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People are now beginning to realize that they can get as much light quantity and quality from LED bulbs as traditional bulbs. Moreover, they are enjoying massive cost savings. While the initial costs may be slightly higher than what you would spend on traditional bulbs, the low maintenance needs and reduced utility costs more than make up for this. So, how can you use LED lighting in your home?

Using LED Lights at Home

Positioning lights has never been easy, whether you are working with Lepro RGB LED strip lights or opting for the same old ones. But guess what? LED lights serve pretty much the same purposes as other kinds of lights. In most rooms, you need three kinds of lights:

• Accent,
• Ambient, and
• Task.

All these lights serve their different uses and cannot be ignored in favor of the other. Take Lepro 50ft RGB LED strip lights as an example. These LED lights can work wonders in accent lighting and can also contribute to task and ambient lighting. But what do all these categories mean, and how can you hack them all?

Accent Lighting

Accent lighting falls into a decorative category and is used to draw attention to a focal point. For example, if you have an art piece on your wall, you will want to illuminate it and ensure that people’s eyes feel drawn to the piece. Using task and ambient lighting is not enough to achieve this dramatic effect. Instead, you want a light that will only focus on the art piece and shadow the surrounding areas. That’s why art shows often lean on this form of lighting when showcasing their art pieces. This type of lighting is common in collections, displays, highlighting architectural designs, and even wall washing. You can use it both indoors and outdoors to achieve your desired look. Which LED lights can you use for accent lighting?

Recessed Lights

In the past, many people looked at recessed lights (also known as can lights) as ceiling lights. While they often sit flush on the ceiling, they also work for other parts of the room, including the floors and walls. For a wall washing effect, you cannot go wrong with these LED lights. Besides, LED lights emit minimal heat and can remain in the hollows without damaging the electrical components.

Track Lights

These LED lights are much more visible than recessed lights. For this reason, you can get more out of them when using a few pieces at a time. Their aesthetic makes them visually appealing, and while they can enhance art pieces and other spaces, they can also serve as visual focuses. Set them in a series in a room of your choice. For example, setting these around a kitchen island would create an ideal dining area in your home.

Ambient Lighting

It’s almost impossible to come across a room that does not feature ambient lighting (aka general lighting). It features a glow that spreads through the room, almost touching every surface and making each aspect visible to the human eye. To better put it, ambient lighting creates a natural light vibe and is often like daylight. This lighting does not draw attention to a specific point in the room but rather provides uniform lighting across the space. Given its effect on the entire space, you must be careful with the color temperatures. When lighting bedrooms and living rooms, and other spaces used for relaxation, lean towards warmer temperatures. But when lighting kitchens, bathrooms, and home offices, go for cooler tones that encourage productivity and make spaces much safer. You can think of ambient lighting as an easy way to impart a mood in spaces.

LED light options, in this case, include:

Pendant Lighting

Have you ever seen pendants not light up a space? These lights, which are also available in LED options, come in a range of styles and sizes. You can even choose how you will place them in the room, adding to their versatility. For ambient lighting, go with clear or light shades that will bathe the room with light. They can be used anywhere from the kitchen to the bedroom, and your creative juices can help you decide what feels most suitable for your space.

Ceiling Lighting

You can install flush or semi-flush ceiling lights in your kitchen, bathroom, or outdoors. For a recessed vibe, you can go with the flush look, or you can decide to let the housing show and have a bit of clutter in the aesthetic. Once again, go with light shades for an ambient appeal. Please note that recessed and track lights also work as ambient lights. However, to create a uniform look, you will use them throughout the room, unlike in accent lighting, where you focus on a specific section.

Task Lighting

While accent and ambient lights are great in their rights, they cannot hold a candle to task lighting to accomplish specific tasks. For example, if you want to read a book in the living room, it’s hard to do so based on accent or ambient lighting alone. Instead, you need directed light that focuses on the book to make your reading easier. The same goes for cooking, cleaning, or performing any other task that needs your focus. Why task lighting? Brain stimulation! LED task lights are great in creating a contrast that signals your brain to be much more alert about its surroundings. This attention to detail can help you avoid costly errors. While you can always use pendant lights for task lighting, let’s consider another LED light that has become very popular in recent times:

Under the Cabinet Lighting

Do you ever struggle to pay attention to what’s happening underneath your kitchen cabinets? It makes sense that you would, given that this section is often shaded. Under-cabinet LED lights illuminate these nooks and enable you to have more control over your tasks. Besides, they also make your kitchen more visually appealing.

Out of these five ideas, which one would you be willing to try?

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It was announced not so long ago that General Electric, one of the biggest US manufacturers of light bulbs, would be ceasing to produce its compact fluorescent lighting (CFL) products. CFL bulbs have been around since the ’80s. They were always marketed as an energy saving alternative to the incandescent bulbs invented a century before. However, the CFL bulb never really made the impact it was expected to, and now, with LED coming down in price, CFL has effectively met with redundancy.

But why are LEDs so much better than CFL that, now that their original high cost has been dealt with by better manufacturing and economies of scale, they have basically made CFL a thing of the past?

More Practical

One of the main things people disliked about the old energy saving CFL bulbs was their unappealing shape and design, which, unless you wanted to cover the bulb completely, didn’t look very nice as part of your home’s décor. Additionally, using CFL bulbs in smaller, feature lights wasn’t really practical. Another problem was that these bulbs took a while to reach their full brightness after turning them on, which may sound like a small price to pay for better energy efficiency, but could actually be very annoying and impractical.

LEDs have none of these problems, and yet still beat CFL on energy efficiency.

Outdoor Use

LED lights are incredibly well suited to outdoor use and can be used in ways that would have been no good at all with CFL. Security lights that come on in an instant when motion is detected, for example, or ultra-bright floodlights. Even decorative outdoor lights such as Christmas decorations are now almost always LED, and whatever lighting you want for your outdoor areas an LED option is almost always available, and far cheaper to run than any other type of lighting. There are even companies like https://www.voltlighting.com/ who specialize in outdoor LED.

Better Light Effects

As the incandescent bulb has been around for all of living memory, this is the kind of lighting people have become accustomed to. As a result, when CFL arrived on the market, many consumers found they didn’t like the lighting effect it provided, feeling it wasn’t bright enough or gave a weird color. With LED, all colors are possible, and so while it is always an option to have blue, red, pink, green, or even color-changing lights as a feature, for normal use, you have a choice of white light tones that range from a warm, yellowish light similar to an incandescent bulb, or a starker, blue-toned white that gives a sharp, modern feel. Whatever your home’s style, you can transform your space with lighting tricks to change the ambience and mood of a space. LED lights make this possible.

Choosing the style of white light that you want and how bright you want it to be is something LED users can do as standard for every light in their home, so it is possible to vary the light effects between rooms depending on what the room is used for and its décor.

As you can see, LED is truly streets ahead of CFL, and it seems nobody is likely to mourn the old style of energy saving bulb now LED has hit an affordable price point.