hey everyone hope you're all doing well my name is Marie and welcome to my
channel DIY Montreal today is the first video from my shop upgrade series I
recently published a video where I gave you a little tour of my shop and talked
about some of the upgrades that I wanted to make and the first one that I decided
to tackle was lighting upgrades right now maybe you you're looking at the
lighting and thinking it's not bad I'm actually probably in the best lit area
in my shop my current setup is for LED 5000k bulbs that are all focused right
above me here which is usually where my workbench is but the rest of the shop
has a lot of shadows and dark areas so I really want to address that and I
decided to upgrade to 4 foot tube lights now before making my decision I did a
lot of research looked into a lot of different considerations when choosing
lighting and I wanted to share with you some of those things to help you make a
decision and I'll tell you what I ended up going with in the end all right so
when choosing your lights I would say there are three main factors to consider
at least I did when I was making my decision number one was type of lighting
florescent LED number two is color temperature and number three is the CRI
which is the color rendering index so starting with florescent versus LED LEDs
are becoming a lot more affordable prices are going down so they're
becoming a lot more accessible that being said LED lights also have a
lot of advantages over fluorescent bulbs number one they don't flicker they don't
buzz they have you know kinds of consistent lighting and you won't get
that flickering especially when you're turning on a fluorescent bulb maybe
you've noticed it kind of flickers before it warms up progressively when
you turn on an LED light you get that instant brightness at a hundred percent
from the start number two they consume a lot less electricity for a hundred watt
equivalent you can have a thirty-eight watt bulb or something like that so it's
it'll save you money in the long run and number three if you have a really cold
shop let's say in the winter sometimes fluorescent lights won't turn on if it's
really cool whereas LED lights don't have that problem they will work even if
it's really cool too so given that and the similar price point between the two
going with LED was really choice for me next up is color
temperature and this is how cool or warm the light will appear and it's measured
in Kelvin so you'll see a number on the box something like 4000 K 5,000 K and it
ranges from anywhere from usually let's say an incandescent light will be 2700 K
2 3000 k this is something you'll usually have in a bedroom in your living
room on the other end of the spectrum you'll have a much cooler light
something like 5,000 K up to 6500 K and this is what you'll find in a laundry
room at in an office maybe a hospital if you've ever found or light that's very
very blue like so white that it's almost blue that's probably like a 6500 K
somewhere kind of in the middle or what I found which was highly recommended for
woodworkers is 5000 K and this is the most I would say close to daylight as
they call those daylight bulbs you can find I did however also find a few
outliers that recommended more of a 4000 K for woodworking it's a little warmer a
little more yellow not as blue as I would say 5000 K and this really depends
on the person though currently I have 5000 K bulbs and while the lighting is
really great I find especially for video that some of the clothes get washed out
it's a little on the blue side so this time around I spend a lot of time
deciding between 4000 5000 K it's not a big difference but in the end I went
with the 4000 K and we'll see how that turns out I hope I won't regret it but
the great thing about the light fixtures that I did choose and I'll show you
those in a minute and link them up down below but they're available in both the
4000 or the 5000 K so you can decide what's best for you
alright the next important consideration is the CRI which is the color rendering
index now this is a number from zero to a hundred and what this actually
represents is how accurately the lighting will allow you to see colors
accurately the closer the number is to a hundred the better it is so ideally you
want to aim for a really high number the highest I found was 92 to 95 on the CRI
index so you kind of want to aim that's what I wanted to get
unfortunately I wasn't able to find anything available to me locally in that
or in my price range at least that had that high of a CRI so
the one I actually ended up getting had an 84 CRI which is good but not ideal so
like I said if you can find anything like 92 or 95 that would be the ideal
scenario and by the way if you're shopping on Amazon you might notice that
a lot of the lights that you look at they don't actually list the CRI so what
you can do is either go on the manufacturers website sometimes they'll
have it listed there and if you can't find it
probably best to stay away from those lights alright so after figuring out
that I wanted 4-foot LED fixtures with a 4000 K color temperature and the highest
CRI I could find the next thing to figure out or decide on was the actual
electrical installation now a lot of lights you'll need to hardwire and
others are plug-in types I definitely wanted to go with the plug-in type just
to make things a lot easier and I don't have to do any electrical work so that
was an important consideration for me but the other thing a next step up from
that is you can actually get light fixtures that are linkable that means
you can plug them in and link them together with a power cord that's
supplied and this is really amazing because this allows you to do what's
called daisy chaining which means you connect one fixture to another and
that's how the power gets into it essentially so you only have to plug in
one of the light fixtures and then all the others basically feed off the
previous one in a chain like that alright so with all that in mind I did
some research and the best option for lighting that I could come up with at
least for me in Canada were these hyper icon I believe you pronounce that hyper
icon shop lights like I said they are 4000 K but you can get them in the 5000
K as well and these are essentially 4-foot LED tubes thirty-eight watts for
a 100 watt equivalent and they are plug-in linkable you can daisy chain
them two bulbs per fixture with a CRI of 84 although it says 82 on the box it
said 84 on the website so last but not least probably one of
the more important decisions is how many light fixtures will you need to let your
shop and this is where lumens come in the lumen output of the fixture is how
bright the light will be so the more lumens you have in your space the
brighter the room will seem the recommendations that I found start at 70
lumens per square foot for a mechanic's or woodworking shop and range anywhere
up to a hundred lumens per square foot and I think that's assuming an 8-foot
ceiling height I got a 4-pack of these lights that are
4000 lumens per fixture which gives me a total of 16,000 lumens
given that I have 192 square feet that works out to 83 lumens per square foot
which is right in that range between 70 and 100 lumens so I'm gonna start with
that see how that works out and worst case I can always add a fixture to down
the road I'm going to use the existing wiring that's already in place for my
lighting installation the wiring for my lighting hasn't been upgraded it's old
cloth wiring which only has two wires with no ground wire since there's no
ground I don't want to use a regular three prong outlet since there's a risk
someone might plug something in there that requires a ground and that could be
dangerous there are two options when you only have two wires you can either
install a GFCI outlet or install a two prong outlet I decided to try and do as
much as I could that didn't involve electricity like installing the new
outlet box and hanging the lights and hold off as long as I could before
switching off the breaker so I could have some light to work with in order to
figure out where I would position each of the light fixtures I started out by
making a sketch of my shops ceiling including all the potential obstacles as
you can see here these little light brown lines are actually wood studs in
the ceiling the rest of my ceiling is a concrete ceiling I also have a steel
i-beam a heater my garage door and there are also some concrete columns
throughout the shop so once I have that layout I did a bit of research looking
for something as close to a formula as I could find and I did come across one
and this is an article that's from wood magazine and I'll link that up below if
you're interested but essentially there is a formula and it goes something like
this you'll need to figure out three
measurements which are ABC and to do this you need the dimensions of your
shop length width and also the ceiling height and you'll need the height of
your main work surfaces so in my case table saw and workbench are about 34
inches off the ground and my ceiling height is 99 inches so therefore you do
a equals 99 minus 34 which gives you 65 inches or 5 foot 5 inches so that's the
distance between your fixtures and your work surfaces then you can figure out B
and this will be the distance between each of the light fixtures and it should
be ideally the same as a 4 up to 1.5 times a so given that a was 5 foot 5
inches B should be no more than 8 feet so anywhere from five and a half to 8
feet obviously closer together together is better but you can go a little bigger
if you need to the last measurement is C which is the distance between a fixture
and the wall and this should be no more than one-third to one-half of B I
decided to go with B being 6 feet which is close together as far as the formula
goes which is good in my opinion so with the B of 6 feet C should be 2 to 3 feet
so no more than 3 feet from any wall and these formulas just for your information
assumes that your footing all the light fixtures end-to-end so anytime you have
a row if you have one row tooth rows or whatever the light fixture should be
end-to-end I'm actually not going to do that
because then she seems a little insane in terms of number of lights I would
need so I'm gonna try and space them out a little more but just so you know
that's what the formula assumes here all right so that being said this was what I
thought of for layout of the shop lights you can see the four lights here the 4
foot tube lights represented by the yellow squares and
how I came up with that basically like I said B would be six feet apart and then
given the dimension of my shops that mean that means it would be nor than
three feet from the wall which is perfect and then in terms of spacing I
decided to give a little more space on the left there because I have these wood
racks over here and I don't really care to light those up that's not really
important so I decided to sacrifice that and a little bit to favor the other end
and how I decided here on this one foot nine is I actually decided that closest
I can put it with my garage door open and hang it off the ceiling it would be
about one foot nine from this other wall so that's how I figured that out I just
wanted to put it as close as I could to the right side there and that left me
with two foot nine inches between those fixtures so it's almost evenly spaced
out if you did that's what I would recommend try and space them out no more
than two to three feet although the formula does recommend that
you stick them end to end so that's what I'm going to try see if this works out
nicely and if it doesn't then I can always move stuff around and adjust as I
go
installing the lights is actually pretty simple
you can either flush mount them or hang them off some wires and both those
options they provide the hardware that you need in the kit I chose to flush
mount most of them just because I didn't want them hanging off the ceiling and
getting in the way and potentially knocking them with you know a piece of
lumber or something that I'm moving around so I just a flush mount most of
my fixtures it's just a couple of screws and the hardest part was actually
getting in those two tiny screws on the other side of my shop braf concrete
ceilings I had to use my hammer drill to make some holes and what I did is I
attached a block of wood to the ceiling and then I was able to hang it off of
those blocks of wood and I chose to hang these ones a little lower because I
didn't want to get any shadows from my garage door railing there I thought I
might get shadows in my workbench area there against the wall and I wanted to
avoid that so by hanging it here I was able to get it close to the rails and
the garage door and no shadows all right so I have the fixture to the right of
the garage door installed and now I'm going to go do the one on the left side
here but after giving you all that theory about the ideal positioning of
the light fixtures and how I would hang it from here as close to position as I
could I'm actually not going to do that I'm going to do something completely
different and the reason for that is that I have a new addition to the shop
yes I've upgraded my table saw and it's big I went all in here and I got the
mother of all table saws at least as far as I'm concerned I got myself a SawStop
professional 1.75 HP 36 inch table with the T-glide fence and the ICS
mobile base and I'm super excited I haven't even used it yet but it's all
set up and I can't wait to try it out and yes it probably costs you know what
it was an investment and I've been playing this for a long time and it
probably costs more than I spent on all my tools combined but you know what I
think given the technology that it has to detect skin and stop the blade
in case of an accident I think that's worth the investment at least it is to
me so that being said new table saw in this position is probably where it's
going to sit in the shop so instead of having a light up here on the side that
might create a shadow I think I want to have it positioned above the saw and
kind of parallel to this edge here so that I don't get any shadows so I'll
probably have position it right up here somewhere
kind of in front to the front side of the table and yeah so I'm going to try
that
so after temporarily plugging in the light fixtures and checking out the
lighting and seeing that I liked everything and it was set up well I
turned off the breaker and then I cut the wire this is was the original wire
that was feeding into my lights so I reused the same wire to feed into my new
outlet box and then I simply wired the socket using the white wire to go to the
silver screw and the black wire to the brass screw and then tucked everything
in closed up the box and simply plugged in the fixtures so this is the lighting
at night I wanted to do this at night to take the Sun out of the equation and
this is what the original lighting I had in the garage which was the four LED
bulbs above the workbench all right and this is the new configuration the four
LED tube lights 16,000 lumens and all spaced out
I'm not sure if I made the right decision going with a 4,000 K maybe I
sort of went with the 5,000 K it's a little yellowish but when I look at the
work surfaces it seems like I'm getting some good lighting and spread evenly
across which is a lot better than what I had before all right this is from the
other end of the shop and this is the new lighting configuration and this was
the old lighting configuration
and this is with all of the lights on the both the new and the old and now
it's super bright so maybe I can just keep both of them what do you think it's
pretty bright in here maybe I need some sunglasses so that's it for this shop
upgrade video I hope you liked it hope you learn something useful that you'll
be able to apply when you upgrade the lighting in your workshop until next
time see you soon thanks for watching what a dirty cat where have you been