Stuff We Use: Garage Lighting Solutions

On our never-ending quest to improve this place by listening to feedback from the B&B, we are taking a new tack with these product posts, choosing instead to focus on items we have actually used or purchased with our own meagre income. After all, if we’re giving you the truth about cars, we ought to give you the truth about car accessories.

Wrenching on one’s own car is a delight to some, a necessary evil to others. Most gearheads fall into the former category – except for that time a snapped bolt turned an hour’s job into a three-day ordeal – meaning the majority of eyeballs on this website could stand to increase the amount of illumination in their workspace.

It matters not if that space is covered, enclosed, or tucked in the corner of a moldering basement. Extra lighting helps. The scourge of so-called high efficiency lighting seems to be largely in the past, with those infernal compact fluorescent bulbs finally falling out of favor in many parts of the country. Their limited ability to ‘warm up’ in a timely fashion has left this author fumbling in the dark more often than he fumbled in the backseat of his weathered Ford hatchback as a teenager.

There seems to be no shortage of LED strips on offer these days, a phenomenon which has only exploded since we last examined this garage accessory. That makes our continued recommendation of Barrina lights – no paid ads here, by the way; just appreciation of a great product. Available through sites like eBay for an increasingly waning sum (about $65 USD, these days), a six-pack of four-foot lights are just the trick to shed light into every cranny of my 24x24 attached garage. Other quantities and lengths are available if yer so inclined. 

The set linked here, which is identical to the one selected by this author, provided each 4-foot LED light bar with its own choice of power supply: an individual clicker switch with which to plug directly into a household socket, a properly stripped connection to wire into a building’s electrical, or a proprietary cord to daisy chain the LED bars together and form one big circuit. That’s what is deployed in my space, with each bar arranged to form a rectangle on the ceiling, 

Installation was dead easy with each bar weighing just a few ounces. Two mounting clips on the end of each bar secures the thing to a chosen surface. All those connection choices and this freestyle mounting system permits a host of options, meaning a customer could put four of the six on their workspace ceiling, then place the remaining pair near a bench or other station. One does not need to put all six in the same location, though that was the solution which worked for me. A standard household plug on the ceiling, installed ages ago for an electric garage door opener, provides the juice in this instance.

Light coming from these LED strips is clear, bright, and illuminates the space better than the four standard bulbs ever could. They’ve been up there for well over a year and show no sign of movement or lessening their grip on the ceiling, marking this as one of the best sub-$100 purchases I’ve ever made for the garage. One caveat worth mentioning is, as the lights age, they have started to dislike immediately being put into service at winter temperatures which often plumb the depths of -20 degrees around these parts. In other words, they take four or five seconds to flick on when it’s cold, though their light output seems unaffected. We’ll keep an eye to it and report back if the behavior worsens this winter.

As planned, this series of posts will continue to focus on items we’ve actually used or bought with our own money. We hope you found this one helpful.

[Images: Manufacturer, Author]

Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.