Charlie, if its not cost prohibitive you would get a ton of lumens per watt, efficiency, energy savings and good lighting if you used Low Bay High Intensity Discharge (HID) Fixtures. You can probably get them in 240 volt single phase (check with Grainger) which is what I would recommend over 120 volt. The drawbacks are higher initial cost, long warm up and restrike times, and poorer color rendition, but the Coated Metal Halide lamps yield pretty decent color. They can be bought with the extra quartz lamps if restrike time is a problem. Higher efficiency would be to use High Pressure Sodium, but the color sucks. Lesser efficient would be Mercury Vapor. If you dont wanna spring for HID Lighting you could go with strip fluorescents, 4 or 8 foot and use high efficiency low noise electronic ballasts. Also buy them with good reflectors unless you had them right up against an all white ceilings which I doubt you have in a shop. Least efficient but lowest initial cost and no warm up problems and good color is, of course, incandescent, maybe the larger units with the Mogul Base, but again use good reflector type fixtures. John T Nordhoff in Indiana, Retired Electrical Engineer
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