Choosing the right mix of LED lighting - LED lighting education
Announcement posted by Light Online Australia 28 Jan 2016
3 Kinds of Light – Choosing the right mix of LED lighting
One essential (but neglected) aspect of your home’s lighting design is the right mix of brightness levels. You want to be able to chill in comfort – in the exact same space where you’ll also very probably eat, read, watch TV or even work from home.
That means your LED lights really need to be designed and installed with flexibility in mind.
Background vs Feature vs Working Lights
At LightOnline, whenever we’re working on a new LED project, we start by splitting its light-sources between three different light levels:
- Background light
- Feature light
- Working light
Depending on the location and its range of uses, a project may need one, two or all three types of lighting. Let’s discuss each in a little more detail below.
Background Lighting
Flat, even lighting. Background light is the equivalent of traditional home ceiling light sources. LEDs can provide this kind of illumination easily and efficiently (we recommend warm white 5W or 10W LED tapes for the purpose, depending on the size of the location) – but to get full advantage from the possibilities LEDs offer, you’ll want to consider adding Feature lights and Working lights too.
Feature Lighting
Accent or decorative lighting. These are the lights that give your room warmth and detail. Use brighter LEDs to highlight fixtures and points of interest, and more subtle LEDs to add texture. Feature lights can include plinth and under-cabinet LED tapes in kitchens, drop ceilings, LED spotlights and LED colour strip lights in living rooms, or cool white highlights in bathrooms to pick up mirrors and porcelain surfaces.
Working Lighting
Lights to let you see clearly and concentrate. Working lights are bright and focused on locations where you need to see what you’re doing.
Your LED working light needs to fit with your task. Kitchen countertops need bright uniform lights for food preparation. If you’re reading in bed, then some well-placed working light will stop you straining your eyes. In a workshop environment, good illumination is essential to get the job done right, whether you’re doing car maintenance or DIY. And with the number of people freelancing and working from home skyrocketing over the past five years, there’s a lot of us who want to create a professional-standard office space at home.
Colouring In with LEDs
Most LED home lighting projects are built around white LEDs. But even with white light, there are still choices to be made. The majority of our customers like white light with a warm (rich, earthy yellow) tint, which matches traditional halogen lights – especially in living spaces, dining rooms and bedrooms. But for kitchens or bathrooms, office spaces, or for very contemporary homes, you can think about using cool whites instead.
Cool white working light for food preparation
White light is measured on the colour temperature (Kelvin) scale, with warm whites rating approximately 3000 Kelvin and cool whites around 5000 Kelvin. Warm whites are great for relaxing, while cooler shades produce better light to work by. For comparison, overhead daylight is rated at roughly 5000k.
For feature lighting, LEDs let you do far more with colours. You can add single-colour accent lights in red, green, blue or amber – or why not give yourself more control and more possibilities by installing LightOnline’s colour changing LED strip lights? Available in RGB or RGBW versions, these brilliant market-leading LED products let you mix light to create literally millions of shades and colours at the touch of an easy-to-use control.