Low Cost LED Garage Lighting

We talked about LED lights in the garage before, from some pretty expensive fixtures that might not make sense to the LED lighting I installed when I was building a new work area a couple of years back that takes up very little space and uses very little power, while still giving me a bright bench top. If I were doing it again today, I would probably use strips more like the project shown here. This Instructable is by a fellow who put up really inexpensive LED strip lights on the ceiling in his garage and it's an option worth considering if you're replacing incandescent bulbs or fluorescent fixtures or just putting up lights for the first time.

There are lots of inexpensive LED fixtures out there now, but a lot of them don't work very well for flush mounting if that's important to you, they all hang down on chains or some other type of bracket, and if you need a lot of them the price can still add up. They also take up more space than they have to because LEDs themselves are so small. This guy bought some of those LEDs in strips, used 3M tape to mount them to the garage ceiling joists and powered them with an old computer power supply. If you're like me and have a few old computers around, this is a zero cost option which is pretty nice, but there are lots of low cost power supplies available so it's still affordable either way.

As I noted before, one of the best things you can add to your garage is good lighting and a light colored paint that reflects whatever light you have. A bright workspace makes every project so much easier when you can actually see what you're doing. If you're going to spend serious time in the garage, light it up!

Instructables