Never Enough Light
It does not matter what room you are in, it seems there is never enough light. This is especially true for workspaces such as a garage. So a bit over two years in, I started to do something about that in my garage. Spoiler alert: even what I did is not enough. But I had to start somewhere, right?
It feels like light is usually one of the last things that goes into a workspace and I am certainly very guilty of this. We are starting to get some projects done and that meant I had a little bit of time to think about lighting in the garage. But the real impetus for this addition was the fact that when we bought the house, I had taken about an hour to replace the fluorescents, using the motion detector that was in the lights themselves and called it a day. It worked, but the motion sensors are not good. If you spend more than 10 seconds standing still, like say looking at instructions, or digging for a specific screw, the light would dim. If you didn’t move a lot for 30 seconds like for instance trying to clean inside a car, the lights would turn off. It got to the point where it was ridiculous to do or look for anything. So I impulse bought 4 foot LED lights.
I am using Barrina lights in my shop and for the price have been doing a really good job. So I ordered another set of those, but the garage is pretty low so I bought them with the diffuser. I did some Youtube and Pinterest perusing for how people are setting up lights in the garage. I found that hexagonal lights are all the rage and my contrarian self quickly discarded that idea. Since I was only getting 8 lights, it boiled down to a couple of configurations. A big square or putting 4 each over each car. I fiddled in Sketchup a little bit and I went with the 4 over each car, but with a twist. I put them at an angle. I feel like it is kind of cool, but maybe it just makes me a dork. Based on previous experience, it probably is more the latter, but I am used to that. I also wanted to get part of the light so that it would go down the sides of the cars when they were parked and this configuration allowed that to happen. If I really want a lot of light on a car, I can put just the one vehicle in the middle and I got a ton of light down the sides.
Once I had the lights in hand, the hardest part was actually figuring out the angle I wanted. I ended up with a 22 degree angle through some trial and error in Sketchup. The first step was to take down the existing lights. That was pretty easy since I had put in receptacles, so I then moved on to trying to lay out the design. I started by measuring 48” away from the walls in a couple of places. I thought I would be fancy and use a laser level to show the line I would butt the lights against, but it took so long to get that setup. I would get one side lined up, but the other would move out of alignment. Once I got that line on the ceiling (regardless of how I got it) I then used that line to mark the angle and get the first bracket up. I would then put the light into the bracket, line up the angle and mark the spot for the second bracket. I would then move the light out of the way, fasten the bracket, move the light back in place, and snap it into the bracket.
It made a big difference, but of course now I can see how bad the paint is. Both in the garage and on the car.
Next, I would put in the cord, pull the next light tight, and then mark the angle, repeating the previous steps. Since I had two receptacles, I just ran two parallel lines of lights at the 22 degree slant. When I turned on the lights for the first time, I was blown away at how much light there was! But I’ll have to admit it was weird getting used to turning a light on in the garage since it had been so long that we had motion activated lights. I did move one of those over to the middle to act as a garage door opener. If you are just grabbing something quick, it also works for that without having to hit the switch. Overall, though I am extremely happy with the results. What do you think, did I hit or miss the mark?