My New House & Workshop

[Shran]

Regarding your lights question - I used something real similar to that Home Depot link you posted when I did fixtures in my shop about 9 years ago. It turns out that Menards doesn't even sell that style anymore. I guess you just replace the whole fixture now instead of a bulb? What a waste. This is the closest thing I could find, probably what I'd use if I had to redo everything: https://www.menards.com/main/lighti...-80cri/p-1459474229643-c-1642874276495749.htm

Maybe I'm complaining about nothing, LED's seem to have an incredibly long lifespan but the average person isn't going to be able to replace an entire fixture. Soccer mom will have to hire an electrician to do something that used to take 30 seconds to swap bulbs - but maybe they'll never need to. I do have one fixture in the shop out of 12 that is really dim for some reason - but I also put drop in T8 LED bulbs in every fixture in my office and none of them have gone bad.

 

[Curious Hound]

There's things I still don't understand. Like, why doesn't a 220 have a neutral? (I'll Google it)

It can and often does. For your water heater, it isn't needed. They designed the controls to operate at 220v. If it had more complex controls that require a lot of human interface, they would probably use 120v controls and require a neutral. You could have run a 4-wire cable. But since the neutral isn't being used, that would have been unnecessary and more expensive. A fairly modern clothes dryer, however, has 120v controls. So most newer clothes dryers have a 4-wire supply. Black and red are the hot legs, white for neutral and bare or green ground. An electric range uses all 4 wires.