An Interior Designer’s Top Tips for Home Lighting
With lighting options increasing by the day, it has become much easier for homeowners to achieve effective lighting. That’s the kind of lighting that not only brightens the home and makes doing tasks easier but is also easy on the budget. LED lights have surpassed other lights by yards in effective lighting, and their versatility and variations make them even more attractive as lighting options. We will cover how you can use these and other lights to give your home the touch it deserves.
Understand Color Temperatures
It’s easy to think of color temperature as hot or cold, but that can confuse you and deter you from getting the right fit for your home. Instead, think of it as the type of light the bulb emits. For example, when choosing Lepro LED high bay lights, you have to consider if you want warm whites or cool whites.
What’s the difference? The ambiance. When you walk into a room with warm white light, it feels cozy. It’s the kind of light you want in a living room, a bedroom, or a dining room for cozy dinners. It relaxes and soothes, and even calms anxiety. You feel at peace.
Cool whites, on the other hand, are much brighter and tend to be harsh. These are the ideal color temperatures for workspaces, hospitals, bathrooms, offices, garages, and other areas where efficiency is key. In such spaces, the last thing you want is a worker slacking off or getting hurt because their visibility suffered due to a poor lighting choice.
For your home, you’ll work with both warm whites and cool whites. For example, your bathroom can do with a cool white, but your living room needs a warm white. Also, consider getting 100w dimmable LED high bay lighting to help you move between the cooler and warmer tones.
Plan Your Lighting
How are you planning on lighting your home? You have probably seen homes grace magazine covers and could not help but wonder how the interior designer put it all together. Here’s a not-so-secret idea- plan! It works for everything, whether you are saving for a car, buying a home, or even lighting your house.
Planning helps you understand your bases. For example, when choosing color temperatures, you have to ask yourself, what kind of room am I lighting? With an average k scale of 2000-6500, where does my bedroom fit? (PS: K is a measure of color temperature). That way, you can avoid getting a 4000K bulb for your living room and interrupting the calming flow in the room. You also don’t want to get a bulb with less than 3000K for the bathroom. Otherwise, the room will feel off, and it will be good luck to everyone trying to get their morning routine done in minutes! What should you consider in your planning?
The Room
That’s the first part of your plan, as without considering it, you can easily choose the wrong lighting and regret it. Think about how you use the room, what the focal points are, what you want to highlight and what you want to avoid highlighting. Secondly, you must consider the style. You can get the best LED lights the market has to offer and still end up with drab lighting. If the lights don’t match the décor, your whole look will look confused or even busy. It’s not the way you want to handle your lighting.
The Output
The term output can be confusing to people. For a long time, people have confused output with watts. These are not the same. They may have a relationship but choosing your lighting based on output alone is not the best idea. Here’s an example. A traditional incandescent bulb boasting 40 watts will produce up to 500 lumens of light. An LED light will produce about 450 lumens but will only use 8 watts. That means that the LED light will be almost as bright as the incandescent bulb but will be using a fifth of its energy! You are better off looking at the lumens as these will guide you better. If you don’t know this, you can end up forgoing energy efficiency in the name of brightness. You can still have your cake and eat it.
How bright should your lighting be? It depends on the room. Take the example of a dining room where you want to have a calming and relaxed atmosphere. 3000-6000 lumens would be appropriate, and you can try dimming the lights to achieve even more coziness. However, when dealing with bathrooms, you want to have brighter lighting. 4000-8000 lumens would be suitable for such a space. Also, do not forget the task lighting for the mirror, which should be about 2000 lumens.
The Style
Have you ever heard of layering light? While this is not a new concept, it seems to have caught on fast over the last few years. It’s an easy way to impart ambiance and interest in a room by highlighting the room’s size and shape. For example, with the proper lighting, a small space can look much larger than it is. You can use lighting to accentuate some parts of the room to avoid focusing on others you may not want to highlight. Do you want an example? Take pendants as an example. When you hang these at standard heights, the room feels normal. However, when you position them low, they create the illusion of a high ceiling, and the room suddenly feels bigger. Think about what you want to convey and use lighting to achieve this.
The Convenience
We are going to introduce another aspect here- smart lighting. With digital technology taking the forefront and paving the way for simplicity, it makes sense that lighting would also follow. You now have the option to use smart lighting, which you can control over your WIFI. What a way to have control over the color, dimming, and operation of your lights!
With LED lights, you will not go wrong as far as energy efficiency goes. These lights can last for as many as 25,000 hours, come at affordable prices, and do not eat into your energy bill like traditional lights. Additionally, they are now available in various designs, and you can find those that match your décor perfectly.