Help with wiring new lights in my garage

[scherp69]

A few weeks ago, I decided to change my lights in my garage from single bulbs 100 watt bulbs to commercial fluorescent lights. Once they were hooked up, the lights worked fine. I then decided that I wanted to listen to some music and that is when all my issues started to happen. I had a new Sony ghetto blaster with an antenna and as soon as I turned it on, it was all static. In the end, I found out it was the fluorescent lights that was causing the problems. If I turned the lights off, my stereo got great reception, but as soon as I turned them on, static. I posted that issue on in another thread and got several suggestions. Get an inline RFI filter and plug it into the outlet that the stereo's plugged into, plug the stereo into a completely different circuit, make sure everything is grounded properly. Unfortunately none of these worked. This brought me to my newest issue....lights blow breaker.

My garage has never had the greatest lighting so I decided I was going to put in all new lighting. I went and got 6 fluorescent lights to add to the two commercial ones that I already have. I did the math and found that with a 20 amp breaker I would be able to handle 1920 watts, which is 80% load. The lights I am running are 32 watts a bulb and there are 16 bulbs giving me 512 watts....well under the 80% load and not a whole lot higher than the 400 watts I was running with the 4 single bulbs. I should be fine there.

Since the garage was built in the early 70's, I decided to replace all the wiring for the lights. I went into the attic and cut out all the old stuff. I then ran new 14/2 wire. I'm going to say that I ran "a wire" and by that I do mean the full 14/2 wire, not just 1 wire. Here's how I hooked it up. I ran 2 wires from the junction box with the incoming power. 1 wire went to a series of 4 lights and the other went to the other series of 4 lights. I put 4 lights on 1 switch and the other 4 on another switch. The power wire went from the junction box to the first light in one series, connected to the lights wiring, and then a new wire ran from the first light to the second light, a new wire from the second light to the third, and then a new wire from the third to the forth. So at the second and third lights I have 3 black wires (the wire to the light and the two new wires I ran) connected, 3 white wires and two ground wires. On the fourth light I only have 2 black and 2 white and 1 ground as that's where the series ends. Back to the first light (this is the exact same for both sides) I have the power wire, the wire to the switch, the wire connecting to light 2 and the light wiring. All the wires are connected using wire nuts and all blacks are connected to each other and all whites are connected to each other. I do not have any of the plugs in the garage hooked up to the outlets so it is all new wiring and just the lights.

When I went to turn the breaker on, the lights came on. As soon as I flicked the switch...the breaker blew. I went into turn it back on and it trips right away and I can hear a quick bzzz and it blows. The one thing that I can see that I may have hooked up wrong, but am not sure as this was how the original lights were hooked up, is the power wire. Can I run the power wires straight to the first light and then have a separate wire from the light to the switch or should I run the power wire to the switch and then go from there? Hopefully this all made sense. Basically I am trying to run 2 series of 4 lights off separates switches. Oh and back to my original issue, when the lights were on for that brief moment...my stereo lost its reception so I'm likely going to run a cable coax out to the garage and hook up an old amp.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I really want lights in my garage again. Thanks in advance.