet, but keep trolling the clearance section in the big box stores.  I scored 6 kinda run-of-the-mill 4 footers billed as a 2-light replacement, and two monster industrial 4 footers designed to be a 4-light replacement.  The regular ones were $14 and the big ones were $25.

That should turn my 12 x 24 garage into a tanning booth for $100

I just found this chart on the Barrina website.

In reply to Patientzero :

My ceilings start there and get higher, and I've got some ceiling duplication from a storage loft, but i ended up with about triple that density (about 60 of the 4' in a shop pretty much 33' square). It may be more than necessary, but i have them broken into alternating banks and usually turn them all on.

 Quite happy with them, though.

I've got Barrinas in my garage (electronics workshop, car parking) and four big LED flat panels in the work area in my shop (car work). I didn't spec out the latter so I don't remember the specifics. The parking area in the shop has some 8' LED "tube" retrofits. I've added some 4' LED fixtures above my two main shop workbenches that I'll occasionally fire up if I need more light - they were just leftovers from something else. In the garage, we almost never fire up the Barrinas above the parking area because they're just so bright and that's not really necessary.

One thing I did that helped a lot in the garage was to paint the walls white instead of leaving them bare plasterboard.

Also, I ran a set of the Barrinas around my lift - an idea I stole from JG. They're fantastic for that, it's a nice even light for your work area without constantly blinding your eyeballs.

We have been slowly converting our Fluorescents over to the Barrinas as they burn up. The shop is so much brighter. My work area is ~12x10 and a single fixture with two LEDs is considerably brighter than it was with two Fluorescents.

Also, look into side lighting.