One of the questions that we are often asked, is how much light does a room need? This is an excellent question as it demonstrates that you understand what an important factor this is to your lighting plan, yet it is a tricky one to provide a scientific answer to. It all depends on the size of the room, what you are using the room for, the ambience you are trying to create and a generous sprinkle of personal preference! There are so many different views on what is enough light, so the answer to this is subjective. Today I’m giving you the best guide there is based on experience.
As a starting point and for the scientific bit, we can start with the size of the room.
Begin my measuring the length and width of your room in meters – if you’re a feet and inches advocate, a meter is 3 feet and 3 inches, so you can multiply your imperial dimensions by this to get your metric measurements.
Next, you need to work out the surface area, which you can do by multiplying the length by the width, for example, 3 metres long times 5 metres wide is 15 square meters.
The scientific recommendation is to allow about 250 lumens per meter, so for our 15 square metre example, you would need around 3 thousand, 750 lumens. You can see another video on Lumens here if you are unsure what this means, or my colleagues at lightingcompany.co.uk will be able to help.
Back to the further help on offer to you. You can email my colleagues, they are real people that live in a real world and can give practical advice. They’ll be able to guide you better about specifics for your home and tell you what lights give what lumen output. I’d suggest telling them what types of lights you like the look of along with the height of your ceiling so that they can come up with some suggestions that give enough light and fit the size of your room. If you are not at that stage yet and simply doing your research you should sign up for our newsletter so that we can provide you with more tips, inspirations, special offers and sales.
I don’t get involved with style advice, it’s all a bit too personal, but would suggest opting for LED lights where possible and we talk about the benefits of these types of bulbs on another video. Choosing a mixture of lights, such as ceiling lights, wall lights and freestanding table or floor lights ensures that they can all be switched to vary the light level, along with installing dimmers or lighting controls. More light is definitely better than not enough when you have the ability to dim lights, or select which lights are on.
My best tip is to plan your lights when dusk is setting in – it is rare that you need all of your lights in during the day, so you will really see where your lights are needed and at what levels when the darkness sets in.
