Workshop Lighting

[DIY Stew]

I really need to upgrade my lighting in the workshop (its a standard sized garage attached to the house), but I have no idea what to use. #-o

There is no natural light and I have good access above.

Cheers

Stew

 

[fluffflinger]

Try these with a daylight tube in them. This is what I have and I can't fault them, cheap to buy, cheap to run and with the daylight tube they are perfect for the workshop, I like the fact they enclosed so easier to clean and tubes are protected. I have five in 5mx4m space and they are spot on.


http://www.qvsdirect.com/2-x-49W-5ft-T5-Non-Corrosion-Fluorescent-Fitting-IP65-pr-24930.html

 

[Digit]

Thanks for that Richard, I had seen that advert and was thinking of replacing my current aged ones with them.

Roy.

 

[fluffflinger]

Roy

No problem, can't remember who I should thank on here for pointing them out in the first instance. When I got these but they were the best I could find for the money. Trust me daylight tubes are the business, got mine from here;

http://www.lampshoponline.com/f49w-49w-t5-high-output-triphosphor-fluorescent-tube-1449mm-daylight/

 

[Digit]

What I like about the electronic start is the quick start and no flicker.

Roy.

 

[DIY Stew]

Richard

Thanks for that, time to get the credit cards out.

Stew

 

[Eric The Viking]

I use daylight tubes myself ("Northlight"), for colour matching purposes, but unless they've improved a lot in the last 20 years*, they do tend to be low output compared to more common fluorescents such as Pluslux. The reason is that phosphorescent discharge tubes tend to have sharp spectral lines, which is why technically you cannot give them a colour temperature. To get a good approximation to daylight the manufacturers have to mix a lot of phosphors together, and the overall output is lower in consequence.

The ones intended for high output are a lot better (3x or more in some cases), with the disadvantage that they're useless for colour matching.

So if you can get a high-output daylight tube, go for it, but if colour matching isn't very important, you'll get better illumination with a high output tube instead.

One final point: it may be obvious, but tubes emit light sideways. To get best illumination, if your workshop has a rectangular floor plan, align the tubes across the long axis, not along it. Also, painting the ceiling or rafters white will also pay dividends, even if the tubes have reflectors above them.

Cheers,

E.

*the last time I went into all this!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

:idea: Don't forget that if you have lathes etc. it pays to have to have normal incandescent lamps as well- otherwise your machine can appear stationary when the speed of the machine is in direct proportion to the cycles of the electricity-- remember seeing wagon wheels in cowboy films speed up, slow down, run backwards, appear static? It's the same affect, only in film it's caused by the ratio of speed of the wheel to the number of frames per second of the film.

 

[Eric The Viking]

That's certainly true with the old fashioned ballast designs, that work at 100Hz. Most old tube holders are like that.

The new fluorescent stuff, so-called 'energy-savig' lamps, have ballast systems that work at tens of kHz. The effect is that they don't strobe significantly. The lamp still switches thousands of times a second, but the 'persistence' of the phosphor coating means you don't get pulses of light.

I used to think they strobed, but I've never seen it in practice. There effect with rotating machinery was one of the big objections to their introduction, but that's all gone quiet now. I just searched quickly on YouTube - nothing there. There are other reasons to hate them (they're not at all 'green' really), but as an opponent of the forced switchover from incandescent, I have to admit they don't strobe as far as I can tell.

The old ones do though, badly, so much so that the HSE would be asking questions if fluorescents were the only source of illumination over rotating machine tools.

HTH,

E.