The Secrets of Perfect Home Lighting: 10 Creative Home Lighting Ideas

Needless accidents are caused by poor lighting in the home – and bad lighting can also damage the eyes, cause headaches or aggravate depression. So it is important to know how to make proper home lighting and know the secrets of perfect home lighting and be well-aware of 10 creative home lighting ideas. So an investment in good lighting will also benefit your family’s health. Good lighting in the home means having the right amount of light for both comfort and efficiency. Ideally, this means a suitable background level of light in each room, to stop you stumbling about, with extra lighting at points where particular activities are carried out. How much light each individual thinks is suitable varies greatly, but as a general rule, more concentrated activities like sewing or reading will require more light than watching TV or having a meal. Remember that lighting can affect your mood also – and a gloomy home will have an equally gloomy atmosphere.

Is your home lighting adequate:

A basic test of your home lighting is to ask yourself a few questions. Does it seem to take you much longer to cook and prepare food in the evening? Can you see properly when you put on your make-up? Do you ever trip over the outside kitchen step? Do you get headaches after reading for long periods? If the answer is ‘yes’ to most of these, you could need to readjust the lighting of your home. Sometimes, just a change of lampshade may be all that is needed. It is not wise to put up the inconvenience caused by poor lighting. One day you might cut yourself badly in the kitchen, or twist your ankle on the unlit step. If you suffer from eye trouble, reading in poor light will put more strain on your eyes.

Problems caused by poor home lighting:

Too little light and too much of the wrong sort of light can both be problems. Working in a poor light on any detailed task like reading or embroidery produces sensations of fatigue and discomfort. If a light source is directly in your line of sight, or when too bright a light is reflected off a surface, such as a magazine page, uncomfortable glare will result. Providing an additional light source will make detailed work easier, while resetting the light fitting will deal with the unpleasant glare.

How this is done usually calls for a compromise. Most of us have to make use of light sockets and fittings already in the apartment or house where we live. Where these are not in the ideal place, the answer is to make as much use as possible of movable fittings such as standard lamps, tracking lights, table lamps and pendant lights. A person engaged in reading should ideally have a light shining over his or her left shoulder (if right-handed) and vice versa, and angled so that there is no glare off the page. Since such a fitting may be impracticable, a standard lamp with a carefully chosen shade may be the best solution. It may also be worth having new sockets and extra light fittings installed when your home is next being redecorated.

If the light source is fixed, the elimination of glare may entail rearranging your work area, unless a lower wattage bulb is the solution. One measure you can take is to fit a movable pendant lamp over the desk or table and then move the pendant up or down to find the height which cuts down glare.

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How to make perfect home lighting in different parts of your home:

The lighting that is needed in each room of your home depends on several factors: the size oof each room, its decoration and the activity that is carried on it. In some places, extra brightness will be needed to enable detailed activities to be carried out.

• Bedrooms: Children’s bedrooms need two or three times as much general lighting, since so much time is spent playing there, while adult bedrooms, on the other hand, can take a low level of background illumination – but extra light may be needed for reading in bed. It is useful, too, to have a switch by the bed, as well as near door. Lighting outside the house, near front and back doors is an essential safety measure, especially for the elderly.
• Garage: Since tools and machinery are often left in the garage, a reasonable level of lighting is also necessary.
• Living room: In a living room many activities may take place. Instead of overall lighting it is better to illuminate areas for sewing, reading or TV against a general background oof light from a central fitting. Fluorescent tubes, although too clinical looking for living rooms, are four times as efficient as ordinary light bulbs.
• Kitchen: In the kitchen, a single central fitting usually means that you are working in your own shadows, so extra light for various areas like sinks and work surfaces is needed. Fluorescent tubes come in tones that will not distort the appearance of the food, nor be too cold-looking.
• Bathroom: In a bathroom, fluorescent lights give excellent light for making-up, especially if they are fixed on either side of a mirror.
• Stairs: Do not stint on lighting for hallways and stairs, especially on bends.

10 Creative Home Lighting Ideas:

• Use LED Lighting: Consider using LED lights throughout your home as they are energy-efficient, long-lasting and come in various colors. LED tubes are about four times as efficient as filament bulbs of the same wattage, and although more expensive to install, they are also economical to run.

 

 

• Use light surface: Another point to bear in mind is that dark surfaces absorb more of the available light than light surface. So a room with dark walls and ceiling will need more wattage than a similar sized room with lighter decoration.
• Use ambient lighting: This is general, overall lighting that illuminates the entire room. Ceiling fixtures and recessed lights are commonly used for ambient lighting.
• Use Task Lighting: In some cases, instead of overall lighting, it is better to illuminate some specific areas that helps you to perform specific tasks like sewing, reading, make-up etc. Task lighting is used to focus on that particular tasking areas.
• Use Accent Lighting: Accent lighting is used to highlight specific areas, objects, architectural objects or artwork in the room. Here the use of track lighting, picture-lights, spotlights may come under the accent lighting. Accent light will enable the light to shine exactly where it is needed.

 

 

• Use Dimmers and Smart Lighting: Consider installing dimmers and smart lighting for adjustable lighting levels to create the desired ambiance. Smart lighting systems allow you to control and automate your lights using smartphones or voice commands. Smart lighting allows you more flexibility to access and customize your lights in bedrooms and living-rooms.
• Natural Light: In day time, it will be very acceptable fact to maximize the use of natural light by keeping windows and ventilation unobstructed and using transparent curtains that allow light to enter your living-rooms, rest-rooms and bedrooms.
• Lighting Design: When planning your home lighting, think about the function, mood, and size of each room. It is very important to consider the room size and color of rooms. You should think efficiently about the shades of light because the function of a shade is to cut down the glare that would come from a naked lamp bulb.
• Lighting levels: To find the amount of lighting you need for each room in square meters or feet, measure length and multiply by width of room. Then work out the amount of wattage needed in each room, kitchen, bathroom. For example, wattage of fluorescent light needed per square meter of bedroom is 7 watts (double for children), for kitchen 15 watts, for bathroom 7 watts, for halls and stairways 15 watts.
• Regular cleaning: Remember, too that bulbs and shades need regular cleaning, as accumulated dust can cut down the amount of light available.

FAQs:

Q. My son insists on reading by flashlight under the covers when he goes to bed. Will this harm his eyes?

Ans: Not unless he is already suffering from some kind of eye trouble, since the young eye is very adaptable. But do encourage him to come out into the open by providing him with a light over his bed. He will probably appreciate far more of what he reads if he does it in comfort.

Q. Our bathroom has no window and so has no natural light. We find that the light in there is very dim by day and bright at night. Is there any way round this?

Ans: If you fix a dimmer switch, which adjusts the level of light, you can have a brighter light by day when you need it, bit a less glaring light in the evening. A dimmer switch can be very useful in children’s bedrooms, too, since the light can be dimmed right down to provide a night-light.

Q. I find it difficult to focus in the dark. Is this unusual?

Ans: The eye is very well designed and will function efficiently in unlit or poorly lit places, if it is given time to d so. It cannot adjust immediately from a brightly lit room to a dark garden, but a few minutes in the dark will accustom it to the change. You may notice the same effect when you go to the cinema.

Q. Our dinning table is used for various activities. We eat there, the children do their homework on it, and later I often use it for sewing. What is the best way to light it?

Ans: A movable pendant lamp over the table will allow you to adjust the light source, by raising or lowering it, so that you can have a lower level of light for eating, but higher levels for some other activities. As a simple rule, choose each position so that the light bulb is out of the line of sight of the people performing any particular activity. The aim is to prevent thelight bulb from being in any way dazzling or distracting.