T5 vs. T8 fluorescent lights

Brian:

I've gotten completely lost following the lumens, watts, 5's, 8's, rows, and... man, my head is starting to hurt. But... I just changed the lighting in my garage/body shop/woodshop from incandescent to florescent. I originally had 3 100W bulbs in each of the three bays. The garage is 3 bays (36x26) but only two bays are real car bays. The third is where I keep all of my tools since it always seems to be too cluttered to actually use any of them in that bay.

I bought the basic 0 degree 4 foot, double tube fixtures from Lowes - $20 each. I used standard 40W, soft white tubes in the fixtures . I put 6 fixtures in the two car bays. They run in two rows, from the garage doors to the back wall, just inside of where the door tracks run. That puts them roughly 8 feet (or a bit more) apart. End to end, each fixture is 32" from its neighbor. I had to start about 52" from the front wall of the garage due to clearance of the door as it opens/closes. I didn't care exactly what distance the last light ended up being from the back wall. My ceiling is 9'

2" high.

What I can tell you is that each bay is lit up like glory itself. It took a little getting used to - the light is so different in color from the yellow of incandescent. But in a short time it became quite natural seeming. The best part - no shadows. I mean - no shadows. I don't care what you do, you can't produce a shadow that obstructs your view. It was shocking to really see everything that was cluttered on top of my table saw - and I'm not kidding.

I priced 8 foot fixtures and bulbs but all I could find locally - without a lot of shopping around, was HO fixtures and the bulbs will take you to the poor house. Not worth it in my opinion.

I wondered about color correction since I paint a lot of cars, but to be honest, I'm not going to sweat it anymore. The light and the color are so much better than what I was used to that I'll just stick with what I have.

My neighbors have made laughing comments about the light coming from my garage now. I mean - it's a lot of light. My eyes are going the wrong way fast and I just can't see like I used to in low light conditions anymore. Not a problem anymore.

So - I don't know what the lumens are, don't care. Don't care what the watts are. Don't care about 5's, 8's or 12's. I got light now and it was quite reasonable the way I did it (price wise).

Hope this sheds some light on the discussion.

Reply to
Mike Marlow
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Ye gads, unless it was a car lot, 4:1 pole spacing ruled for parking lots as long as the poles were 40 ft or less.

Roadway jobs, now that is a whole nother kettle of fish which I avoided like it was the plague.

Times have sure changed I guess.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

Sounds like a spec written by the local utility rather than a lighting systems engineer.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

I did a lot of searching of this newsgroup on Google. Many people quoted some OSHA rule of 3 watts per square foot as a guideline for lighting.

They meant it as a guideline, not a rule that had to be followed.

Do you recommend 4' or 8' fixtures? 4' fixtures are a fair amount less money, but a lot of wreckers recommend 8' for better lighting.

Brian Elfert

Reply to
Brian Elfert

A lot depends on hours of operation and ambient temperature.

A 96" HO tube has better terminations than a 48" standard, but usually more than double the cost.

Life of either one is usually quoted at 20,000 hours.

If you are looking at a typical home workshop type application, consider the following:

2-3 hours/night, 5 maybe 6 days a week will be about 20 hours per week. 20 hours per week, 50 weeks a year = 1,000 hours/year or 20 year life.

How long the system lasts becomes moot with numbers like that.

Things like inital cost, power costs, winter time temperatures, become signficant issues.

The very first one you want to address is temperature since light output is so temperature dependant.

If you need insulation, that is ahead of lighting, IMHO.

Notice how everything I touch turns into a system?

It's just the nature of the beast.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

You get the message.

For your application, you could care less what the true color is, but you sure care that it is repeatable, 24/7.

Have done some work on "color tables" as they are called.

Requires a controlled temperature, a specific set of lamps that have been precalibrated, with known hours of operation, and a whole bunch of other things.

People who need a color table are ink manufacturers, greeting card manufacturers, etc.

IOW, the print portion of the graphic arts industry.

Doing a color table is strictly for the prestige.

Lots of time for small amounts of money.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

This one tells me you have been around lighting. I duck and run when I hear full spectrum/natural lighting. Mike M

Reply to
Mike M

Don't remind me.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

The shop will be fully insulated, heated, and cooled. Temps will be kept at 45 to 50 degrees in the winter.

I definitely want T8 fixtures with electronic ballast. 4' or 8' is the real question. The 8' fixtures are more than twice as much as 4' fixtures from what I have found to date.

Brian Elfert

Reply to
Brian Elfert

Makes sense, they put out twice as much light.

Guess it gets down to a "what flavor do I like" decision.

Good luck.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

Double check price and availability of bulbs Brian. Not to say they're not available, but which is more convenient, more common, cheaper, etc.?

One consideration I found worthwhile with the 4 foot fixtures is that I can turn off fixtures I don't always need. Mine all have chain pulls on them. For normal garage lighting I might get by on only half of my lights. Easy to turn off the ones I don't want and still maintain the ease of hitting the wall switch to light the bay to the normally needed amount of light.

BTW - did I tell ya that my freakin' garage is *bright* now?

Reply to
Mike Marlow

Don't know where you came up with that number, but it sounds golden and looks to solve my own lighting questions. I'm in a basement with a 7' ceiling so I should be fine with anywhere from 1/2 w / sq ft (~50 fc?)to the full watt (slightly greater than 100 fc).

Right?

Bill

Reply to
W Canaday

7' mtg ht makes getting a good lighting job tougher than 8', but it can be done.

Use single tube fixtures and keep rows of fixtures no more thyan 48" apart.

Good luck.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

...that and colour balance. In my business, the customer picks out the colour for their countertops at their house, so I don't really care about balance...just what's easy on the eyes. Too much light in my game is bothersome too... virtual snow blindness can set in and the eye will lose all detail when a white countertop is illuminated too harshly... just can't see and sanding swirls after about 5 minutes of staring at the work.

I also have some fluorescent lamps, vertical, against two walls inside a fixture which I painted black. The lamps cast a nice picture of two white vertical stripes which I use to check for flatness in an assembly. That's also just enough light to show up sanding marks in darker countertops. They're 4-foot bulbs and the centre of the tube is at eye-height. It really shows off how well my parallign vacuum clamps work.

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is level, flat is flat, no screwing around, not even with veneered panels... and with all this low-angle lighting, I still can't see a biscuit in a joint..

Reply to
Robatoy

Oh great. You just hadda go there, didn't ya?

Reply to
Mike Marlow

In reefkeeping, T5's are the new black. They allow for more light with a smaller fixture, the bulbs last quite a bit longer than T-8's, are cheaper to operate than MH, and put out more light than a compact fluorescent.

That said, the light available is more a product of the reflector chosen than the bulb. The t-5 allows a smaller reflector that bounces more light down into the tank.

I have T-5's over my tank and track lighting in my shop. It allows me to put light exactly where I need it with no shadows (and I got 15 fixtures on Ebay for 10.00 so the price was right)

Reply to
Duke of Burl

No worries... nobody here has ever seen the 'biscuit phenomena' either. Just because that dumb Norm put a cookie 1/16" below the surface of a piece of cheap wood.......

Reply to
Robatoy

I took a closer look, got measurements and dirtied a piece of graph paper. I have 372 sq ft on a 12 x 31 rectangle. That argues for 10 x 40w tubes. After considering the effect of 80x (2x40w) directly over my lathe, I don't think that 400w is going to cut it. I decided to put a row of single tubes 2' away from each wall and end with a row down the middle (lengthwise) offset by 2' to balance things out. The rows are designed to be no more than 48" apart, although a couple of obstructions (plumbing) will cause this to vary somewhat. This will yield

15 tubes for a total of 600w general lighting. There will be additional point-of-use task lighting at the bandsaw, lathe and drill press. Possibly also at the table saw over the router table wing.

All lamps are "daylight" spectrum, 6500k, 2325 lumens.

I'm tired of squinting in the dungeon.

Bill

Reply to
W Canaday

It's not rocket science.

Play with several layouts before you commit.

Don't forget you can use supplemental task lamps for specific tasks.

Uniformity of the lighting is the controlling fsctor.

Have fun.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

could impose on your previous life one more time...

If a guy had 29 x 51 shed with 12' ceilings (white steel panels on ceiling and walls, insulated) hoping for 80-100 FC maintained.

How many would you recommend ? and what layout ?

(my flavor would be leaning towards 2 fluorescent 40 watt lamps/fixture mounted to the ceiling) but if you have a better idea for 12' ceilings, please let me know what you would do.

TIA Tom

Reply to
trechsteiner

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