And yet, most garages in Newport Beach tend to be poorly lit, making them difficult to navigate. Importantly, if you are using garage storage cabinets, good lighting becomes indispensable. Lack of ample lighting in a garage can leave you and your family vulnerable to falls and injuries, plus it can cause significant eye strain during DIY projects.
With strategically installed lighting, you can brighten up and illuminate your garage to boost its efficiency, visibility, and safety. Moreover, your garage storage system needs proper lighting anyway. If you don’t know what type of lighting to install in your garage, or where to even start, continue reading on.
Different Types of Garage Lighting Fixtures
When it comes to artificial lighting, there are 3 types: accent, task, and ambient. An ideally lit garage has all three of them.
Accent lighting is perfect to shine on showpieces – like your trophy collection – that you want to display in your garage. Task lighting is brighter than accent, and it’s designed for garage storage systems and workbenches to lend increased visibility during organizational tasks and work projects. Ambient lighting is quite soft and perfect to illuminate the walls and floors so you can safely park or walk around.
Why exactly do I need so many different varieties of lighting, you might ask? It’s all about layering the illumination. Since most homeowners in Laguna Beach use their garage for multiple purposes, it’s best to create layers of illumination so you’ll have the right light for your garage storage cabinets, handiwork, display, and parking.
By buying lighting fixtures in all 3 categories of lighting, you’ll cover all of your bases. Accent lighting fixtures include sconces that mount to walls and pendants that extend from the ceiling – which allow for easier nighttime entry when installed on either side of the garage door.
Task lighting fixtures include shop lights (4-8 foot-long adjustable strips that extend from the ceiling) and trouble/drop lights (light bulbs housed inside a metal cage and a hook you can hang and move as needed). Ambient lighting fixtures are usually a part of garage door openers with linear or round flush-mount lights that attach to the ceiling as well as built-in lights.
Make Sure the Fixtures Are Installed Right
When installing the different types of fixtures mentioned above, keep in mind their functionality. Accent lighting fixtures should be placed in a way that the light shines directly on the objects or details you want to showcase. For example, if you’ve got a decorative display in a garage storage cabinet, the pendant light should be positioned directly above it.
Task lighting should be cast down onto your custom garage cabinets for storage or work surface in a way that eliminates glare. At the very least, your shop lights should be mounted on the ceiling, so they hang a few inches behind where you sit or stand while working. This way, the light will reflect away from your rather than right into your eyes, blinding you.
As for ambient lighting, its light should be cast evenly across the entire garage floor. If you’re using multiple flush-mount fixtures, place them at an equal distance from each other on the ceiling. For your garage door opener with built-in lights, position it at the center of the ceiling.
Calculate Your Light Output Needs
According to the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) Lighting Handbook, an average residential garage needs 50 lumens (a measure of light output) per square foot. If you do some heavy-duty work in your sophisticated garage workshop, you may need as much as 300 lumens per sq. ft.
In addition to providing best in class custom garage cabinets, our Garage Excell technicians can also help you with lighting. We have installed garage lighting in many homes in Yorba Linda and surrounding areas over the last 13+ years. And in our experience, a good rule of thumb is to aim for 75 lumens/sq. ft. for accent lighting; 300 lumens/sq. ft. for task lighting; and 50 lumens/sq. ft. in areas that require ambient lighting.
If you have any questions or you need help understanding exactly how different types of lighting will work in your garage, don’t hesitate to give us a call.
LED is the Way
Raise your hand if you want to reduce your electric bills. Who doesn’t! So swap out the incandescent bulbs in your garage for energy-efficient fluorescent or LED bulbs that provide the same light output as incandescent bulbs – but at a really lower wattage.
A 14-Watt fluorescent bulb or a 10-Watt LED bulb can give you the same amount of illumination as a 60-Watt incandescent bulb! If you’re not using LED lighting in your home or in your garage, you are leaving a lot of money on the table – for your electric service provider.
Here’s a suggestion about the LED and fluorescent bulbs: make sure you choose LED or T5 or T8 fluorescent tubes. You can totally choose the regular pear-shaped LED or fluorescent bulbs, but tubes tend to cast light over the wider area which comes in handy in a garage. These tube-shaped bulbs come in several diameters:
- T12 (12/8”)
- T8 (8/8”)
- T5 (5/8”)
T12 bulbs are older so they are not as energy efficient as the newer T5 and T8 models. Also, the T5 and T8 tube bulbs are equipped with tiny transformers, i.e., electronic ballasts that reduce flickering in case the temperature in garage falls below 50 degrees or the bulbs get bumped.
Install Motion Sensors
We love motion sensors that are connected to garage lighting because they can reduce electricity consumption by automatically shutting off the lights after some time if they don’t detect any movement in the garage.
Make sure you buy a motion sensor that’s compatible with your light fixtures. You may need to call an electrician to wire the sensor to the lights, or you can do it yourself by running electrical cables from an electrical box to the sensor and then to the fixture.
Choose Fixtures with A High Color Rendering Index (CRI)
If you have a workshop in your Laguna Beach garage where you paint, make jewelry, or craft intricate wooden stuff, you’ll want to make sure that your garage lighting renders the color of whatever it is you’re working on as closely as possible.
So choose bulbs that have a CRI of 85 to 100. CRI quantifies how well a light fixture can appropriately depict the whole range of colors, at a scale between 0 and 100. Think of the CRI of 100 as the daylight at midday, i.e., the true colors of the object. At 0, all colors look the same.
Incorporate Natural Light
Yes, there are some really stupendously amazing lighting options in the market today, but nothing can ever beat the natural light you get in your Newport Beach garage to navigate the space or safely use your garage wall cabinets.
If you have the time to do a garage remodel project and you can afford it, consider installing a skylight or a window. First of all, natural light will help reduce your electric bills when you’re using the garage while the sun is shining down upon you.
Secondly, there’s just something about sunlight that brightens up a space and makes it warmer and cozier. It’s no wonder that countless studies have proven that exposure to natural light makes us happier, helps us to focus, and improves our sleep.
Contact Us to Beautify Your Yorba Linda Garage!
Need a hand with cleaning and organizing your garage? At Garage Excell, we are not only the leading custom garage cabinet maker in Orange County, but we also offer a number of garage enhancement services to transform the whole space. For any questions, feel free to call us at 877-573-6637 or contact us online.