[kelvancra]

I've been replacing my four footers with four foot LED's Costco is selling. I will not be going back.

Of course, the LED's don't care about the temperature, so that will be a plus for many.

If you need task lighting, check out lightingwill.com. I've bought from them several times for house lighting bars (e.g., 20" aluminum strips with 45 LED's for ten bucks) and have been happy with the results. You order do get here by slow boat from China, however, so plan on up to a month for the product to arrive. However, it arrived working and well packaged.

All my shop tools, like the drill press, band saw and grinders now have sixty watt equiv. screw in LED's.

 

[kelvancra]

What we're all looking for is lumen output. LED's get us there just as good as florescents.

I installed two three way circuits. The thousand foot portion of the shop I do most my work in has about fourteen four footers. It's good enough to go, by a mile. However, I plan on adding about seven more and I shouldn't have shadow anywhere.

That should be somewhere in the ball park of seventy-five thousand lumens at about eight hundred forty watts.

The other eight hundred square feet is storage and I find four or five four footers toss enough light for those purposes.

 

[kelvancra]

Finding PAR references on lighting is, probably, not quite as easy as finding "3 HP" on a Craftsman hand power tool. In fact, I wouldn't even know one if I hit it on the golf course [a few hundred feet from my house]. Lumens, on the other hand, they's about as common as that "3 HP" thing.

I'm sure they'll do another terminology shift, after word gets out and if it's an improvement in establishing light levels under my counter.

 

[kelvancra]

You'd be mistaken. They will work just fine. Compare light output of the LED's to the florescent you'd use. Better yet, invest sixty bucks in a couple for a work area and get some first hand experience.

I have eight foot ceilings and wished I could get a couple more feet for better dispersion of the lights I have.

I would like to upgrade to LED, but my shop is 1200 sf with a 10 ceiling.I don t think I could get enough light from LED s.

- MrRon

 

[kelvancra]

Like Onhillww, I've experienced the advantage of spreading the light over an area and was very pleased with the result.

I bought ten 20" long light bars for ten bucks each from lightingwill.com and installed them under my kitchen cabinets. I had wired for halogens so I had to dim them through a magnetic transformer (120VAC dimmer), rather than the usual means of dimming off a 12V dimmer. They work so well, we rarely turn on the overhead lights, other than the task lights at the stove and the sink.

With the bars, there are not bright and dim spots, like we would have had with the halogens. Of course, there is the heat issue too. Finally, though power is REALLY cheap in Eastern Washington (e.g., literally three dams next door) running halogens hours a day would have spun the meter. As it is, the entire counter is lit off only a few watts.

All these things said, for my shop, I want the maximum blast of light I can, reasonably, get. It would take a lot of bars to give me what the four foot shop lights provide.

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NOTE: LED's offer no significant, if any, power reduction compared to florescents.