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Let there be LIGHT!

I have been yearning for a while for better light in my shop.  When I set it up, I installed five recessed "pot" lights in the ceiling, spaced above the workbench.  They work well over that space, but the rest of the garage was lacking so I installed a couple of dual-tube, four foot long, florescent shop fixtures in each bay and that gave me what I thought was pretty good light, but I always wanted more, especially right on the bench where I would get a few shadows on the surface and it was kind-of dark when crawling around under the cars.  On top of that, Florescent lights are kind-of useless under 30F because they start slow at less than half their brilliance until they warm up (if ever, if it's cold enough out).   I wanted more.

Yesterday, I went to a local outlet place that deals in selling overstocks and so forth, and they had 4' dual-tube, LED shop lights, 4700 Lumens and 5000K Hue (bright daylight) for the measly sum of $15 bucks each!  Stunned....STUNNED, I was!

So I bought 8 of them, replaced the 4 florescent fixtures already up on the ceiling, added two more in the middle up there and then put two more under the upper bench cabinets, washing the bench surface.

WOW!        That's one Helluva Lotta Light!  

Here's the shop with just natural light from the windows (it seems darker in there than it looks in the photo):

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And here's the same space with the new lights on:

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Here is my bench top before the bench lights were installed under the upper cabinets, showing the shadows from the overhead floods:

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And the same bench with the new bench lighting on - NO SHADOWS!!:

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I LOVE this new lighting, plus I got a 10% discount for spending over $100 so it all came to just over $100 bucks for a MAJOR lighting upgrade.

On top of that, the LED lights come on instantly regardless of the temperature.  Gotta love THAT!

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