Understanding the Basics to Choosing Lights for your Home/Business

Getting your keys to your new home or embarking on a new business venture soon? It doesn’t matter if your keys are for BTO/Resale, Condominium, Terraced-house, Bungalows or even for your newly bought/leased premises for your business. Lux-Lumens is here to help you understand the basics of lights so that you may to choose the perfect fit, catered to your needs.

There are 3 basic parameters of lights that you need to comprehend to choose the correct specification for a lighting fixture. They are Lux, Lumens and Watts.

Lux – Measure of Illuminance

Lux is the measure of illuminance to give you an idea of how much light is being cast over a given surface. One LUX is denoted by the symbol (lx) and is equivalent to 1 lumen (lm) per square meter. Do note that the height of your ceiling from where the lighting fixture is installed will affect the lux [See Figure 1].

1.  The relation between distance and light source

Source: Panasonic

Therefore, if you intend to install super chio & atas pendant lightings, you must be acutely aware of the height the pendant lighting is to your floor area.

Most pendant lighting comes with a cord length of 1m-1.2m (adjustable to a shorter length), therefore the most strategic height would be to have your super chio & atas pendant lighting hung up, is about 40cm from your ceiling in most homes.

This ensures that the light source is approximately 1.5m away from the floor area (considering the height of the lamp’s body). We have all the height of the pendant lights we sell in the ‘specifications’ tab when you select a product you wish to find out more about.

The reason why this is applicable to pendant lighting is that the light emitted from the bulb/led of a pendant lighting is most often than not restricted by the lamp’s body into a conical focused beam of light. Therefore, the lower your light is hanging, the less visible light is emitted to your surroundings. Unless you specifically want the pendant light to cast a focused light on the dining table or kitchen island counter, then hang it as low as you can go.

However, you do not have to worry too much about ceiling lights since most of them do not have restricted angles in which lights are beamed. Lux-Lumen’s LED Ceiling lights have a relatively wide beam angle of 160 degrees. That is sufficient to allow the spread of light evenly across a given area.

Lumens – Measure of visible light emitted from a fixture

Lumens (lm) is the measure of the light we see emitted from our light source. In other words, it can also be used to determine the brightness of the light. The lumens value is usually provided on the packaging of light bulbs. For example, you can see that the lumens value is 800 lumens in a Philips Hue Light Bulb below:

However, there may also be instances where the lumens are not stated on the packaging of bulbs such as smart bulbs because there are other (more important) specifications stated on it:

When you encounter this, fret not, simply use the wattage value to determine the lumens of the lightbulb (Confirm have wattage, don’t have, please PM with pictures, I give you 20% off your purchase).

A good approximation of the lumens would be 1W = 90 lumens. Therefore, the smart bulb’s lumens can be determined by multiplying the wattage by 90 lumens. For example, 7W x 90 lumens = 630 lumens

Watts – Measure of rate of energy transfer

Watts (W) is the measure of the power consumed by your light source. This measurement is familiar to most of us. We used to choose light sources by the Wattage on the light bulb or fluorescent tube’s packaging. The higher the rating, the brighter the light will shine.

That was a long time ago ladies & gentlemen, this no longer works because older light sources such as incandescent and even halogen bulbs are not as efficient as LED light bulbs/sources these days.

An old incandescent bulb (admittedly looks super chio with the tungsten lighted up), consumes much more power than a modern-day LED bulb. A 40W incandescent bulb is equivalent to today’s 6-9W light bulb. An incandescent bulb may draw 40W of power but will only convert less than half of that to produce light. Therefore, when choosing your light bulbs/source these days, you may have to use lumens to get a more accurate result.

But if you die-die want to have those super chio incandescent bulbs that will illuminate your vintage-themed homes/business, lucky for you, there are LED (Incandescent) bulbs that mimic the old-school styled ones and ranges from 4w-12w.

Because Ceiling LED lights do not use light bulbs, but a LED chips that emit light and placed on a back-plate, we usually only have the wattage as the specification. So, for example, a 36W Ceiling light with 0.9 power factor and which is suitable for a bedroom can be determined to have approximately 3240 lumens. The values differ according to the efficiency of the LED chips used but is generally does not differ much since LEDs have an efficiency of about 90% from the power it draws.

Now that you have the foundation set, you may anticipate the next post where Lux-Lumens will go into details to help you calculate LUMENS based on pre-determined, approximate LUX values and floor area