Led shop lights

I have all 8" fluorescent lights in my shop. A few have quit working and I am not going to buy new ballasts. Who makes good Led shop lights? There must be 100 companies you never heard of selling them online. I suppose they are all made in China so that may not be a deal killer. I have 10' ceilings. Some are open and some are finished. Will I need more or fewer fixtures? Does the light from LEDs spread as much as fluorescent or are they more directional and require more fixtures?
Any lighting experts on here? Thanks for any advice or anecdotal experience you guys may have.

So I found the led replacement bulbs instead.
went to home depot and found some with a good warranty that way I could take them back.
some wire with or without the ballast. good or bad I don't think it matters.
I got the kind that will work either way, and if it is dead, I just need to rewire at some point.
don't know how many lights you have or if that is more cost effective than buying new fixtures.

I am pretty sure mine are GE bulbs.

Thanks I'll check that out. Its possible that some of my fixtures may not work with those. Some of them have the bulbs with one big pin on each end and some have the more typical 2 pins on each end.

I bought mine off Amazon ( I also had 8' Commercial HO fluorescents). I stripped the fixtures and kept the reflectors only. Mounted the the single strip LED (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081JPK9MC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1) and mounted them to the ceiling using only the reflectors. Been up 2 years thus far and they have been great. (crossing my fingers that they last). Oh...and my ceilings are 16'. Light dispersion is great. In the back half of my barn (40x40 area) I installed two (2) of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07V9HC5SD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1. The throw an unbelievable amount of light.

If I were redoing my shop lighting I'd install a sh!tload of these - possibly some in the walls about a foot off the floor !! I've used these in 4 house renos now and they're awesome and dirt cheap and because of the low current draw you can literally install 50 on a circuit and still meet code. Also, they come with their own junction box so no need for the rectangular units. Available in 4" (which I used) and 6". I bought mine off Amazon for under $10. each Oh, and since they fit flush there's no chance of hitting them with anything !

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Lithoni...-WF4-LED-27K30K35K-90CRI-MW-M6/308905674

LEDs have much better coverage.

There are Made in the USA LED manufacturers. But, you can’t expect Harbor Freight pricing.

I too have been updating my lighting. I bought three of these 3-4 years ago and they are working great.



https://ledshoplights.com/ledshoplights/linkable/linkable.

https://ledshoplights.com/index.html

Man! I'm looking at some of these lights and thinking "Those are expensive!"

At my local Menards I've been buying off the shelf 4' LED "shop" lights when they are on sale for around $15 each, those are the cheap ones and some are over 4 years old now. They come with a cord and on/off pull switch, and a female receiver plug on the other end from the cord so you can plug up to 6 units into the same outlet. Some of mine are wired through the wall switch (using the wiring from the fluorescent fixtures the LEDs replaced), and some I turn on as needed with the pull chain. You get the hanging chain kit as well. I've been replacing each 8' florescent fixture with one 4' LED each time I can pick one or two units up. The stock varies, sometimes there are not many there, other times the rack is full. I suspect the more expensive LED fixtures may be better, but the cheap ones have been working well for me.

You want to watch how many lumens the light puts off, 3,000 -5,000 Lumens is brighter then any 8' florescent ever thought of being and work extremely good with my 8' ceiling in my garage. For comparison, the guy at Menards told me a 1000 lumens LED daylight bulb is about equal to a 100 watt daylight bulb, and the brightest florescent fixture I've seen was 1750 lumens. I can't imagine how bright a 20,000 lumens LED light would be. Gene

I bought some LED replacement tubes at Costco a while back and popped them in the existing fixtures in my attached garage, BIG improvement. I need to do the same in the unattached garage if I ever decide to go back to work in there, but that is an entirely different issue.

a few years back, i replaced all my 4 & 8 foot florescent fixtures with cheapo e-bag units.
what a HUGE difference ! brighter than daylight, and instant on in the dead of winter cold.
i think they were 5000k units, and i bought 12 pack multiples.
i installed them in the stripped florescent tins, and the light distribution is great !
i can actually see my mistakes before i make them now !

I second the cheep ones from menards. Mine are 10 years old. Have 13 and 1 went bad early took it back and free replacement.

So these would help me see in my garage

https://www.menards.com/main/lighti...-light/z-20000tpl/p-6698461259726176.htm

At 20K lumens they would really light up your garage for sure.
At $45, those are the more fancy ones then my cheap butt bought, but mine are not 20K lumens either.

I'd buy a couple and see if you like them. After you see the light, you will be back for more, but probably not as many as you thought you were going to need.

They're closing these out and if you're lucky enough to be at your store you'll be impressed.

https://www.menards.com/main/lighti...p-light/z-4000tpl/p-4221069729983703.htm or https://www.menards.com/main/lighti...d-shop-light/0050-2004/p-60298259625.htm, https://www.menards.com/main/lighti...shop-light/cl-sl5k-st/p-105478307020.htm

Smart electrician is the brand I have. Just check your local Menards online and select in stock to see whats available I think I got mine for around $10.

I’ve used a bunch of led bulbs and fixtures made by sunpro that I find on Amazon. No issues and I avoid the circus that is an in person store trip. The shop lights are awesome and you simply plug in the next one as needed and save from running new outlets. One of the builds in the project section showed the 4x8 fixtures in action for his garage build. Look in the modern bullitt thread for that.

I ordered 4 from Menards yesterday and they have been shipped already. If they do what I hope they will then i'll probably order more. They are a good deal even with paying for shipping.

Here's another option that I used for my garage. Instead of LED fixtures that are sealed and can't be repaired, I bought these fixtures and added LED bulbs. Whenever a bulb fails, I replace just the bulb, not the entire fixture.

https://intelligentlightingtech.com/

Here are pictures of my garage addition with these fixtures and LED bulbs:

I had to switch out lights in my shop recently and went with LED shop lights. They save energy and give off better light than the old fluorescent ones. When picking them, I looked more at how bright they were and how much power they used, not so much the brand.

LED lights shine more in one direction, so you might need to plan differently to light up the whole place. How many lights you need depends on how bright you want your shop.

I also learned about fixing fluorescent lights. I found this site, leds.to, that had lots of info on how to set them up and keep them working well. It talked about all the parts, like tubes and starters, and how to stay safe while working with them. This helped me understand my shop's lights better.

This thread was a couple of years old so a lot of things have changed since then. I had 8 ft lights in my old shop and bulbs kept getting harder and harder to find. The new shop that I'm renting has 4 ft LED shop lights. I'm in the process of building out some storage space under my house and I'm using 4 ft LED shop lights from Costco. The ones from Costco are about $30 each, fully enclosed with a cord and 8000 lumens. A handful of them really light up a storage space.

I love how you can put them in under a ceiling joist if needed.

Anyone else notice these LED bulbs are noisy.
I got some 48" LED bulbs off Amazon, bypassed ballast, and they are nice and bright.
But, I noticed they are causing issues with my radio in the garage.
This never happened with old fluorescent bulbs.
Exact same FM station is now impossible to hear because of static, turn off light, sounds fine.

I have a MyQ garage door opener and had to move it away from the LED lights a bit to get it to not have issues. Forgot exactly what it was doing or not doing, but moved it a few feet away and fixed the issue.

When I'm ready to buy lights for my new garage, I'm going to buy from these guys. https://www.omniraylighting.com/ They are the same lights you can get through E-bay or Amazon but Omni-Ray changes out the Chinese driver with one of their own. They claim no radio frequency interference.

years ago when i got and installed my LED's, i never had any interference with the radio.
lights are still going strong today, as is the radio.

I need ro switch mine over. I have sixteen T12 8' bulbs and four 4' bulbs in my garage. I can see my meter spinning like 3 times as fast when I am out there with everything on.

I've been working out of my 24 x 30 garage for 22 years now. I started with four 8' florescent lights, all set up to be turned on or off as needed. As those wore out, each of the 8' lights were replaced with two 4' florescent, those replacement 4' lights were spread out a bit more, to put the light to where it was most useful and I also added a couple extra 4' lights .even the 4' florescent lights were better then the 8', but there were now 40' of lighting instead of 32' of lighting. Those 4' lights are also set up to be turned on or off individually. Yes, much of the time nearly all were turned on most of the time, but I still liked that option. A few years ago I started replacing those 4' florescent with 4' LED fixtures. At this point I have replaced the 4 primarily used florescent lights with the LED lights. Those LED lights are also the round tube lights and do not appear to be the individual LEDs like a lot of the newer ones are. Just updating those 4 LED lights was a huge improvement. I have since retired, the odds are most of the remaining florescent will remain until they no longer function. There is still a very distinct difference between the LED lighting and the non-LED lighting. The LED is much brighter. The LEDs do not interfere with my radio, but I think they help the far away radio station I like to listen to come in a little better.

I do have an LED plug in trouble light that does mess with the radio if it plugged into the same circuit as the radio is plugged into.