We are currently building our barn, and nearing the stages of adding lights. I want it to be bright in the barn while working. I’m looking for suggestions for the isle, wash area, stalls and tack room. Wash stall has white metal siding on 3 sides. Light would more than likely need to be flush mount.
photos of said barn:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/e8trTFqgQzieqtd1A
https://photos.app.goo.gl/VrJpDqLGVxDAA2Jk8
https://photos.app.goo.gl/q5fnZ5GzFHfrVJ2G8
Thanks in Advance!
Friend of mine installed LED shop lights. OMG it was brighter than broad daylight in there. They are also less expensive to run and last longer. I am pretty sure they can be flush mounted. Relatively easy to put up and change out bulbs when they burn out.
Your barn is lovely!!
Instead of one strip of lights down the center of your aisle, do two, offset to either side. That way light won’t be directly overhead your horse when cross tying and you’ll be able to see underneath 
Also, another vote for led shop lights! Go with the “rough use” ones.
If you’re planning on using heated buckets or tubs, make sure your outlets for those are near enough that the cord reaches.
Plan on more light and outlets than you ever think you’ll need. Be sure to illuminate your runs and whichever side of the barn your manure pile is on.
Consider if you want anything automated. Several of our outside lights here run on lutron caseta switches, which means I can schedule when they come on and off, and turn them on and off from my phone. It’s SUPER slick.
Oh! Also think about hardwiring the barn for internet. If you ever plan on perhaps having cameras out there, pull cable now. The image quality you’ll get with hardwired cameras will far exceed what you can get with WiFi.
have LEDs and a secondary lighting system of regular old single bulb things that I use when I am just needing some light and not wanting to turn on the brighter than daytime LED lights .
For the 5AM feeding it is the old fashion bulb lighting
We did LED strip lights down both sides of the aisle, and a strip over each stall. The hall and stall lights are on different switches; it’s been great having it like that for mucking stalls it’s nice to have the overhead lights on, but for everything else we usually just turn in the aisle lights. We also did pendants in the aisle on a third switch which is useful for checking on the horses at night without turning the brighter LEDs on.
Lights will work anyway, no matter where we put them, but for best results with a large mass as a horse is, you want lights coming at it from the side, if you are building new or remodeling.
If someone has the lights already there, they will be fine where they are.
Ours were above the stall walls and illuminated both the aisle and stalls.
Then we moved the stalls back, so now they are over the middle of the twice as wide aisle, it is what it is.
We may say a horse is like a table.
A light right over it will be great to see clearly all that is on top of the table, but you won’t see very clearly what is under the table.
Similar with a horse, lights right above a horse, you will see the top of the horse very well, but underneath there will be shadows.
Light coming from the side will let you see that one side from the top to the bottom, legs included, which we generally want to see in a horse.
We also have some LEDs overhead dusk to dawn lights outside where we walk in and out of barns.
We have two on the front of the barn, three on the side the stalls open into their pens and that lets us check out there also when is dark.
Inside the barn itself we keep it dark if we are not there, but you can see a bit in there from the outside lights, is not totally dark.
I’ve been slowly replacing the existing fluorescent fixtures in our barn with outlets and then putting up these:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Commercial-Electric-4000K-3-ft-Black-Integrated-LED-Shop-Light-with-5-ft-power-cord-54254141/206028863
I can’t stand those tube light things, not even with LED bulbs instead of fluorescent. The above are fantastic, and super bright.
I agree about side lighting for the stalls to avoid shadows - that’s what we have, too. We also have the aisle, stall, and outdoor flood lights on separate switches, and we have three-way switches so that lights can be turned on/off from multiple locations.
In addition, there are flood lights on the outside of the barn that can be turned on from our house, separate from the ones that are turned on from the barn. Very convenient when walking to the barn at night.
@Jarpur Are you flood lights on the outside of the barn hard-wired to your house? Can you control them with your phone? We’re somewhat far away from the barn and from our house we cross a driveway on the side, then go do into the pasture and cross the creek. Thanks in advance!
They’re hard-wired – were installed when we had the barn built, with a secondary electrical panel on our house and a trench for the wiring to the barn (with another electrical panel there), so the ones that can be turned on at the house are controlled by a regular switch.
However, now that our trees have grown so much in the intervening years, I’d like to add some more floods, on the well shed in-between house and barn, to add additional visibility. I’m interested in researching the remote-controlled LED lights mentioned on another thread, but the only ones I’ve seen so far are indoor lights, not outdoor floods.
I guess we could install lights on the outside of the well shed to be phone-controlled but, in my situation, I don’t want to have to bother with an app on my phone. Point and click with a remote sounds easier to me!
Mine are controlled by my phone. It’s awesome but does have a finite range. I just checked the site and am surprised to see that they say the switch must be with 30 feet of the bridge…my barn switch is maybe 250’ away from the bridge. My electrician installs a lot of this stuff, so perhaps he just understands the limits, or there’s something else at play that’s helping.
We didn’t have a switch for the barn floods in the house, and this allowed us to install one without pulling wires. The switch is wireless, and runs on a battery. You can stick them anywhere, but they’re sized and shaped to install next to other rocker switches so it looks like a “normal” switch.
You can schedule the lights on and off, or turn them on/off from your phone, or even geo fence it–lights turn on when you get nearby with your phone. You can also have a remote. Or have Alexa or Siri or Google turn on your lights. It’s really all very slick.
https://www.casetawireless.com/Pages/Default.html
@Jarpur this technology can drive anything, inside or outside.
@Simkie …Do you need WiFi for these lights or do they work on bluetooth from your phone? Love this idea!
The bridge plugs into your router and the switches connect to it wirelessly with propriety tech. I don’t think WiFi is required at all, but could be wrong. Check out the FAQs on that site I linked. Bluetooth is not involved at all.
Thanks, Simkie, I will check it out!
ETA: The ability for the Caseta lights to be controlled with a battery-operated Pico remote sounds like what I’m looking for.
Yep, it works great. The wall switches that are not hardwired are those pico remotes, just installed on the wall. We also have a couple that have been mounted to car visor clips, although with the rest of the automation, have not really found a use for those.
I really thought I’d be manually turning stuff on and off, but found that I set up the automation and it pretty much runs itself now–which is really nice! But however you want to drive it, they probably have a method :yes:
whatever you use, get the ones with sealed casing, rated for wet condition.
NEMA 4 rating ( if European rating it is IP66)… it is for wet conditions interior or exterior that is also dust tight
Another vote for the Orion West lighting. We have the florescent ones too, they switched to LED literally months after we bought and installed ours 4.5 years ago. We have been very happy with them. We have one round light over each stall and the long ones down the middle of the aisle. The barn is bright as day and generally we have no complaints about being able to see things well. We did a lot of research before selecting these lights. At the time we installed them, I didn’t see any info about having lighting offset, so we just did centered in each stall and down the center of the aisle. Pretty much every barn we boarded at had centered lights, but they were all pretty crappy and under-lit, so that was one of the big things I wanted in our barn: good lighting! Seems to be pretty bright, even though not offset, no real complaints from the vet or the farrier. The table explanation is a good one though and makes a lot of sense.
Being in MN, it gets pretty cold and the florescent bulbs to take a bit to warm up. LED wouldn’t have that problem of course.
Photos at night with flash off on the camera. This is just after we had our stalls finished, barn has come a long way since then. (Hopefully the links work!)
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152706928599578&l=2a775143cc
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152706928629578&l=4bd153c01b
If you get LED’s make sure to get covered fixtures as my understanding is that they do not do well with dust as other posters have stated. When I was looking at outting lights in my indoor, I had this conversation with someone who said…it is a HUGE PITA to replace those bulbs at 16 feet and they aren’t cheap. I opted for $80 used metal halides over the $225 really good LED’s. But I am replacing all my barn flood lights with LED floods. I LOVE the brightness. Makes a HUGE difference to me.
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