The garage is a critical feature for prospective homeowners. With the utility it offers, it’s easy to see why. The garage bears a lot of the functions we need in the home. We max out wall and ceiling space for storage and set up workspaces for our projects. From tools and pool accessories to lawn equipment and cars, everything has its purpose and place.
It doesn’t get much consideration, but your garage lighting is just as critical to your garage design as any organizational scheme.
Is your garage lighting working for you?
Optimizing your lighting will make work easier and create the atmosphere you want. There are countless lighting options, so we’ll make it easy with our guide to the best garage lighting ideas for transforming your space.
Improving Your Garage Lighting
Your artificial lighting falls into three categories in any room — general, task, and accent lighting.
General lighting is usually softer, widespread light acting as the primary source of illumination in a room. In a living room, this is often the ceiling fan light. For garages, the light on your garage door provides general lighting.
Task lighting is for accomplishing specific chores. A desk lamp or cage bulbs you hang while working on your car are good examples of task lighting. These are usually more powerful than general lighting to give you the best visibility.
Accent lighting is for decoration, to highlight areas and draw the eye. This is less common in garages, but if you have a trophy case or like to show off the ceramic coating on your car, accent lighting adds essential glamour to the space.
While general lighting is crucial for most garages, how you layer accent and task lights into your garage lighting layout depends on your unique needs.
Let’s look at the different kinds of lights you may want to incorporate in your garage.
Types of Garage Lights
In choosing your lights, you’ll 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.
Because they hang from the ceiling, putting shop lights in the garage is easy to add general and task lighting. Power sources are straightforward plugs, and many models can be daisy-chained together if you want to increase the lighting. Plus, you can adjust the height as needed to get the right spread of light across your garage floor.
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
Sometimes called can or pot lights, recessed lighting is inserted into the ceiling, not taking up any space in the room. This adds a bright and fashionable lighting array for general or accent purposes. They direct a stark light directly down, so you’ll need several of them spaced across the ceiling to illuminate the whole garage.
Flush Mount Lights
Flush mount lights are dome-shaped lights that hang from the ceiling. These are more decorative than shop lights and more diffused than recessed lights.
Rope Lights
Rope lights are good for accent or task lighting, though you can also string up a bunch if you want to use them for general purposes. Their best used under shelving to light up various materials or in dark corners and cabinets that are hard to see inside.
Strip Lights
LED strip lights are a popular smart home addition and one way to make your garage stand out. They aren’t ideal for general lighting, but they’re incredibly versatile for task and accent uses.
LED strips can run up the sides of your garage door for a showy entrance or line your workbench for added visibility. If you made an effort to put in a showroom quality floor for your treasured ride, colored LED strips can be the perfect highlight.
Other Light Options
Other accent lighting options include pendants and track lighting, both of which are excellent ways to shine a spotlight on specific areas of your garage. There are plenty of standalone motion sensor lights or security packages that can integrate with your existing lighting setup.
How To Optimize Your Garage Lighting
Like every other item in the garage, your lighting placement should be the product of a smart organization. When you understand your needs and goals for your garage, your garage lighting will fall in line. Map out your workspaces, displays, and storage to assign different layers of task and accent lighting.
Determine Your Light Output
The recommended illumination for the general lighting in your garage is 50 lumens per square foot. For a standard single car garage measuring 14 feet wide and 20 feet long, you’ll need roughly 14,000 lumens for the 280 square feet of space.
You could get one light to manage all 14,000 lumens, but the best bet is to stretch it out over three or so lights. This will create fewer shadows and take the burden off of one overworked light.
While the 50 lumens per square foot is adequate for accent lighting, you should also brighten your highlights more than your general lighting to draw attention. You certainly want your task lighting to be much brighter. If you have work areas, lighting should provide 300 lumens per square foot.
When finding the right bulbs, you need to take the total light you need and divide it by the number of bulbs you will use. This gives you the number of lumens per bulb. While shopping for lights, use a handy conversion chart for finding the right wattage in incandescent and LED bulbs.
Consider Other Light Sources
Don’t just stop with electricity; think of how you can enhance the lighting in your garage with a smart design. Light-colored walls, for example, reflect more light than dark walls, so you don’t have to use as much power. Any mirrors or reflective surfaces can also be strategically placed to bounce light around and even extend the perceived size of a room.
Your floor can also contribute to lighting in a big way, considering that all general lighting shines down. Among its many benefits, an epoxy floor will reflect a lot of usable light. On the other hand, if you use mats or other rough surfaces, those will trap light, and you’ll likely need to make up for it.
Windows and skylights can be an excellent way to save costs if your garage gets a lot of natural light. The light direction does change throughout the year, so don’t rely on a skylight to shine directly on your car as a highlight all the time. Instead, a well-placed window or skylight can generally act to add even more natural white light to the garage.
Choose High CRI Bulbs
Compared to warm incandescent light, natural light helps the mood of a garage, and it’s also practical.
Look for bulbs with high CRI, which stands for Color Rendering Index. This measure indicates how realistically the lighting displays colors in your paint, woodwork, metal, and other items around the garage. The index goes up to 100, and you should look for bulbs with a minimum of 85 CRI.
Reduce Task Lighting Glare
Task lighting needs to be the brightest, but it also needs to be the most unnoticeable. If you have a workbench set up against a wall, make sure any hanging task lights are positioned slightly behind you to reduce glare. Keep the reflective quality of any surface around the workbench in mind as well.
Get Professional Garage Lighting With Garage Designs
Upgrading your lighting can change how you use and appreciate your garage. By following these tips, you will create a more thoughtful and functional space for years to come.
Garage lighting is much more than an afternoon DIY project, especially when you run a busy schedule. If garage organization is critical to managing your hectic everyday life, let Garage Designs in Fenton, MO, create the perfect space for you.
As a professional garage organization company, our experienced designers can fine-tune every aspect of your layout, from floors to ceilings, to bring you the most use and joy out of your garage.
For a limited time, save on your garage door project, then request a free in-home estimate and let’s talk lighting!
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