Best LED Shop Lights: Options Simplified
You work great, but only whenever there is sufficient lighting for your garage to see what you are doing. You don’t have to be limited to the days when the sun is shining at its brightest. You can set up some of the LED lightings to help you work whenever you want to.
1. The LEONLITE LED Wraparound Garage Lighting
2. Sunco Lighting Industrial LED Shop Light
3. LLT LED Vapor Proof
Choosing those LED lights is where the challenge is as there are literally hundreds of different options. Well, it’s time to find out which of them is the best for you.
Best LED Shop Lights Comparison
What Is The Best LED Shop Lighting?
Everyone has absolutely varying desires when it comes to setting up their shop as they would want to. Some may need to have overhead lights, others may require brilliant yet soft lights, others may be looking at the most energy-efficient of them all.
The following garage lighting options have been curated to cover a variety of requirements that you or someone else may have in regards to building their garage, and are generally considered to be among the best garage lighting options to choose from.
1. The LEONLITE LED Wraparound Garage Lighting (Editor’s Pick)
As a space-saving option, this LEONLITE LED Wraparound light sits flush on the ceiling, giving you the task lighting appropriate for your work, and the headroom to allow you to move around without having to clash with the low hanging ceiling fixtures.
Another benefit of this 4 foot LED lighting option is the fact that it only sips 42 watts of power and yet provides 4400 lumens worth of light. Talk about having excellent lighting at a very economical price point. You may only spend $10 a year to keep these lights on but that is dependent on how many units you have, and how long you will be keeping them on.
This is the single biggest reason why these LED bulbs make it onto the list of best garage lighting options as the lumens per wattage ratio is quite affordable.
2. Sunco Lighting Industrial LED Shop Light (Runner Up)
How you build your workshop is entirely up to you and the way you want to style it. This, of course, will be greatly informed by the total area you have to work with. In some cases, you can have small areas that require lights that are flush or super thin light fixtures.
In others, you can have the space to replicate an industrial feel complete with a high bay. If the industrial feel is what you are going for, then the Sunco Lighting Industrial LED should be your first stop in the design.
Each LED tube are 4 foot long and generate 4000 lumens from only 40 watts of consumption. The LED lights are put behind a frosted cover to better diffuse light and to protect them from breakages while still providing cool color temperatures.
When put on a ceiling with a high bay, the fixture works great to provide excellent color temperature while seemingly melting into the surroundings.
3. LLT LED Vapor Proof (Value for Money)
The very nature of a garage means you will be getting work done inside. You could be the type to do your own finishing on wood products or the car, and so you have particles flying all over the place.
You could also be a spray painting enthusiast or you wash your car inside the garage. All of this means at one point or another, these particles or these sprays will make their way onto the light. This can either cause damage or get you to replace the light prematurely.
With the LLT LED vapor-proof light though, you don’t have to worry about such things. The light is safe behind an IP66 rated housing. This makes it dustproof and resistant to direct liquid spray. The light also comes in three different color temperature options, great for those who have different needs.
4. Zjojo Motion Activated Lights (Most Versatile)
If your work area is pitch black, you may have to go through some moments of stumbling in the dark to find the light switch. If you are adept with moving or adding an extension to the switch to an area you can reach, that would be beautiful.
That, though, would be a lot of work when you could just simple walk in and the light will come on and you can continue with your work. The Zjojo motion-activated lights do just that for you.
Forget about light switches and just concentrate on what brought you to the work area in the first place. The best part is, it comes in three adjustable panels. These panels can be individually rotated. You can choose to light up a large area all at once, or you can choose to concentrate all of the light in a single spot.
5. GE Basic Under Cabinet Fixture (Best for Workbench)
Your work area can be well lit in a manner that allows you to make repairs or weld things together. But what about when you need to put together small components that not only require a great deal of attention but also great lighting to enable you to see your work in detail?
That’s where this GE workbench light comes in. This is a beautiful and functional option to have right on top of your workbench area. It comes attached to an electrical cord that is five feet in length.
You can plug it straight into a mains outlet and get to work putting together the tiniest of components you can come across.
What Is The Brightest LED Shop Light?
Trying to search on Google for the answer to this question will lead you down a rabbit hole that will most likely leave you disappointed when you come out of the other end. There are many links on Google, and many videos on YouTube all claiming that the mentioned LED garage lights provide the brightest garage lighting.
They may be able to produce a brilliant white light, but the light fixture itself may not be up to the task in the long run. Fluorescent fixtures can last a long time, but LED lighting fixtures have been known to last more than 50,000 hours.
The word, bright, can mean a lot of things to many different people. While the LED light may be great for your needs, it may be inadequate for someone else who may require a different light fixture that has the color temperature that works for them, or one that makes your garage lighting look like a joke.
Determining what good garage lighting means to you, you have to look at what you want to achieve. Someone could be a part of a traveling company, like a Dakar Rally enthusiast, and needs garage lights that are easy to install and are super brilliant to help them while working in the dark.
The watts consumed may not matter. Some may require sufficiently bright light, with the right color temperature as their task is dependent on accuracy.
What To Consider When Shopping For LED Shop Lights
Getting an LED shop lighting fixture isn’t an easy matter of walking into a store and coming out with the one that interests you most, whether it be in terms of price or aesthetics. It also isn’t a matter of logging into your favorite eCommerce platform and picking the best rated one.
That best-rated fixture may be of great help to the people who voted for it, but it could be a terrible fit for your needs. This is why you should take a look at a few things before settling on a set of LED shop lights.
You have to first consider your needs and your surroundings. That led shop light might look awesome on the shelf, but it may end up being a dead weight on your ceiling. It wouldn’t be prudent of you to spend time and money trying to find the right product with the right features after various tries, rather than getting it right from the start.
Here are a few things you can use to determine the best product to use.
1. Brightness
Depending on the product workshop you have set up, you could be receiving ample natural light, little or none at all. This is the first thing you have to consider when looking for led shop lights to buy.
Depending on the amount of daylight you get, you could simply be using the light to augment what is filtering into the room, or the led shop lights could be the primary source of light in the workshop.
To determine what you require, you have to understand lumens. Lumens is the measure of how bright the light is. This number will typically be expressed in the thousands.
Typically, you can find bulbs starting from 1000 lumens and going higher. A higher number denotes higher brightness. If your workspace is super dark, then you will require LED shop lights that have a high lumen number.
2. Energy efficiency
Bulbs are not all the same. Before the proliferation of LEDs, incandescent and fluorescent lights were all the rage. Incandescent bulbs are famous for their energy consumptions and heat production. This is the reason why they fell out of favor.
The fluorescent is known to cost as much as 70 percent less than an incandescent bulb. However, it is the LED shop lights that take the trophy when it comes to energy efficiency. They can go as much as saving 95 percent of the energy that an incandescent bulb would have used.
This, however, is dependent on the power rating and the overall brightness they can produce. This is why you have to check those ratings before buying.
3. Climate
Believe it or not, the climate of the area you live in will affect how the LED shop lighting will function. This is when you get to witness the best features of an LED product. If you live in an area that experiences low temperatures, then you are just going to reap great benefits from having LED shop lights for garage lighting.
LEDs work best in cooler temperatures as this makes them more efficient. The use of LEDs in such climates makes them good for your pockets. They can produce as much light for very little energy consumption.
Are LED Shop Lights Better Than Fluorescent For Garage Lighting?
With the move towards climate-saving systems, the incandescent light bulb fell greatly out of favor with the LED lights. Not only were they producing heat, but their high lumens per watt energy consumption meant more needed to be done to produce energy. This was costly to the environment.
Enter the four feet long fluorescent bulbs. Though they have been around for quite some time, they also aren’t the best for the environment.
This is because of the mercury that has to be included with any type of construction. Mercury is poisonous and can also cause various changes to the body of whoever is exposed to it.
The great thing is, LEDs came to the fore. While fluorescent bulbs can save you a great amount in terms of watts consumed in comparison to incandescent bulbs, LEDs, whether four-foot LED or bulbs, can do up to 95 percent of that!
This is the first reason why the LED bulb is the best of the three options. They also don’t contain hazardous material, which makes them way safer than fluorescent bulbs.
More readings about LED Lights:
FAQs
What Are The Best-LED Shop Lights?
The best LED shop lights could be relative to your needs with regards to brightness, energy efficiency, and climate.
What Is The Brightest LED Shop Light?
The dictionary definition of bright is one that produces the most light, in this context. That light, however, can be of the wrong color temperature. The brightest LED light will typically be the one that produces the most lumens, consumes very little in terms of watts, and has a brilliant white to bluish color temperature.
As to whether that is good garage lighting for you is another matter altogether. Here are four of the brightest LED shop lights.