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Your garage, like any other utility room in your house, deserves good lighting. The type or types of fixtures you choose will largely depend on how and how often you use your garage.
Lighting from incandescent bulbs is more than sufficient if your garage is only used to house your cars and store infrequently used items. Incandescents come on immediately, use very little energy with infrequent use, and will not flicker like some cheap fluorescents no matter how cold the temperature.
However, if you have set up your garage as a workshop or other kind of activity center, high-quality fluorescents are your best bet. For several reasons, fixtures with T8 tubes (T stands for “tubular” and the number refers to how many eighths of an inch are in the diameter—in the case of a T8,1 inch) and electronic ballasts are worth the extra expense over a standard fixture that holds T12 bulbs and has magnetic ballasts.
The T8 sheds about the same amount of light as a T12 but is 32 percent more energy efficient.
Colors under T8s look closer to the real thing.
T8s with electronic ballasts keep the bulbs from flickering and humming down to degrees as low as 0 degrees F. This is in stark contrast to T12s, which fail to operate correctly below 60 degrees F.
Most T8s come with rapid-start ballasts as opposed to instant-start ballasts, which tend to burn bulbs out prematurely when lights are frequently turned off and on.
When purchasing fixtures, look for ones that take 4-foot tubes. They are not only less expensive and easier to handle but also last longer and save more energy than 8-foot tubes. When installing the fixtures, placing one every 4 feet will provide more even illumination than placing two every 8 feet.
Once you have decided on a fixture or fixtures, you need to choose the bulbs. The two qualities to consider are the ambience factor and the color rendering quotient.
The ambience factor—whether the light shed from a bulb or tube appears warm or cool—is determined by its color temperature, measured in degrees on the Kelvin scale. The higher the degree, the cooler the light. If your garage is used for little more than housing cars, neutral light (3500K) is perfectly acceptable. However, if your garage is used as any sort of entertainment area, you probably would do better with warm light (3000K). Cool light (4100K) works better for an office or an activity that is detail oriented. Look for color temperature ratings on the packaging.
The color rendering quotient—how “true” colors appear under a certain light—is expressed as a bulb or tube’s CRI—color rendition index. On a scale of 0 to 100, most people find that colors look true at 85 and above, with 100 representing how a color looks in natural sunlight. T8s score right at 85 (T12s rank in the 60s), and the only lightbulbs that reach 100 are halogen incandescents. A high CRI rating is most desirable if you are trying to match a wood stain, for instance, or if you use your garage as an artist’s atelier.
