- Soon after we moved to Denver,
I upgraded the lighting in the shop
and I thought it would be a good time to
teach you a little bit about lighting
and a little bit about the LED technology
that I was going to install.
I made that video, I put it on our second channel.
You know, the one that nobody knows about or watches.
So I decided to bring that video over here.
Again, it's two years old,
you'll see the shop space doesn't look quite the same
as it does now, but I think the information is good
and I think you're gonna enjoy it.
Let's get to it.
So today I wanna talk about shop lighting
and before I show you what I installed here,
in the new shop, let's take a trip down memory lane
to a simpler time, 2012, when I built the dream shop.
I did my research on lighting at the time
and it seemed pretty clear to me that T8 fluorescent bulbs
were the way to go.
They had phased out the T12.
T8s were smaller, brighter, more efficient
and it just seemed like a logical solution.
Now LED was around at the time,
but the problem was it was cost-prohibitive
and there really wasn't a lot
in the way of options for that,
so T8 was really the only way to go.
Since then, about five years later,
we now have tons of LED choices.
The market has taken off, there's a lot of options
and the cost had really come down.
Now, here in the shop here in Denver,
we actually are working with America Green Lights
to outfit all of the LEDs in the shop
and it is nice and bright and beautiful
and looks good on video.
And I have two different types of fixtures,
and I'll show those to you later,
but for now, I wanna talk a little bit
about some terminology.
Because in order to be an informed shopper,
you need to know some basic terms.
And I'll tell ya, this lighting stuff,
you could really geek out on it
and it is certainly a science that you need to master
if you're gonna get into the business.
But if you're just buying shop lights,
you just need to know a few terms
to understand what you're buying.
So the type of light we're talking about today is LED.
That stands for Light Emitting Diode.
Now, we're not gonna get into the science behind it,
but just understand that it is brighter,
it's more efficient so it costs less to run
and it produces less heat.
Now, when you look at lights,
you're gonna see a bunch of different numbers
on the packaging and the next three terms
deal with what those numbers actually mean.
One important one is lumens.
Lumens is total light output,
and that's just how they measure it.
So if you have a lot of lumens,
it's gonna be really, really bright
and if the number is low, it's not gonna be as bright.
You'll also see references in literature to foot candles.
We're not gonna really get into that,
it's related to lumens,
but most commercial products I've seen reference lumens
and that's where we're gonna keep out discussion today.
The next number you might see is CRI,
that stands for Color Rendering Index.
Now, when it come to artificial light,
some are better at showing you
what the colors actually look like than others, all right?
What we're comparing this to is daylight.
Natural sunlight is a 100 on the index.
Basically, it is showing you vivid colors
and you can see the colors accurately for what they are.
With artificial light, some of them are very good,
so if the number is low,
it means that you're not really gonna see red as true red
or blue as true blue.
But if it's a high CRI, in the 90s, maybe, you know 90-95,
that actually means the colors are gonna be bright and vivid
and very close to what natural daylight would produce.
Next up is color temperature.
You'll see this as a number with a K at the end
that stands for Kelvin,
that's just the scale that it's measured in.
If you go 5,000 Kelvin or higher,
you tend to get into your blues and your whites.
It looks like a cooler color.
If you go below 5,000 to two, 3,000s, that's warmer
and you're gonna see more yellows and reds.
Now, this matters because the way the light reflects
onto surfaces and things in the shop,
it can actually give you an unrealistic view
of what the color of that thing actually is.
Now, as someone who does video,
this is extremely important to me.
It may not be as important to you
but you still want a color
that kind of makes sense for the space.
And when it come to these colors,
I think it's interesting if you look inside a house,
most people can't exactly tell you
what the right color is for temperature,
but they will tell you the wrong color temperature.
So if you go into a living room space
and someone has daylight-spectrum 6,000 K bulbs in there,
it's not comfortable.
It's weird, it would feel odd to sit in a living room
that's brightly light with 6,000 K.
But if you go into a laundry room, let's say,
or a work area and it's lit with 3,000 K lightbulbs,
a very warm light, it's gonna feel weird in there.
It's gonna look dim,
it's not gonna be a bright, active space, right?
So for a workshop, in my opinion,
I think 5,000 K is a pretty good number.
Now, Jim over at American Green Lights
did an amazing job sort of looking at my shop space
and helping me determine what the best layout is
and what kind of lights I would need
to properly light this space
not just for woodworking but for video work.
So let me show you the details.
Jim requested two things from me:
my shop dimensions as well as my proposed tool layout.
It's a little early to fully commit to tool locations,
but I figured, hey, let's run with it.
Jim recreated my layout using his software
and placed a series of 24-watt and 60-watt fixtures
throughout the shop
with light being focused over each major tool or work area.
He then generated a heat map
showing the areas where the light would be brightest.
As you can see, the tool areas are yellow, orange and red,
meaning it will be brightly lit.
The areas between the tools are a lot less important.
But since most of the shop is green,
that means there'll be a fair amount of light
consistently cast around the shop to help limit shadows,
which really helps with my video work.
Now, let's look at the lights themselves.
Now, here is a 24-watt fixture
and we kinda saved this to last
'cause it's got a nice dent in there, unfortunately.
But you can see I've got a nice strip of LEDs here
and the driver is encased in it`s own little compartment
and, of course, the LEDs mount on top like this.
So all you need to do
is connect this to standard 120-volt power,
you've got your hot, your neutral and your ground.
Pretty straightforward.
And this guy produces about 2,500 lumens
and the color rendering index is 92 to 95,
so really good quality.
The 60-watt fixture's a little bit larger.
We've got five LED strips here,
two drivers in the case and this guy puts out 6,000 lumens.
Now, keep in mind that my shop is half woodworking shop
but also half video studio,
so the things I'm concerned about
and the amount of attention I've paid to lighting
might be a little bit more than you're prepared to do.
But, at least if you know some of these terms
when you go and shop for lights, you could be more informed
and make sure you're getting a quality product.
Because guess what.
There's a lot of stuff coming in from over seas
and it's very hard to verify the quality of those things.
So at least knowing the terminology,
you can make an informed buying decision.
Of course, check out American Green Lights.
They make a fantastic product and in addition to this video,
we actually have a little article that my buddy Vic wrote up
telling you a little bit about
the different types of LED lights that are out there
with some recommendations as well
that you might wanna incorporate into your shop.
Because sometimes brand new LEDs
are not necessarily the way to go.
There are retrofit kits and replacements for T8 bulbs
that are LED, which is pretty cool, all right?
So be sure to check that out on the website.
All right, thanks for watching everybody.