The new year is here, and it’s time to give your home’s lighting a new look. If you want to make your home feel entirely different with a completely new lighting setup, you should speak with professional electricians. But in the meantime, follow these easy tips to start bringing more light into your home life.
Replace Older Lamps and Path Lights
Replace old lamps and garden path lights that aren’t working that well anymore. Old lamps can start to fail after many years. Path lights can break down. And if they’re solar lights, the little solar cells can become less effective. Replace them with new items that use electricity or store solar power more efficiently.
Consider Different Bulb Temperatures
If you’re using LEDs, the bulb’s light color is linked to the bulb’s temperature, measured in Kelvin, or K. Changing the color of the light and the temperature of the bulb can really give a room a new look.
Lower values, such as 2,000 K, give off yellowish lights. If you go too low on that scale, you end up with light that’s almost orange and not very bright. Much higher values, such as around 8,000 K, give off light with a blue tint. These are ideal when used in Christmas lights. But for room lighting, these temperatures are too cold and harsh. Temperatures in the middle (think 3,000 K to 6,000 or 7,000 K) are in the natural to daylight range and work well in homes.
Seek out Dark Corners
Look in each room for corners that seem unusually dark. These can be the actual room corners or corners formed where your furniture meets the wall. You don’t have to get rid of all the shade in the room, but overly dark areas need more light. Move some furniture and let more light from a nearby window hit that area. Or, you can try adding a floor lamp or wall sconce to lift the darkness.
Add Accent Lighting
Finally, add some accent lights. These can be small desk lamps, adhesive strips of LED lights for shelves, a well-placed spotlight over artwork, or another small light that shows off different spots in your home. Adding these small lights can really make a difference in how bright a room seems, even if the lights themselves aren’t that big or bright.
For example, if you have a bookcase with books, the spaces just above each row of books may seem kind of dark. That happens even if the bookcase itself is in a fairly well-lit area. Add strips of LED lights to the underside of each shelf, which will make those dark spaces disappear. But you’ll also notice there’s a cumulative effect of the room lighting plus the shelf lighting. That effect makes that part of the room seem even more well-lit than you’d expect.
Give Pride of Tucson a call to discuss a new lighting design plan for your Tucson, AZ, home.