Recessed lighting the Lotus Way
LED Recessed Lighting
Let’s brighten your life.
Recessed lighting is one of the best ways to increase how you love your home whether you want to illuminate dimly lit space for general or task lighting or to wash walls to create dramatic accent lighting for art work or architectural detailing. One of the most common uses of LED recessed is to install the fixtures in ceilings, soffits and custom woodwork for down lighting. Other uses include installing LED recessed lights in walls and in the ground to light pathways, steps and other features for ambient, accent and general lighting.
With all the options available, it can be difficult to know where to begin. We, at Lotus Construction Group, can help create a simple, yet elegant, lighting plan using LED recessed light fixtures to compliment and enhance your lighting needs.
The two main components of LED recessed lighting fixtures are:
LED recessed lighting housings
The housing is the part that is installed into the ceiling, wall or ground and contains a junction box for wiring connections and clips or brackets for mounting the can. There are two basic types of housings: New Construction and Cut-in or remodeling cans.
If you are remodeling your home and have the framing exposed, there are more options for placement and types of lighting housings. Remodeling cans are installed in locations where you are not removing drywall for installation. It is still helpful to have access to the area where they are installed to run wires to minimize patching of wall and ceiling material.
Knowing which type of housing you can use will determine the available trims that can be installed into the housing. You will want to purchase them together to make sure they are compatible.
LED recessed lighting trim
The trim is what is visible to the you. There are a few basic types of trims, down lights, wall washers, accent and up lights with an endless variety of finishes and shapes, lumens and color.
LED recessed lighting terms: Lumens, Kelvin and CRI
The term Lumen refers to the unit of measurement used for the brightness of light.
Led lighting has the lowest energy consumption to produce an equivalent luminosity.
As an example, a 60 watt incandescent bulb that generates 800 Lumens of light is equivalent to a compact fluorescent using about 13-15 watts and an LED which uses 8-12 watts of power. With this in mind, you can see how updating your lighting fixtures to an LED system can save enormous amounts of energy, not to mention reduction in heat gain that comes from the older halogen and incandescent bulbs. Imagine an older home that uses 20-60-watt incandescent bulbs. This outdated lighting system uses a whopping 1200 watts of power consumed compared to 20 LED bulbs using only 240 watts of power.
The term Kelvin refers to the unit of measurement used to describe the hue or color of a light source.
An incandescent bulb represented on the Kelvin scale is 2700K (warm incandescent), white halogen bulbs are 3000K and household fluorescent bulbs are 3500K.
Color temperature greater than 3500K are considered too harsh to use in residential lighting.
Choosing the color temperature of your LED recessed lights carefully is paramount to creating a successful lighting plan.
The term CRI is an acronym for Color Rendering Index or how colors look when compared to sunlight. The index is measured from 0-100, 100 representing how colors appear under natural sunlight.
This rating is used by the lighting industry to discern naturalness, hue discrimination, vividness and color harmony.
It is important to consider using lights that are greater than 90CRI to be able to transform a space by highlighting architectural details, artwork and to imbue an overall natural environment
As one last economical option, you may be able to remove the existing trim of your current recessed lights and install a retrofit fixture. You will need a qualified electrician to inspect the current system to see what’s possible. Most halogen recessed lighting systems have transformers that will need to be disabled in order for the new line voltage LED fixture to function.
Hopefully this page has helped you navigate all the terms and educated you on the basics of LED recessed lighting. Give us a call to schedule an appointment to evaluate a customized lighting plan for your home.
