One of the nicest things about living in a house (as opposed to an apartment or condo) is having a good-sized garage. Since I prefer to do most of my own vehicle maintenance I need a place that's out of the sun and rain, offers a little more warmth in the winter, and ideally even has some good music to keep things moving along. I'm fortunate to have all these things in my current accommodations.
When getting down to real work, there's another very important thing a garage needs to provide: Good lighting. It's hard enough to work on my own vehicles and I don't need it to be made more difficult by not being able to see the task at hand. My garage came with two eight-foot, twin-tube fluorescent lights to light up the main floor and a single four-foot, twin-tube fluorescent light over the workbench.
These worked quite well over the summer as I settled in, but in the past couple of months the lights started intermittently going out. First the workbench light went out. I figured it was just a matter of replacing some tired bulbs, but while removing the first bulb one of the plastic terminals snapped from old age and a sticky prong. Drat! Off to Home Depot, where I found a nice replacement that included a mirrored reflector and used T8 bulbs instead of T12s.
T8? What's a T8 bulb? Let me share some fluorescent facts with you. The "T" value is the diameter of the tube in eighths of an inch, so a T8 bulb is one inch in diameter. Most older fluorescent lights use T12 (1.5" diameter) bulbs. The smaller the diameter the more efficient the bulb can be, producing more lumens per watt. The T8 bulbs have another advantage as well: They can produce light in much cooler temperatures. The old T12s have a hard time lighting up below 50 degrees (F), which is why you may see them flicker in cooler temperatures until they warm up. The T8s can start all the way down at zero degrees.
The replacement fixture also uses an electronic ballast, as opposed to the old magnetic ballast, so the lights turn on instantly, to full brightness, just like an incandescent lamp. No more waiting several seconds for the bulbs to flicker and come to life. (It's a nice effect in scary movies, but annoying as heck in everyday life.) The electronic ballasts are also silent, so there's no low hum when the lights are on, either. Since I got to buy new bulbs to go along with the new fixture, I chose ones that produce light with a color temperature of 5,000K.
5,000K? "K", or Kelvins, is a measure of the pure colors that combine together to produce the "white" light. The higher the number the colder, or more blue the light appears; lower numbers produce warmer, more yellow light. (Yes, it's a counter-intuitive.) 5,000K is a little on the cool side, but it is pretty close to natural sunlight at mid-day and it's what I calibrate my computer monitors for, too.
After learning all these fun fluorescent facts and replacing the workbench light I thought I'd be done, but no. As the days started getting cooler the big lights started flickering and, eventually, going completely out. Again I hoped it was just tired bulbs, and this time I was at least half-right: One of the fixtures simply needed new bulbs, but the ballast on the other light was shot. It wasn't terribly surprising since it proudly proclaimed technology copyrights from the 1950's on its yellowed label.
I could have simply replaced just the ballast, but the old fixture didn't have any sort of reflector and I really like the efficiency and performance of the new T8 bulbs, so I decided to replace the entire fixture. It's pretty hard to find eight-foot long T8 bulbs, so I went with a pair of four-foot fixtures with twin bulbs that can be mounted together in a row (four bulbs total). The old T12 fixture without a reflector shoots 9,300 lumens any which way they want to go, but the new T8 fixtures with a reflector direct 11,400 lumens down at the floor and along the walls in a pleasing pattern, making it a real joy to work underneath them.
The job was pretty straight-forward and now I have plenty of instant-on, 5,000K light in the garage to get me through the winter. Now let's just hope that I'm working in there on fun things, not fixing broken stuff!
Fluorescent bulbs? Are you going green on me?
Just kidding. Informative stuff, here!
Posted by: Curt Schimmels | 2008.12.03 at 05:45 PM