Incandescent light provides soft, warm yellowish light, usually used for recessed cans or downlights. Halogen lights produce a crisp white light that is appropriate for task lighting; fluorescent lights, which have a long life and low energy use, now come in many different shades from warm to cool.

The best way to light any room is with layers of general or ambient light, task light and accent light. In the kitchen, good task lighting should cover areas such as the sink, the stove, counter space and kitchen islands. If you have strong ambient light, you may not use additional task lighting in some of these areas.

Intended to highlight a specific object or area, accent lights are typically three times as bright as ambient lights. Accent lighting draws attention to a feature, such as artwork, furnishings or architectural details, converting them into focal points.

Ambient lighting is also known as general lighting, and it is used to provide light to an overall area, such as a room. Task lighting is lighting which is designed to help you accomplish a specific task. For example, in the kitchen you may want to illuminate the worktops in order to make cooking easier.

Lumens: Ambient lighting for a living room should be 1,500-3,000 lumens. Task lighting for reading should be a minimum of 400 lumens.

white

Measure your ceiling height so you know what will fit. Ceiling fixtures don’t need to match from one room to another – but should be similar in scale, style and color. Don’t mix extremely ornate fixtures with very simple styles. Choose dark finishes like black or bronze if your home has dark door hardware.

You might like to choose lighting options that are available with fully controllable dimmable features. For a nice and bright experience, LED tapes with closely spaced LEDs are a good choice. This will ensure that the area beneath the cabinet is lit properly. Cooking is by sight, sound, smell, and taste.

For the average space of 250 square feet, you’ll need roughly 5,000 lumens as your primary light source (20 lumens x 250 square feet). In your dining room, you’ll want about 30 lumens per square foot on your dining table (to see, not examine, food), so if your table is 6 x 3 feet, that’s 540 lumens.

Kitchen: 3,000 to 4,000 lumens. Dining room: 3,000 to 4,000 lumens. Living room: 1,000 to 2,000 lumens.

With this in mind, we suggest a mid-range 440 – 800 lumen bulb to light up dining areas. Warmer temperature bulbs make it appear softer – even if it’s bright! Living Room. This is the place you relax, so a softer light usually works best.

That takes lumens. Lumens measure brightness. A standard 60-watt incandescent bulb, for example, produces about 800 lumens of light. By comparison, a CFL bulb produces that same 800 lumens using less than 15 watts.

A 5000K LED bulb produces a bright daylight kind of color. So, it’s good for bathrooms, basements area and your study room. You can even use it in the kitchen when you work. A 4000K LED bulb produces a bright white or cool toned kind of color which gives a warm effect as well as bright enough to work beneath it.

5000K is part of what of is considered white light. There was one study in which they exposed human eye cells to twelve hours of light including monochromatic blue at 5 mW/cm2, and they found this to be unhealthy. It is not recommended to stare into pure blue light at close proximity for twelve hours straight.

Scientists from the U.S. and Europe warn that LED lights could be doing more harm than good: A 2012 Spanish study found that LED radiation can cause irreversible damage to the retina.

red light

Use Computer glasses or Anti-reflective lenses Computer glasses with yellow-tinted lenses that block blue light can help ease computer digital eye strain by increasing contrast. Anti-reflective lenses reduce glare and increase contrast and also block blue light from the sun and digital devices.

LED plant lights with a lot of blue and UV diodes can be harmful to our eyes. The same goes for all-white lights that emit a cooler white light (5000 Kelvin and higher). The amount of harm an LED light can cause depends on the color and the intensity. Any powerful light can hurt our eyes if we stare directly at it.

ARMD is the leading cause of vision loss in adults over 50. The ANSES report differentiates between two types of blue light: ”warm white” found in home LED lighting was found to have weak phototoxicity risks, not unlike traditional lighting.