The Homeowners Comprehensive Guide to Lighting (part 2)

Lighting Basics

Rules of thumb for selecting lamps for the right color

Task, Accent and Art lighting use halogen or xenon lamps.  Small voltage lamps such as PAR halogen or MR16 work better for art because they throw their heat back, away from the object.

General Lighting.  Compact fluorescent and PAR halogen work will, but make sure the compact fluorescents have a color temperature of about 3500K (they range from 2700 to 6500K).  If you use fluorescent tubes, choose lamps with a CRI over 80 and a color temperature of 3000 - 3500K.

Dining lighting.  Incandescent lamps are hard to beat for the soft, warm lighting they case on food and people's skin, even though they are not energy efficient.

Lighting Types

The Homeowners Comprehensive Guide to Lighting

Lighting Basics

To effectively light a home enough of the right kind of light for the occupants to function within the space is required.  This can mean anything from highlighting a treasured masterpiece on a wall, enabling the pool shark to line up their shot without shadows, or creating a relaxing mood to unwind after a stressful day.

Through-out this series we will take you through the different terminology, types and functions of various lights while providing tips for you to utilize in your upcoming renovation.  Stayed tuned every Tuesday for the next article.

This weeks article will cover some terminology that will help you understand upcoming articles better.

Terminology

Lighting intensity is measured in Lumens (lum).  In the Metric System, one lumen is the amount of light energy that falls on a spherical surface of one square meter, produced by a single candle.  The American System uses Footcandles (fc), where on fc is the amount of light that falls on a square foot of spherical surface at a distance of one foot from the candle.  The relationship between lumens and footcandles is 1lum = 12.57 fc.  

Color Temperature is an index of how the light source, itself, looks to us, measured in degrees Kelvin (K).  Warm light sources have color temperatures less than 3000K.  Light sources between 3000K and 4000K are considered neutral in color.  Anything above 4000K is cool.

Color Rendition is an index of how the light makes objects appear.  How accurately a lighting source defines objects is measured by the Color Rendering Index (CRI).  The best score is 100, the CRI of sunlight.

Both Color Temperature and Color Rendition are important because sources with the same CRI can produce different moods at different color temperatures and artifical light sources vary widely in their color rendering indices.