Sawdust on the Floor

Your Workshop Lighting

No matter how big or small, if you have a space in the basement,garage, or a separate building that you call your woodworking shop, there is one very practical thing to take into consideration; shop lighting.

The ideal shop would have 100 % natural lighting, and we all know that isn’t practical.. so what are our options, and what is recommended. If you had an unlimited budget, and were building your ideal shop from scratch, you would naturally have lots of southern facing windows, and a lot of sky lights. Nice dream. Maybe some day after I win the lottery! So let’s get back to reality.

Most of us ending up going to the local hardware store and purchase a lot of the 48” florescent fixtures and hang them around our shop. Why? Well for a start, they’re cheap, and then there is the fact that they’re basically plug and play. Open the box, put a couple of eye hooks in the ceiling, hang them from the supplied chains and you get instant lights. Seems like a good idea, right? Well not really. Most of the florescent lights sold at the big box stores use what’s known as a T12 bulb and Ballast. The T12 bulbs have several negative features, namely there is a lot of flicker from the bulb, the color from the bulb is not true, and they don’t work real well at colder temperatures

The amount of flicker can create a real safety hazard in any shop. Under the right conditions, the flickering from a florescent fixture can make a turning saw blade appear to be stopped. This is a strobe effect, same concept as the old timing lights used to tune cars. If the frequency of the flicker and saw blade RPM are close, the blade appears to be stopped. A VERY dangerous condition in a noisy shop, where you don’t hear the saw running and you may touch a spinning blade thinking it was stopped.

Are all florescent fixtures bad? No. Just those with the T12 bulb. The T8 florescent bulb is recommended by many of the pundits. The only other bulb consistently recommended is the Metal Halide Bulb. Both have their correct applications, and there is some disagreement between the experts about the merits of both.

The T8 bulb is recommend for most applications that have less then a 14’ ceiling. Metal Halide seems to be the choice for those us lucky enough to have a greater than 14’ ceiling. The great feature of the T8 Bulb is that it has a CRI of 85%. CRI is the color rendering index, where a CRI of 100% would be natural light. And the operating cost of the T8 is less then the T12 Bulbs. If you have a lot of the T12 in your shop, you can get replacement ballasts and bulbs to upgrade your existing lights.

Metal Halide ( MH) fixtures have a higher initial cost, but reportedly, you don’t need as many of these as you would the T8’s. The operating costs are reported to be less then the T8’s. The CRI for the MH is 65-70%.

The one thing all of the pundits agree on is that everything from the ceiling down should be painted white. There is no real disagreement on this. So if possible, give everything a nice coat of white paint and brighten up your work space.