Illuminating - Garage Lights
This post is something of a crossover of our daily photo galleries and the Stuff We Use segment on the TTAC podcast. A spate of wrenching this week, during a time of year in which the sun sets at an alarmingly early time, allowed this author a better appreciation of affordable garage lighting available to the average gearhead.
[Images: Author, Barrina Lighting]
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The scourge of so-called high efficiency lighting seems to be largely in the past, with infernal compact fluorescent bulbs finally falling out of favor in many parts of the country. Their limited ability to ‘warm up’ in a timely fashion left a lot of DIYers fumbling in the dark. Modern LEDs serve up a much better solution.
Our continued recommendation of Barrina lights – no paid ads here, by the way; just appreciation of a great product. Available through sites like eBay for an increasingly waning sum of about $65 USD, a six-pack of four-foot lights are just the trick to shed light into a 24x24 attached garage. Other quantities and lengths are available if you are so inclined.
The set shown here provides each 4-foot LED light bar with its own choice of power supply: an individual clicker switch with which to plug directly into a household socket, a properly stripped connection to wire into a building’s electrical, or a proprietary cord to daisy chain the LED bars together and form one big circuit. Installation is dead easy with each bar weighing just a few ounces.
One does not need to put all six in the same location, though that was the solution which worked in this example. A caveat worth mentioning is, as the lights age, they have started to dislike being immediately put into service at winter temperatures which often plumb the depths of -20 degrees. In other words, they take four or five seconds to flick on when it’s cold.
