what kind of light or lighting

[vinman753]

do you guys use on your amp workbench or area?   My eyes ain't what they use to be and I need all the light I can get but that doesn't get in my way.

[tubesornothing]

Flourescent and halogen.  I want more.  Daylight would be great, 10 bazillion lumens.  Interested to hear what others have to say.

[hdave]

Hi Guys,

I just happen to be in the lighting business for a living.  My best suggestion would be to go with a T5 High Output flourescent fixture with 4100K lamps.  The best fixtures available bar none are from The Light Edge in Tualatin Oregon.  Not inexpensive, but as tube amp guys you realize that price is what you pay, value is what you get.  Which fixture to use will depend on your setup and the amount of light you think you need.

[tubesornothing]

So whats the diff between el-cheapo home depot fixtures and these ones - will they be brighter or less flicker?

[hdave]

It is not quite like amp tone, which is a subjective thing.  There is a lot to lighting design and you have touched upon  just a couple of the issues ToN.

There are "cheapie" ballasts which will give you flicker due to the operating frequency and performance.  The T5 HO lamp has 54W output compared to the "standard" T8 lamp at 32W.  The fixture design dictates how well the light is dispursed and cheapie fixtures just "throw" light out indescriminantly whereas ones like those from The Light Edge have focused output.

Proper lighting design can and has been proven in studies to do many things such as reduce visual strain, improve mood, and productivity.

You could compare this to buying a KIA, or buying a Ferrari.

This is a very brief overview (try explain Tube amps in a paragraph or 2).  What I can say is that since I have been in the business, my number one observation is that people just take lighting for granted.  The majority of the population just does not realize nor appreciate the science involved.  A proper lighting job can greatly enhance your life.  The only lighting jobs are ever noticed are the very poorly designed ones, or the exceptionally well designed ones.

[vinman753]

Those lights are something else judging from the comparison pics.
    In my case, though, I have my daughter's ex bedroom for my man cave. (she just got married)
    It's a small room and I have a work table to play with my hobbies and projects.  I have been using a 27w flourescent daylight desk lamp for working on amps, etc.
    What I didn't think of and am going to try is using a standard incandescent desk lamp with the low wattage but more light flourscent curly bulb in it.
    I can use one of these bulbs and not exceed the wattage of the lamp but get like 60w of "daylight" aimed at my work.
    Not fancy, but it's cheap and may do the trick.

[bnwitt]

My shop is 11' x 20' and I have 12 dual 32 watt T8 fluorescent fixtures lighting it.  I use Phillips daylight tubes rated at 5000K.  I purchased the fixtures from Home Depot and didn't buy the cheapest ones they had.  They do not flicker.  I also have a fluorescent fixture over each bench for close in lighting.  I have great lighting.

What most people don't understand about lighting is that different tasks require different levels of lighting.  The Illumination Engineering Society has long identified lighting levels for varying tasks in their manual and when used to design work area lighting you can almost guarantee success.  For instance, there is a different level for reading pencil written documents than for ink documents.  An accounting office might require 200 foot candles while a dentist's treatment room would require 1,000 foot candles.

The two most important qualities for lighting sources are lumens output, and diffusion.  Direct lighting sources (non-diffused) like incandescent bulbs can cause harsh glair due to uneven illumination of an area.  Under these conditions, the eye has difficult time processing visual information due to glare and looking into areas of brightness and darkness around a room.  Your eyes are constantly trying to adjust to the varying levels and this is fatiguing.  

Larger light sources like fluorescent fixtures with diffuser panels are much better for task lighting.  For amp assembly work I like anywhere from 500  to 1,000 foot candles but making the lighting even around the room without glare is the most important quality.   The Kelvin temperature of the lighting is important for accurate color recognition and the closer to daylight the better.

Here is a link to some information regarding glare and task lighting:

http://www2.umdnj.edu/eohssweb/ergo/part_two/2page01.htm

If I had a limited budget and were only working on a single bench I would probably use a desk type fluorescent task light.

[RicharD]

My bench has a double 4' fluorescent with SPX4100 T8 lamps.  I want to upgrade to T5 as hdave suggested.  They're very efficient.  The higher the SPX number the brighter the light color.  What nobody has mentioned is a lighted clamp on magnifying glass.  I can't work w/o it.  I have a cheapo with a curly lamp and a broken clamp base.  I drilled a few holes in my bench to mount it in.  If your eyesight is fading anything like mine, it'd probably be your best investment.  It's nice to be able to see what you're working on.

-Richard
 

[Dynaflow]

 +1 on magnifying glasses.... I use a simple battery operated magnifying glass that has a small light next to it thats hand held. I absolutely need it to read those darn capacitor values or fagitaboutit... :D Lighting for me is abysmal, I'm in an apt. so the best lighting is in the bathroom counter where theres four 75 watt incandecsent lamps over the mirror... (And a sink to drop parts in...  ;D ).


Regards,

Don

[hdave]

bnwitt has a lot of the info correct but the footcandle levels suggested are very extreme.  The typical office a few years ago might have been lit to between 75 and 100 fc.  Today it is usually more around 40 to 50fc.  That will give you an idea as to how bright 1000fc would be.  It would require a tremendous amount of fixtures to achieve this and you would be blinded by the light output.  The article he has a link to looks pretty good and uses 500 lux as an example.  As a rough reference 1 footcandle represents about 10 lux.  I suspect you merely used the incorrect measurement ,footcandles, rather than lux which is easy to do.  I can't remember the last time we even designed a space to be illuminated to 100 footcandles, let alone brighter.
That must be a really bright workshop you have bnwitt.  A nice elecrical bill too.
The bottom line is it seems to a comfortable amount of lighting for you and that is what counts at the end of the day.  The lighting you describe would be too bright and uncomfortable for most people but sounds like it fits the bill for you.
Butterylicios, the number gven on a lamp indicates the colour tempertature of the lamp and follows the light spectrum.  Typically 4100 or 41K is in the range to more simulate "daylight", the 5000 or 50K mentioned in bnwitt's post tend to be a bit more bluish in tinge and actually produce less lumens than lower temperture lamps.

If you are working in a bedroom or another spot where a recessed fixture won't be practical, there are suspended options.  The most comfortable of all visually(though not as efficient in lumens per watt) is any fixture that is indirect (ie bounces light off another surface, usually the ceiling before illuminating the workplane)

[bnwitt]

Yep, lux is what I meant.  Here is list of levels for different tasks:

http://www.lightboss.com/JF0062-07.pdf

[tubesornothing]

Priced out T5HO and T5 fixtures -ouch.  Tres expensive.  Went and replaced my T12 hummers with T8 electronic fixtures with reflectors and  6500K bulbs ($40 for fixtures and bulbs).  Works great!  Went 6500k cause I think I am sad...  or just a sad case...

[mick]

My wife makes Jewelry and uses a OTT light.   She just got me one for Christmas and I can say I like it...It has a magnifying glass as well.   Hope this helps.




http://www.joann.com/joann/catalog.jsp?CATID=cat3247&PRODID=prd37604

[PRR]

When I realized my eyes would never be teen-aged again, I got TWO basic 2-tube 4-foot open fluorescent fixtures, $13 each at Home Despot. Nominal 140W-160W input.

I hung them low over my bench.... lesseee... stand-up bench hits just above navel, fixtures are just above head-height, you work it out. Probably not much over 24".

This gives a fairly even 44"*18" area of light-source, to maybe 72"x30" of bench. This covers an amp-chassis (or more often a PC chassis) or two, from every angle, both sides, inner corners, and parts tray.

I think I have two cool-white tubes and two some-red tubes. This takes the curse off pure-blue light, but does not really give enough Red to read red versus brown stripes on resistors.

I used fluorescent because in low-low-price 1980s technology, there was NO way to get the light level I knew I was needing using incandescent techniques. I had built a four 150W incandescent-flood array for another purpose, and knew it was HOT to work under. Somewhat comparable to the fries-table at McDonalds where heat-lamps keep fries warm long after their freshness is gone.

These are plain-old tarred-iron 60Hz ballasts. I note that in the last year, little 18-inch cabinet lights have gone over completely to electronic (supersonic) ballasts, obviously because the cost of a bunch of Silicon and a little coil has fallen to less than the cost of iron and tar.

I now have a sit-down bench for light PC work. I lit that with an old Movie-Bar (attached to an 8mm home move camera and took four super-bright bulbs for shooting slow film indoors at near-sun light level). I'd have to look, but I think I have two 20W compact fluorescent bulbs and two 65W halogen spots.

The bulbs are omni and provide general light in a dark corner as well as ample bench light for easy work. Like all commodity compact fluorescents, they take time to brite-up and the color is a little off. While they claim to be "60W equivalent", in some ways they are not, especially in Red.

The spots give a strong down-light, which is plenty bright on top of a problem, but does not cover sides or dig into chassis-corners. The light/heat ratio of the halogens is better than old standard thin-Argon filament lamps, but still a 130W heater focused on your head can be warm: nice in winter, annoying in summer. Would be worse except there is a strong HVAC draft in this area (in fact the lightbar hangs on an air-register). Does give good Red rendition. 

> how bright 1000fc would be.  It would require a tremendous amount of fixtures to achieve this and you would be blinded by the light output.

Your eye can handle it. Outdoors mid-day is ~~5,000 Foot Candles. Obviously our eyes are designed to read armadillo tracks or inspect tasty nuts in full daylight; else we'd have starved.

You won't walk direct from a ~~10FC hallway into a 1,000FC workspace, any more than you walk outside and try to see. Takes a minute to adapt.

You will then COOK. Our Sun has a better Light/Heat ratio than most practical artificial lights, and you know how toasty you get in full sun. I have been on TV stages lit to 500-1000FC, and it is brutal.

And as you say, you can't afford to install or feed 1,000FC over an area larger than a book. (1,000 Lux is 100FC and a lot more practical.) My 4-tube bench lamp covers a 15 square foot area. At 1,000FC we need 15,000 Lumens inside that 15 SF. A 100W incandescent gives 1,000 Lumens, but going in every direction. At any practical height, about 9/10th of the light goes away from the bench, and nearly none comes back from high ceilings and dark walls. So we need like 150,000 Lumens, or 150 100W bulbs! The 15KW of heat is five times more than the room wants in the coldest weather, and would load-up 8 of the 3 20A-110V circuits I have.

Of course you use reflectors to send light to a specified area. But it is hard to get a directivity gain over 3 or 4. Using sealed-beam PAR bulbs you could maybe do 1,000FC over 15 SF with less than 25 PAR-150 bottles.

And you don't need >100FC very often or over any large area. >100FC is helpful because your eye iris stops-down, which masks focusing errors. Same as a film-camera working at f/16 will look "sharp" from 4 ft to infinity. But 1,000FC is nowhere near 10 times better than 100FC. And such sharp vision is usually needed over just a small area. ~~100W incandescent a few inches away will get the work-zone of your embroidery near 250FC.

I know some rough levels from photography. My living-room is ~~5FC over most of its area. Reading happens at 10FC-20FC. Guys who sell light say a classroom should be 50-100FC on the desk. Schools design lower and then fail to maintain, 10-20FC is common and 30FC seems bright. There is a long jump to Daylight, which peaks over 5,000FC but falls quickly from 1,000FC to 50FC in late afternoon.

[PRR]

> the number given on a lamp indicates the colour temperature

"Color temperature": heat a hunk of iron in a very hot fire. Take it out, it glows. First "dull red", then after more heating "red hot", then orange, yellow, and "white-hot".

Hot objects shed their heat. First as deep infrared, which can be picked-up on special film/sensor for "night vision", useful for finding warm objects (live bodies, engines, etc) in the dark. If hot enough, some of that heat extends into "red".

The temperature is a low-pass filter, like a treble-cut in audio. "Dull red" is like an amp which only passes the lowest note.

At higher temperatures, more of the visible range is emitted. When you get enough blue to notice against the strong red, you say "white hot". It is still more red than blue, not a true white; but when you have "some" blue and everything else is reddish, your eye compensates and accepts it as "white". If you take the white-hot iron out in full sun, you will see it is a very poor thing compared to real light.

A hot object which emits red and enough blue to notice will also produce every in-between color. It is a random process so all colors will happen. If red is stronger than blue, the in-betweens will be slanted in strength, but they will all be there, none missing or standing-out.

So you can state the color-bias of a hot-source lamp by saying its temperature. If you know the temperature, you know the shape and slant of its color output.

This is strictly only true for "black body radiation", where the hot object has no color preference other than temperature. There are ways to filter the intrinsic color. Most filters give only an overall slant. Photographic lamps had a blue paint on the glass to cut the red. But such tricks are not very powerful, and black-body theory is useful.

Gas-glow lamps, and Mercury lamps, including fluorescents, don't obey Black-body theory at the macroscopic level. The actual "body" is teeny ions colliding at very high energy. This is equivalent to very high temperature AT the ion, although there are so few ions that the average temperature is low. The light is emitted at very high color. Mercury emits mostly invisible ultraviolet. And this very-hot glow gives a very narrow range of color (or since we don't see this light or color, a narrow range of wavelengths). Neon gives an orange with weak red and no green or blue. It is a much narrower curve than a hot black body. Mercury's light is a few very narrow UV spikes.

But Mercury makes a lot of light easily and cheaply. To get the UV to colors the eye can see, we use phosphors. These funny compounds absorb one color, jiggle, and release another lower color. There is a very efficient and cheap phosphor which takes Mercury's UV and delivers blue. There is another which delivers a red, but much is lost in the jiggle. There are some others, but less efficient or more costly. So ordinary fluorescents are a bright blue phosphor and a dimmer red phosphor. You get some choice of proportion: Cool-White and Warm-White. And while the two ends of the spectrum are balanced to your taste, fluorescents are typically pretty weak in greens and/or yellows. Not the gentle slant of a hot-body, but a lumpy curve.

I note that some compact fluorescents are giving a broader flatter color-curve than the old conventional fluorescents. I guess because they are smaller, and sell at a high price, and are used to replace all-color incandescents, they fancy-up the phosphor mix. At least in the premium brands.

[PRR]

Since non-hot sources give funny light, and are now more installed than hot filaments, we need another way to specify "how white is the white". There is a color rendition index. hdave will know the TLA, and if there are several such "standards". Anyway you compare the curve to a "good" light, an incandescent or the sun or an ideal source, or some inverse of the eye sensitivity. Where there is too much red or not enough blue, you take off points.

So "color temp" indicates the general slant from red to blue, "color index" hints at how smooth the curve is.

I'm uncomfortable using such a single number, even two numbers, to find a "good" light. It may score 99 but be missing one color-slice I need.

However such indexes are excellent for figuring why some lamps have more light/watt than others. I have a yard-light to find my dogs in the yard. The Lumens/Watt on the box looked like a typo, until I found the low color-quality index, and realized this was a funny bright un-white light. Since I don't care what color my dogs seem to be (white hair seems to reflect everything), quantity is the thing, quality is useless. It IS a very odd light, all colors look about the same. But when you get used to it, you realize you are doing a LOT of seeing for very small electricity. You can't tell brown fur from dirt or poop or blood, but you can find The Dog and bring her into a better light for detailed inspection.

Most technical work is NOT color-fussy. A good bright blue-white fluorescent gives very effective shape and detail vision. As hdave says, the poor color-index and the big dip in green (the eye's favorite color) can give less seeing per lumen than other lamps. But sometimes the high efficiency of the blue phosphor works by brute force and low cost allowing lots of light.

The BIG exception is Color Codes. Especially Red/Brown. Brown isn't even a color, we see it as a color-balance. When there are few other colors in sight, and the light source has goofy color curve, Red/Brown becomes a real tough call. Blue/Green can be problematic also. Moreso for eyes with mild color-blindness. Some folks just can't read color-codes, but a lot of guys are just a bit weak and can tell Blue from Green IF the light source isn't making things tougher. Fortunately we never need a large area of good light to read a resistor, so a teeny 25W high-intensity halogen spot is ample.

> fixture that is indirect (ie bounces light off another surface, usually the ceiling before illuminating the workplane)

For detailed technical work, that's a half-answer. Most of the room is brighter than the work.

And a task spot lamp is the other half-answer. Get a heap of light ON the work. But one or a few sources will leave shadows and make glare. So you want maybe half your lumens AT the work, and the other half "all around" the work. Like a good concert: there is sound EVERYwhere, but more in the front. No hot-spots, no dead-spots. Ceiling-bounce is VERY effective at filling all shadows (if you have a low white ceiling), but a pretty poor way to get high level over a few foot area.

My high dark ceilings are bounce-proof, hence my very large-area source. This also causes less glare than one or a few small sources.

In product photography, where light must be high but glare must be controlled, they sometimes use huge light-boxes with multiple sources behind a scrim, so light comes evenly from a 4'x4' or larger area, one or two on each side of the product. These are often set just barely outside the camera's sight, to keep distance short and throw light to all sides of the product. Then "task" lights for specific highlights, to pop-up the logo-badge or even small-area lights to deliberately throw a small glare on the curve of a fender. My 4-tube array is a small un-scrimmed light-box.

[G._Hoffman]

For my electronics bench/desk at home, I have a couple compact fluorescent recessed lights in the ceiling, and an old hat rack looking light with three 100 watt halogen equivalent compact fluorescent and a three way halogen (when it burns out, it will be fluorescent).  I find that I need less light for most tasks than I did back before I started doing event lighting design (concerts, big corporate meetings, fashion show, etc. - mostly as an intelligent lighting programmer)  I see light better, and I pay more attention to what I'm seeing which some how translates to not needing so much light. 

At the shop, for wood working and the light, my bench is in the front room which means that for most of the day (all day, during daylight savings) I have fantastic north windows giving the best possible daylight you could imagine, on top of which we have four 8 foot double tube fluorescent lights and my bench has a architects lamp with a 100 watt equivalent fluorescent which I hardly ever turn on during the day.  I've also got a compact fluorescent on the end of a lamp cord that I can put inside of round holed acoustics to see what's going on inside, and then we have a tiny little 4 inch long 3/4 inch diameter fluorescent tube that we can get inside most f-hole guitars.  And a bunch of really bloody bright LED flashlights for similar use.  I keep hoping that someone will get a LED bulb that is reasonably priced and which has decent spread so I can use those for inside guitars, but no love yet.


Gabriel

[tubesornothing]

Gotta love it when PRR sheds some light on the subject.  (couldn't resist)

[bnwitt]

My shop runs 50 to 75 foot candles depending on where you are.  75 at my two benches and 50 in the general area.  This old man can see everything under those conditions.  Even at 0.15 per KWH I only spend about $10 a month on the lighting.  When I go into the house it's like going into a cave. ;D  I use T8 lamps and they are great.

[tubesornothing]

Gee when I was scoping out an amp I noticed a new oscillation - 40kHz.  T8 lights.

[Direwolf]

As I am getting older and suffer CSS, I realized I needed magnification. I bought a magnifying lamp for my bench but it didn't cut it. I then got a magnifying loup from American Science and Surplus. It's got an adjustable headband and several different lenses with varying magnification. They work great and I can just flip them up out of the way when I don't need them. I admit, I look like a dork wearing them but, what the heck, I probably am a dork! Now I need to get better lighting which right now is 2 regular lamps. Thanks to this thread, I now know what I need.

[vinman753]

I just stumbled on this on clearance at Office Max and it works out great for me so far.  It's 3 halogen bulbs 20w.  and the fixture clamps to the table.  Oh, and pardon the mess.   :-[

[jjasilli]

Well you guys got me to thinking and I've stumbled upon a low cost or cost-free solution :  an Itty Bitty Book Light.  Already had one lying around.  It clips onto anything handy: like a chassis or a partially open parts draw, and puts enough extra light where I need it.  The bulbs handle 4 - 8 volts, so it can work off the 4X C cell battery case, or a proper wall wart laying around. 

[TubeGeek]

I have been using two jewelers' loupe's I purchased from an electrical parts business.  They have been working great for me.