Get Your Home’s Recessed Lighting Right

Learn the formula for how much light a room needs plus how to space downlights, use multiple type of lights and more.

Lighting is an important element in any interior design. Your home look thrives with the right mix of lighting, and recessed lighting is a big part of that success. Well-placed recessed lighting can highlight the best feature in the room and help you to focus on the task at hand (reading, writing, drawing, etc). Check out the tips below on how to get your home’s recessed lighting right.

Get the Right number.

Getting the right number of lights is essential for your home. You don’t wish to be too dim or too bright. Here’s a handy formula to figure out how much lighting your room needs: Multiply the length of room (L) by the width (W) to find the total area. Multiply the area by 0.025 to find the estimate number of lighting.

For example: if your room is 15 feet wide and 23 feet long, the total area is 345 square feet. Multiply 345 by 0.025 and you’ll get 8.6, so you’ll need around 8-9 piece of lights to have sufficient brightness in your room.

Note: This formula is a “general guideline” of the number of lights that make up efficient brightness in your room. The number of lights may vary depends on the interior design and choice of lights (but in this case, we use LED Downlight 12W as our case studies).

Space your fixtures evenly.

You now know the estimate number of lights needed for your room, next step is to space them evenly. Light spacing is a very important process in light planning because you want a balance and equal light emission in all place.

The general rule is measure at least 2 – 3 feet off all your walls, divide your downlight around the room evenly and leave at least 3 feet between each fixture. Of course these are general guidelines, adjustment need to be make depending on the space available. This is the process where you decide the “actual” number of light in the room. Sometimes you need to add or remove a downlight to place the light evenly.

Use Different mixture of Downlight.

A normal recessed LED Downlight are usually wide-angle light illumination that provide well-balance light for overall space. You can use mixture of narrow angle downlight (Spotlight) to create focal point in the room. Most of the interior designers use Spotlight to highlight features in the room such as painting, furniture and even wardrobe.

Tip: Getting the lighting in bathroom working effectively can be tricky. Usually a mix of several types of lighting will give the best result. Here’s the key, try install spotlight fitted close to the mirror. Space them evenly so that the light output overlaps from other’s.

Side Note: If you are building a new home or doing major renovation, take your floor plan to reputable lighting retailer and ask for a lighting plan. A detailed plan will make everything clear for your electrician and save your money in long run.