But there’s no mains power in his garage. If there were he could use a fluorescent strip light, which you can often find thrown out but OK for a garage, and efficient and reliable. They produce a lot of shadowless background light. A small inspection light could do the rest.
So he’s stuck with some sort of rechargeable solution and he says he’s not a dab hand with a soldering iron. That pretty much leaves him with something off the shelf.
Are there rechargeable striplights? I think there are a lot of things like that for the caravan and boating crowds, but they run off 12V lead acid leisure batteries which are quite pricey and have problems.
I should get a commission for the way I’ve been pushing this critter, but for 8bux, you can’t possibly go wrong.
Ramps up/down when you press’n’hold the button. At dimmer settings, it should last forever on an 18650. And full-tilt is actually quite bright for a head-light.
And the wave on/off doodad is pretty convenient, too!
Non-headlights, maybe a regular flashlight with diffuser would work. Any efficient light will work, and will throw more light vs just shooting up at a dark ceiling.
If you want more light, get a piece of clean white poster-board, and shoot the light at that vs at the ceiling. The cleaner and more reflective, the better.
Grab an old car battery, pretty much anything holding over 12v, then a 5w or 10w solar panel. Connect panel direct to battery (no need for controller at 10w (on a car battery) Then get a cheap led strip or work light.
If you get the battery for free, whole thing should be under 15 pounds.
The Q8 is a BLF project that is nearing completion. It can run on 1, 2, 3, or 4 Li-ion 18650 batteries. No one can say for sure yet what its final performance ratings will be, but when fully loaded with 4 cells, I suspect that it will be able to bounce 1000 lumens off your ceiling for a minimum of 4 hours straight, and probably a lot longer.
Guys, thanks for all your suggestions - some interesting ideas.
On the face of it, a head torch could work, but it already feels as though I’m rummaging round in a cave using the D80. I could be wrong, but I think I’d be happier illuminating as much of the room as possible, to make it feel more inviting, rather than dingy. Perhaps I’ll end up with a combination of both some general illumination and a head torch when I need a bit more light.
When Mrs Nightshade decides on a kitchen I’ll have the old cabinets and a worktop to use as a bench
Peardrop, I keep coming back to images/ videos of those led strips creating fantastic garage or workshop light. Your post got me thinking, out of interest, if I either used this little project as an excuse to bring my soldering up to scratch or maybe even drafted in some help, does that open other options up?
I have a Hakko 936 soldering station clone, and I have done bits but only putting plugs on heavy gauge wire.
You want to light the garage on a budget and if you are messing about with developing a solution you are going to hit problems and costs rise as you go up blind alleys. Even things like getting or making battery boxes costs time and money.
I’d search for an off the shelf solution first. You could email companies that sell LED lighting which might have or know of something. If that turns up nothing, search to see if anyone else has done this and developed a similar project, ironing out the bugs.
I’ve had a quick look and what I found was for closet lighting, so OK to find a pair of shoes but not something to work by.
Then there were LED tape lights running off 12V which look impressive and I assume that’s what you were talking about. There were also USB LED strips, which I suppose could be run off USB power banks, although I’m guessing because I know little about USB power banks or LED strips.
It must be possible to make a 12V supply for these LED 12V strips using 18650s, but I haven’t really thought about it. My first idea would be to use four cells and a 7812 low drop out linear regulator but there are almost certainly better ways.
yes, i was gonna say what ANGLER just said… i was worried it might seem rude, but…
honestly, if i wanted light anywhere INDOORS, i would just run a piece of romex, wire up a light fixture or two, and wire up several PLUGS and be done with it.
if i had a garage out the back yard? I would bury a conduit rated for ground exposure, run to the garage, and be done with it. If I were “concerned” about the garage or anything power wise? I could shut the breaker off thereby shutting the garage down.
I’m probably not the only one here that could give advice on how to accomplish some simple mains 110 wiring, its really cost effective (budget, lol) when you can do it yourself.
To ME, this is the ultimate solution, and a long term one.
I’m assuming here that getting mains power to the garage, say via an extension lead, just isn’t a possibility.
I’ve seen a few places where the garages are off the main property and even across a road from the property, and have no mains power connection of their own.
My preference would be to run the extension cord if possible (I would pursue the buried option and actually wire the garage myself) but since you want to keep it battery powered:
My first though was my SkyRay King. I was lucky enough to get one of the older still-good clones, but you can get the light fairly cheaply through different sources now. Possibly a gently-driven seven-emitter model:
More emitters to get the lumen output up, but keep the drive level down to prevent overheating.
More emitters means floodier output, which would be desirable in this application.
Most of the cheap ones are junk with poor thermal path and Lattice Bright emitters, which can vary from decent to terrible.
I’m thinking that if the light is gently driven enough, but has decent enough emitters:
Fabricate a rounded diffuser to radiate the light around the area.
Hang it as high as possible from the ceiling pointed down (would be easy with the cut-outs in the SRK design).
Find a used laptop battery pack to salvage some surplus 18650s.
Since the SRK design uses parallel cells, it should be safe in this configuration.
At a reasonable drive current, you should be able to get several hours of use from 4x 18650s.
Depending on the construction of the garage, paint the ceiling/walls white if possible, as that would make a huge difference.
Or, staple foam insulation sheeting if you have exposed joists?
If you have exposed corrugated or other sheet metal, just spray paint the underside white.
So, because I don’t like leaving threads unfinished, here’s the final update.
I never really answered why we couldn’t use mains, but the root of the problem is that the garage needs pulling down. It has an asbestos roof and water finds its way through. The walls are prefab sections, but basically, it needs pulling down and starting again and at that point, I’ll have mains power added. For now, I just wanted a cheap and easy solution.
Also, excuse the state of my garage…. much clearing out to do, but it has potential to be a good space for me.
So all I’ve done is buy a 5m strip of 5050 LED’s, cut it in half and add a plug to connect to the lipo batteries I already had. I also picked up a lipo alarm in case I run them too low (anyone know how long a 1300 mah will power these led’s?)
The picture was taken late at night - there’s plenty of light for me to work with super pleased with a budget result!
What’s wrong with it?
I can still see parts of the floor
Actually as you said, all you need is larger garage.
When it comes to either throwing stuff out, or building a larger garage.
I vote for the larger garage.
Nice simple solution.
As for how long a runtime, just measure the draw in milliAmps and divide that number into 1300. That will give you the runtime in hours.
Say it draws 1000mA (1A), then the runtime would be about 1.3 hours.
And I am guessing that 5M strip draws about 1A
That looks like a nice cave, but you need full main power for a fridge there mate
Get on that roof, I repaired our roof myself and it was not only very gratifying but also dirt cheap. For me it were tiles, if you have a flat roof it xantbe more tricky, use some water dissolving food colorings to mark suspect areas so when the water enters you know where the problems are.
Do cover the asbestos with paint for safety.
Nice garage, my garage aint much better
The only difference is that mine is brick and mortar with bitumen roof, and fitted with 8 double Tld armatures
Filled with bikes, kids toys, tools and so on
I have 2 8’ high output fluorescent fixures, and 2 4’ers. Highly inefficient I must say, but super bright. Near the front of the garage I have a couple of standard E26 style fixtures with Cree 100 watt LED bulbs installed.
