We need advice

13 years ago

Our living room lighting has problems. It's about 26 by 15 feet. It has a vaulted ceiling and 2 skylights and French doors leading to the rear deck on both sides of the fireplace.

We use the room all the time and can't seem to get the lighting right. It's often too dark for what we want to do. We have floor lamps on either side of the sofa, two table lamps on other areas of the room. We also have recessed lights in the ceiling that sort of flood light around the fireplace. And we also have a light in the ceiling fan that casts only a dim light around the room -- that was a mistake, because it does not give the kind of light we need and does not produce anything like the sort of atmosphere we would like in the room.

I should add that this room has been very hard to furnish because it is also the pathway from the front foyer to the dining room and kitchen.

Questions: Should we replace the recessed lights with something else? Pendants would probably not work because too close to the ceiling fan. Should we keep the recessed lights and get more of them? If we decide to replace lamp shades, what should we get that will throw off light and yet produce a kind of atmosphere appropriate for a living room? Should we hire somebody to help us with this problem -- who, and how to identify the right person? Any other advice on the general approach would be helpful.

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Comments (3)

DavidR
13 years ago
Recessed cans are good for highlighting room features (like your fireplace) but rather poor for general lighting. I wouldn't add any more. They'll just eat electricity, provide a path for heat to leak out through the extra ceiling holes, and not help much.

I'm not a lighting fashion expert, more interested in practicality, so I might start by fitting a new light kit (or if necessary a new ceiling fan) to get more light from that source. Flanking it along the long dimension of the room with two or more additional surface mount or high-hung fixtures would add more light and make it more even.

Other possibilities are sconces scattered round the walls, and cove lighting to flood the ceiling with indirect light.

You might also try retrofitting some or all of your standalone floor and table lamps with extra large compact fluorescents (kind of like jumbo shrimp :). GE makes a 55w CF that produces 3860 lumens, and TCP has a 68w, 4200 lumen CF. There are others even brighter, but these get rather huge and that causes fitment problems.
fandlil
Original Author
13 years ago
Thanks for your comments, davidr. Esp the recommendation for extra large compact fluorescents. That might make a real difference. I've been feeling less and less happy with incandescents. They burn out too fast, and use too much juice. The interesting thing with CFLs is that they sometimes take a moment or two to get to the point that they produce their maximum light. When you first turn them on, they look a little dim -- something to get used to.
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DavidR
13 years ago
I haven't used any significant number of incandescent lamps (except in very infrequently used fixtures) for years. I started using CFs in the early 1990s, when they were pricey and quite a bit less refined, and I've never looked back.

CFs vary in how dim they are at first, and how long it takes for them to come to full brightness. Some of mine are really dim when first started, and others - not so much.

I've seen some manufacturers advertise that theirs have little or no "warmup." I recently looked into Neolite low mercury CFs and they make such a claim. That's only one example, and I mention it only because it's something I saw recently.

Mostly, though, I haven't followed up on this because I've never been much bothered by the warmup.