Lighting Experience in New Shop

[Steve Mellott]

I’ve nearly completed the construction of a new basement shop and wanted to share my lighting experience. The shop is approximately 20’ x 30’ with 8’3” ceilings. The floor is painted light beige, the walls are eggshell white and the ceiling is white suspended tiles.

Within this area, I installed 8 separate 4 bulb fluorescent fixtures. I used the electronic ballast fixtures that you buy at Home Depot – they are satisfactory, but seem to be somewhat flimsy when opening and closing the door to change bulbs. They buzz a little bit, but the buzzing is masked by the music that I play in the shop.

I allowed 4’ between the sides of the fixtures, 4' between the ends of the fixtures, and 4' between the fixtures and the walls. This spacing covers the entire shop.

I used T8 daylight bulbs. I accidentally installed regular (as opposed to daylight) bulbs in one of the fixtures and actually thought the ballast or wiring was bad – the light from the regular bulbs was very yellow and dingy compared to the daylight bulbs.

I also wired an emergency light to the hot side of the light switch. (I actually have two light switches – one for the front half of the room and one for the back half of the room.) When the power to the lights goes out, the emergency light comes on.

The lighting in this shop is excellent – I don’t think I would change a thing. Since I based much of my planning on information I learned from this site, I thought I’d offer this as input to others who build shops. I’m sure there are other ways to do this – but this just happened to work for me.

[Wilbur Pan]

Another data point: My shop is a hair over 20' x 10', with ceilings just under 8', and I used five 2 bulb T8 fixtures to light my shop. Altogether that's 10 bulbs, which is 1/3 of the 32 bulbs Steve is using for a shop 3 times bigger than mine.

It would be interesting if most shops using T8 bulbs wind up with about 1 T8 bulb for every 20 square feet.

I agree that daylight balanced bulbs rock.

[Greg Narozniak]

In my garage which is roughly 20' x 20' with 10' ceiling. I have a large support beam dividing the shop in half, Actually it's more like 65/35.

I installed four 8' fixtures with 4 T8 bulbs in each in the larger part for a total of 16 and four 4' double bulb T8s on a seperate switch in the other part. My wife swears that I must do surgery out there. With the White walls and white ceiling it is very bright and I would not change it.

The more the better, Like tools :)

[Justin McCurdy]

There was a thread with a survey about the lighting average in everyone's shop about 6 months ago give or take. It seemed like most people fit into a mid-level category with just a few flittering on the outside of the average either high or low.

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=47397&highlight=shop+lighting