Finally getting to the electrical finish on the home/garage I'm building for myself. I was going to use the 4 bulb T5's from Home Depot, but after pricing them out with bulbs it was evident it was going to be very expensive. So I got online and started poking around.

Got with Kyle at ProLighting, sent him a diagram of the garage and where I had pre wired. Essentially TWO 24x30 bays, with a total of 12 fixtures prewired. He suggested using these less expensive 2 bulb units and recommend bulbs...

2-lamp 48" strip fixture and 5000K lamps.


Fixture: http://www.prolighting.com/t442t51mrhp0000.html
Lamps: http://www.prolighting.com/f54t5-ho-850.html

The pricing allowed me to do BOTH garages and man am I glad I did!! It's like daylight in there. The reflectors on these are extremely nice and make a huge difference in output. 4 bulb, at least with these reflectors would have been almost unbearable to work under.

A good tip from a previous build job customer we built for, if you're building or have the opportunity to prewire...put the switch or switches for the T5 units away from the garage/house entry door. And put some general/daily lighting on separate switch. That way the kids, wife, etc. aren't torching your lights when coming and going...or leaving them on. In our case I installed a few can lights for coming and going and switched the two garage T5's each separately.

I'll post some pics as the job progresses. Garage is full of trash and the tile/flooring guys are set up in there...which btw are enjoying the good work light!