Placement Of Lights As Important As Wattage
Q. I’m setting up a home office where I plan to work a couple of days a week. My work space will also include a computer. How should I light this area? Will a 100-watt light bulb do the trick?
A. You’re smart to ask these questions. Many people don’t think about effective lighting when putting together a home office, and they should. The solution is not necessarily a bright light as much as the right amount of light in the right place. Fortunately, the principles of good lighting design and energy efficiency go hand in hand.
Bright light within your field of vision can cause excessive glare and eyestrain. Instead of a 100-watt bulb, perhaps a bulb with much lower wattage placed closer to the work area will do. Use a small desk-top task light designed to aim light only where you point it. That’s better than a table lamp, which sends diffuse light in all directions.
Choose efficiency While you’re thinking about lighting options, don’t overlook recent advances in energy efficiency. That desk lamp, for instance, works perfectly well with a low-wattage compact fluorescent lamp. You have two options. Use a screw-base fluorescent bulb in place of an incandescent bulb, if you find one that fits, or start with a fixture designed to use fluorescent tubes with pin-bases.
Fluorescent lighting is about four times more efficient than incandescent and creates less glare. Look for the better color tubes with “rare-earth” phosphors, if you’re not comfortable with conventional cool white and warm white colors. Rareearth phosphors improve efficiency and the color-rendering index (CRI). A CRI of 80 or higher is recommended.
A few cautions are in order. There is a wide range in the quality of fluorescent fixtures. Higher-quality fluorescent lighting usually commands higher prices. Be sure you can return a product if, for example, you end up with a noisy light. Also, some electronic fluorescents may cause interference with other electronic equipment, including computers, phones and VCRs. You may need to choose a different fluorescent lamp or plug it into a separate circuit. Surge suppression and electrical “noise” filtering equipment are good ideas nowadays for many of your electronic appliances.
Other lighting considerations include positioning the fixture and controlling unwanted light. Lighting your work from the side reduces shadows and reflected glare. An adjustable fixture has the advantage of satisfying different lighting needs. Many new task lights designed for desk work include parabolic reflectors and louvers that effectively direct light without glare.
Next, eliminate any overly bright or dark areas in your immediate surroundings. Repeatedly adjusting your eyes to contrasting light conditions leads to eyestrain. Bright windows can be darkened with blinds or drapes. Do bright lights across the room reflect off your computer screen? Mounting wall sconces or fluorescent tubes behind a cove or bracket is a good way to provide low-level background lighting by reflecting light off walls and ceilings.
Adapting a common bending-arm fixture offers a low-cost option for lighting your desk. While this type of fixture typically uses a 60- or 75-watt incandescent bulb, you can screw in a compact fluorescent instead. If the painted reflector can be removed from the fixture, you can even screw in a compact fluorescent that has its own built-in specular (mirrorlike) reflector. When you need high levels of light, say for reading fine print, aim the fixture on your work. When you are using your computer, aim the light toward the ceiling for soft, indirect lighting.
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