The Language of Lighting: 10 Useful Lighting Terminologies

1. Consider the temperature of light you might want. Either a cool or warm light is measured in K (Kelvin);
   1. 2000 to 2700K and below are warm. The lower the K, the more orange the light.
      The benefits are more comfortable on the eyes when relaxing or reading.
   2. 3000K–6500K is a cooler, bluer, and whiter light and is generally used in kitchens and bathrooms.
      The benefits are that it makes things look fresh and contemporary.
   3. Dynamic white, or adjustable white, allows the light to be adjusted from warm to cool at the touch of a button. This provides total flexibility—the best of both worlds—but at a cost. As one would expect, it is more expensive.

When we look at a light, we see the entire colour spectrum blended (like a rainbow). However, not all lamps can produce 100% of the spectrum. As a result, the CRI is the percentage of the colour spectrum that your lamp or lighting fixture will display. While most LEDs start at around 80% of the spectrum and go up to approximately 97% for museum-quality lamps, the result of low CRI is that it will distort true colours, which are especially important for artworks.

Controlling the levels of light (LUX) in your space is a basic requirement that can be done via either low-tech or high-tech equipment. However, it is a must-have in lounges, dining rooms, and bedrooms. Generally, these areas benefit most from having dimming capability as your requirements during the day change. However, the use of dimmers in other locations that you will set once and rarely adjust is especially useful when trying to achieve the right lux levels.

There are plenty of charts on the internet that will give a good guide to the amount of lux required for each room in your home. Nonetheless, I would always go for more light than these indicate, as you can always dim the light back down. Obviously, in areas where difficult tasks are to be performed, you require higher levels of illumination or lux levels, for example, in kitchens.

This is the amount of light produced by the lamp and distributed across 1 square meter. For example, an LED lamp of 7.5 watts might have an output of 345 lumens, but this output will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer per wattage. Some lamps will be more efficient than others. Therefore, the higher the lumens of the lamp, the brighter the light will be. This is shown on the lamp box or light fitting specification sheet.

This system allows every light source to be controlled individually, so you could have ten lights all on the same circuit yet be able to dim any one of these independently. It works simply like having various printers on the same computer network: you pick a printer and tell that one to print, while another will print something else.

Changing the colour of the light in a room has become cheap and common. However, in my opinion, most installations look cheap and somewhat vulgar. Working with colour in your home is extremely difficult to pull off unless you are using it, for example, in a cinema room, where it might look more appropriate. However, I would always suggest a very light touch with the use of colour. Nonetheless, if you use some of the latest colour change technologies, these can also include dynamic or adjustable white lighting, which can produce any colour in the RGB spectrum. Once installed, I have found that most people only use their colour-changing lighting for the first couple of weeks as a new fad. After this period, they soon fall back to using only the more sophisticated “dynamic white” option of varying the temperatures from warm to cool.

This function allows you, at the touch of a button, to control each light channel in your space. For example, it might dim your ambient lighting by 20% (channel 1) and put your task lighting up to 100% (channel 2) while keeping the down lighting set at 50% (channel 3). Now, this could be done with dimming controls alone, but once this is set, you simply punch one button, and it adjusts to your pre-set channel levels. This example uses a 3-channel system, but you can have as many as you can afford and need. It can also control fade times. This is the time it takes to move from one scene to the next.

Most control systems now allow you to use your smartphone to set all the parameters of your lighting system, including scenes and fade times.

An electrical product’s ingress protection rating defines its ability to protect it against water, dust, or solid object intrusion. The higher the IP rating, the better it can withstand these factors. The IP rating is especially vital to consider when working in any wet areas, for example, bathrooms, kitchens, or exterior environments. You can locate a list of appropriate IP ratings on the internet and in the specification sheets of the product.