I stuck this here to get a bit more traffic. I need to update the lighting in our 40x60 pole barn with very tall peak (think 24 feet floor to peak). Looking for plug in LED fixtures. What is everyone using? What to avoid? What is easy to install (less time on a ladder for DH is best). I’m clueless on lumens and watts and all that fancy electrical verbiage, so any help there would be awesome too.
Avoid fluorescent --had those in my first barn --when it became really cold, they stopped working well. Currently I have incandescent --work better but wish I had twice as many!
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LEDs are great. I can’t imagine installing incandescent…can you even get the bulbs reliably anymore?
I have 8 foot vapor tight LED fixtures down the aisle and 4 foot ones in the stalls. I can get them wet, which I do when I pressure wash, and they’ve required nothing in the 6+ years they’ve been installed. An electrician put them in, so unsure of brand, but there’s a switch inside to select color temperature, which I thought was kind of neat.
Any electrical supply company should be able to point you in the right direction.
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Ditto to @Foxglove 's Ix-Nay to fluorescent!
I put in cold-ballast fluorescent fixtures because I disliked the wait time for the then-popular halide.
In humid or rainy weather they’re iffy.
When I can afford it, I’ll switch to LED.
I ordered the vapor tight LED long fixtures from ProLighting 4 years ago and very happy.
They aren’t plug in, but I can’t say enough about these. https://www.ledmyplace.com/products/led-canopy-light-150w-15600-lumens
SUPER bright - I have one over each stall and call them my surgery lights because you can do surgery in the stall with them on.
I got these from Amazon for our indoor ring three years ago or so. They are terrific, and plug in. I think I got them on Prime Day, on sale. I researched high bay LED lights for damp conditions.
LED High Bay Light 100W 15,000lm 5000K Daylight 400W MH/HPS Equivalent with US Plug 5’ Cable UFO LED Shop Lights Commercial Warehouse Workshop Garage Factory Lowbay Area Lighting Fixture, Non-Dim
Are you looking to use multiple LED light fixtures, with each one being corded and plugged in an electrical outlet box.
By upgrade, do you mean adding additional light fixtures
to what lights are already there, or upgrading to all new lighting?
Working 24 feet up is not something I’d care to tackle, ever. In fact when I decided to have my barn fluorescents converted to LED bulbs and added two additional banks, effectively tripling the barn illumination, I hired an experienced electrical firm. It took three people one complete day, and cost $5,600.
I considered it money well spent, if for no other reason that I am still alive by not trying to work at multiple locations atop ladders over a concrete floor. I have read that any ladder fall over nine feet has almost a certainty of a fatal or significant serious injury outcome.
Replacing the six existing plug in light fixtures that were scavenged from the previous owner’s workplace. They are sodium type high bay lights. I’d like LED ones in their place. Plug in is fine— he was an electrician and according to our electrical inspection, did a bang up job wiring the barn (everything is in rubber coated stainless conduit).
We are having our barn roof maintained by a contractor this summer and want him to use his lift to also install the new lights if possible.
