Comparing The Best Led Shop Lights
I had a couple of rules for this contest because I dont have infinite time or money to test every light there is.
Rule #1: Everything needed to be . Yes, I know there are plenty of other lighting stores out there, and some of them are really good. But I wanted LED shop lights that were available from someplace that everyone trusted.
Rule #2: I only looked at all-in-one LED shop lights, not separate fixtures and bulbs. Most garages will be just fine with low-cost\high-output LED shop lights.
Rule #3: The price per fixture ranges between $20 and $40. Like most normal people, cost is a factor so I want to get the most brightness for my buck. Or, if youre Canadian, lumens for your loonie. 🙂
Rule #4: All of the lights would have a color temperature of 5000K, with one exception so I could see the difference. For more on what that means, I wrote an article that goes into detail what color temperature garage lighting should be.
And thats it. Pretty simple, right?
Determine How Much Light Your Garage Needs
The amount of light your garage needs depends on the size of the space, the number of windows in the space, and the type of lighting you want. Light output is measured in lumens, and, in general, youll need 50 lumens per square foot for ambient lighting, 300 lumens per square foot for task lighting, and 75 lumens per square foot for accent lighting.
After determining how much light you need, choose light bulbs that have enough energy to deliver that brightness. For example, lets say you have a 360-square-foot two-door garage and you want to install ambient lighting in one half of the space and task lighting in the other half.
If you use the guidelines above, you would need 54,000 lumens on the task side and 9,000 lumens on the ambient side. Using a lumen-to-watt conversion chart, you can decide on the type of light you need, the number of lights necessary to brighten the space, and the wattage you want for your bulbs.
For example, 38-watt LED bulbs produce 3,000 lumens each, so you could use three of those for the ambient side, or you could use three 200-watt incandescent bulbs to produce that same amount of light.
Faithsail Led Wraparound Wrap Light
This product comes with four wraparound lights that sit flush against the ceiling. Theyre wrapped in an acrylic prismatic lens to maximize light output and distribution. Not to mention, theyre easy to install and can be connected to create one continuous light through your garage.
FaithSail LED Wraparound Wrap Light
There are five main types of garage lighting fixtures.
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Hykolity Linkable Led Shop Light
This four-pack of tube lights hangs from the ceiling on chains. You can adjust the length of these chains depending on how close you want the lights to be to your workspace. The lights also come with a cord that has an on-and-off switch that plugs into a wall outlet for easy installation, and the lights frame is available in black or white.
hykolity Linkable LED Shop Light
Use Fluorescents Or Leds
Who isnt concerned about the electricity bill? We all do worry about this and for this reason we often tend to find energy-efficient products. But the question is how are you going to light up your garage while making sure that the bills do not surge?
For saving energy it is helpful for you to choose LED or fluorescent lights. Both types promise you to offer equivalent lighting as old incandescent bulbs by using relatively lesser wattage. When using these lights and comparing the bills you will notice a drastic change.
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What Is A Good Cri For Led Lights
CRI, or Color Rendering Index is a measure of how accurate the color appears in a given light source when compared to a reference light source.
Usually that reference light source is how the item appears outside during normal daylight.
The CRI is measured on a scale of 1 to 100. Anything with a CRI higher than 80 is considered good and CRIs higher than 90 are excellent.
To give you a better idea of what this mean for you, take a look at this image. It compares how strawberries look under a light with a CRI of 75 and a light with a CRI of 95.
As you can see, the colors look more vibrant in the
For most people, anything over a CRI of 80 is great. People who need extremely accurate color representation, like automotive detailers or artists would need a light with a CRI as close to 100 as possible.
Why Trust The Spruce
Theresa Holland is a professional commerce copywriter based in Portland, Oregon. She has been contributing to The Spruce since 2019, covering home improvement and interior design. When living in their 100-year-old house, she and her husband had to figure out how to illuminate their closets and basement with limited outlets, and in the process, she learned how to spot high-quality fixtures. For this roundup, Theresa spoke to a contractor, researched various types of garage lighting, combed through user reviews, and considered dozens of products before making her final selections.
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How Bright Should Garage Lights Be
For basic garages, 50 lumens are ideally recommended per square foot. If, however, you wish to use the garage as a workshop as well, nothing less than 300 lumens per square foot will do. For electric lights, lumens denote their levels of brightness. So, the higher the lumen value, the brighter the light is. When talking about lighting any confined spaces, especially where good lighting is essential, the brightness levels are always considered in lumens.
Incorporate Light In Other Ways
Installing a skylight or window will increase the natural light in your garage. You could also repaint your garage in a white or eggshell color to make the room brighter or hang a mirror to open up the space. Additionally, consider replacing your existing garage door with one that has windows to brighten the room.
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How To Choose The Best Lighting For Your Garage
The perfect garage lighting is vibrant, economical, inexpensive, and safe. From selecting the proper sort of lighting to taking into account its brightness, efficiency, and the size of the garage, making a decision could be difficult.
But dont worry, this information will assist in answering all of your concerns.
Use Layered Lighting: Since the garage is often used for multiple purposes, it is indeed ideal to layer lighting so that you have enough illumination for parking, crafting, storage, and displaying.
Remember to keep these factors in mind when choosing and arranging the different types of lighting fixtures for your garage. You should keep in mind that for your garage to be well-lit, you must combine various sorts of lighting to serve different functions.
Artificial lighting is classified into three types: ambient, task, and accent, and your garage must feature all three.
Ambient lighting is a gentle overhead illumination that is intended to brighten the walls and floors so that you can move about it and park properly.
Task lighting is stronger and is designed for usage in working and storage areas to improve vision during detail-oriented activities and organizing duties.
Accent lighting focuses on creations you wish to highlight, such as a foosball table or an antique trophy gallery, and is brighter than ambient lighting
The brightest lighting fixture has the most lumens, and on average, a bulb with 3500 lumens or more is regarded as optimum for your garage.
Advantages Of Led Garage Lights
LED garage fixtures are often recommended by lighting experts, for several reasons:
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They achieve energy savings of over 30% compared with fluorescent tubes, and over 60% compared with HID lamps. In other words, LED garage lights will help reduce your electricity bills.
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The best LED garage lights have a rated service life of 50,000 -100,000 hours, which means you dont have to worry about replacements in a very long time. The durability of LEDs is a very useful feature in commercial garages with high ceilings, since lamp replacements at height are more difficult and dangerous.
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LED garage light fixtures are safer than HID and fluorescent lamps, since they emit less heat when operating. This feature prevents burns when garage lights are installed in low ceilings or cabinets, where they may be touched accidentally.
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Many LED fixtures are shatterproof, while HID and fluorescent lamps can break easily, releasing glass shards and mercury droplets.
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Some garage lights are switched frequently, and this shortens the service life of HID and fluorescent lamps. However, LEDs tolerate frequent switching without a major impact on their service life.
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LEDs can achieve a high color rendering index , which makes them useful for garages with work areas or laundry equipment.
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LEDs can also be switched without a warmup period or flickering. This is very useful when you need to find something quickly in your car, or a storage area inside the garage.
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What Difference Can Garage Lighting Make
Lighting is one of the most practical functions of a garage because it makes sure that you can see whatever is in your space clearly. Without it, you’d be bumping into your lawnmower, garden shredder, and any other tools you keep in this space.
Want to spring clean? Illuminating your stuff is of a huge benefit when it comes to having a sort out a solid garage light will help you spot anything that’s broken, as well as see items that could easily be donated.
That said, this isn’t the only gain from installing the best garage lighting. If you’re big into your DIY, you can transform this space into your workshop. As there isn’t much natural light in a garage, you’ll find that workshop lighting will allow you to work on any woodwork or repair projects into the night. Similarly, you might want to transform your space into a garage gym.
1 x V-Tac 40W 4Ft Led Batten Fitting
Pros:
Can be fitted to the wall or ceiling
Easy to install
Lots of different sizes available
Cons:
Some users had issues with the included fixing clips
Review:“Just moved house and had a poorly lit garage of a 4 watt single LED bulb. I didn’t want the hassle or cost of fitting fluorescent lights so thought I would give these 1.2m LED batten. I have to say they are very impressive for the cost. Excellent light distribution. Easy to fit .
“I used a total of 4 x 1.2m battens to cover a double garage. Well lit everywhere now and I can find all my tools no problem.”
Types Of Garage Lights
In choosing your lights, youll find incandescent options, but we recommend fluorescent or LED lighting.
With incandescent lights efficiency, fluorescent tube lighting is a popular ceiling hanging option for garages. CFL bulbs, the spiral alternative to the standard incandescent, last 10 times longer than standard bulbs and provide the cooler light you want in a garage.
LED lighting is the best option because it uses the least power and lasts twice as long as fluorescent or incandescent bulbs. They are at full brightness as soon as you turn them on and do not give off much noise.
The one downside to LED garage lights is that the light is directional, so you may need several fixtures if you still exclusively to LEDs. But given their crisp light, energy efficiency, and long life, they are still the best choice for your garage lighting needs.
Shop Lights
Shop lights are popular warehouse and garage ceiling lights due to their simplicity and cost-effective function. You commonly see these as side-by-side, four or eight-foot fluorescent tubes in a metal housing. You can purchase them with LED lighting as well.
The best fluorescent and LED garage lights are T5 or T8. These are the most energy-efficient and best-performing tube options.
Some shop lights come with a wraparound acrylic guard. This helps diffuse and disperse the light in more directions. It provides a more professional look as well since it hides the bulbs behind an opaque cover.
Recessed Lights
Flush Mount Lights
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Outdoor Garage Light Fixtures
Outdoor garage lighting is not just a beautiful addition to the exterior of your house, but it is a useful fixture to take into account as well.
You can put wall-mounted lamps on the sides of the garage door and add lighting above the garage door to help illuminate the nearby driveway and surroundings. However, here are some of the outdoor garage lighting options:
Landscape Lighting: This is a broad category of outdoor lighting that is utilized in both residential and commercial places. This is normally used for security and community amusement in parks, office building terraces, and public pergolas.
Motion Sensor Light: Motion sensors are integrated into this lighting. It is usually located on the outside of a garage. Sensors are made up of microscopic electrical components that recognize infrared energy emitted when things are moving.
Whenever a motion system senses a significant quantity of heat radiated, which is found in humans, animals, and automobiles, it immediately switches on the lights.
Spotlight: This lighting provides direct and directed illumination on important sections. Spotlights can be used to illuminate garage exteriors, doors, and decorations.
Spotlights vary from floodlights in that they focus beams in precise lines focused at a single center point rather than dispersing light across a large area.
What Is The Best Garage Workshop Lighting
Fluorescent lights and CFLs are an ideal alternative for garage workshop lighting. Although they are not as economical as LEDs, the light is more evenly spread.
Fluorescent bulbs with a color temperature of more than 5000K are ideal for workshops and other locations where precise visibility is required. To achieve consistency, apply the same color temperatures to all of the lights.
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Are Led Shop Lights Better Than Fluorescent
It used to be that fluorescent lights dominated the industry. You could buy them in four foot or eight foot tubes and the fixtures themselves were fairly inexpensive. They were also more efficient to operate, watt for watt, than the incandescent lights we used in our homes.
As time went on and lighting technology got better, LEDs have replaced fluorescent lights in many industrial settings.
LEDs are much more efficient
LED shop lights typically consume about 50% of the power of comparable fluorescent lights. Its common to see fluorescent T5 bulbs using 14-80 watts or higher. Comparable LED light bulbs use around 14 watts per bulb.
LED lights last longer
On average, LED lights last twice as long as comparable fluorescent light bulbs!
For those of you who want solid numbers, the lifespan of the average T5 fluorescent bulb is around 24,000 hours while the lifespan for LED bulbs is approximately 50,000 hours.
LED lights are dimmable
Because, sometimes, you just dont need full brightness on every light.
Now, I dont want to imply that fluorescent lights arent dimmable. They are, but there are some caveats that make it impractical.
In most cases, you need a special ballast in the fixture and a bulb that is also dimmable. Both of which are rare.
LED lights work better with motion sensors
Colour Scheme Based Lighting
If you do not want your garage to be different from the rest of your house, you can choose a color scheme that matches the color and decor of the rest of the house.
If the furnishings of your house are soft, you should use soft colors to light up your garage, but if the decor is bright and vibrant, you can make use of bold colors.
Just ensure that you have a proper understanding of the color scheme of the rest of the house before choosing lights for your garage, if the lights complement the decor of the house them your garage will look more like a part of the house, but if it is different from the color scheme, it may look chaotic to you especially if you want everything in the house to blend.
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How To Arrange The Lights
Generally speaking, there are two basic types of lighting: general lighting and task lighting.
Task lighting illuminates small areas in brighter, more focused light while general lighting illuminates the entire room.
Choosing the right beam angle is important so your lights wont cast shadows on your wall. Because of the height of most residential garages, that means picking a light lighting with a broad beam angle.
A narrower beam angle would be used for higher ceilings, such as in a warehouse or barn. The narrower beam angle is needed to project the light over a greater distance to the floor.
For most residential garages with ceilings up to 10 high, the best beam angle for LED shop lights will be between 90º and 120º. If you have ceilings above 14 high, youll want a more narrow beam angle between 60º and 90º.
Its worth noting that all of these LED shop lights have broader beam angles, designed for residential garage ceilings.
How To Make Garage Light Brighter
Although general illumination is essential for bringing your interior garage lighting ideas into reality, task and accent lighting complement it to create a brighter layered illumination scheme. Here are three examples of how to use this lighting technique:
Rope Lighting: This arrangement of lighting may be utilized at the bottom of shelving components to assist you in seeing objects while also making them noticeable on the floor where the shelf begins to prevent stubbing toes or mishaps.
Rope lighting can also be installed beneath cabinets to provide additional brightness where it is required.
Strip Lighting: Strip lights are a terrific feature when it comes to lighting below cabinets. They improve general illumination while also providing more targeted task lighting for garage workstations.
Recessed Can Lights.These lights are a well-known alternative for adding task lighting or perhaps modest ambient lighting. This sort of light may be placed at a task location in the garage or used to border the perimeter of the area for increased illumination.
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