Designing your home lighting: the ultimate guide

Here is a definitive guide to learning how to design your home lighting. Carefully planning the lighting in your home is a crucial task in order to make the most of your furnishings and add personality to your space. No matter how attractive, functional and aesthetically appealing they may be, the furnishings of a space are nothing without light, which is why the design of a home cannot be separated from the lighting technology.

In this article, we will provide you with some practical tips and tricks to help you create an accurate lighting design for your living space in line with your needs.

Here is all you need to know about the new home lighting systems.

Main types of home lighting equipment

In the following paragraphs we will provide you with some important basics that you need to know in order to realise your personalised home lighting design. In order to best configure the light in your space, it is first of all important to know the main lighting systems available on the market today.

In this regard, let's start by saying that lighting engineering represents today, as in the past, a real field of design: for this reason a professional of light and lighting systems must be able to read and interpret the technical characteristics and peculiarities of each lamp and know how to position it in the space specifically identified by the project.

There is a wide variety of lamps on the market today: an initial classification can be made on the basis of the different technologies with which the instruments work and are able to produce light. For each lamp there is also an operating time before the light source is compromised. Other characteristics of a lamp are its efficiency and colour rendering: the latter is an index ranging from 0 to 100 respectively, indicating how natural colours are rendered in the environment. Here are the main types of lamps available on the market.

Incandescent lamps, what they are

Incandescent lamps are instruments which produce light by heating a special metal filament, usually tungsten. This component is heated with the aid of electricity. In particular, light is produced by electromagnetic radiation: according to this principle, a heated body will always emit electromagnetic radiation. When high temperatures are reached (above 1500 degrees Celsius), the electromagnetic radiation will enter the visible light frequency. The principle of electromagnetic radiation is the same as that of sunlight.

Obviously in an incandescent lamp it is necessary to prevent the heated filament from burning and flaking off. To avoid this, these instruments are equipped with a special inert and invisible gas inside the bulb.

One of the main disadvantages of incandescent lamps is that they are not known for their high efficiency. They tend to burn out frequently, as the metal filament emits not only radiation but also small particles of the metal of which it is composed. This is why the filament breaks when it becomes too thin.

As far as the classification of incandescent lamps is concerned, there are two types of instrument: bulb lamps and halogen lamps.

Bulb lamps are the most classic and popular tools in Italian homes. Halogen lamps, on the other hand, are characterised by the presence of a shorter filament; inside the small bulb they also contain halogen gas, which helps to make the particles of the same fall back onto the filament, which become detached due to the great heat. Thanks to the presence of halogen gas, the efficiency of these instruments is greatly improved. The light from halogen lamps is very similar in principle to the light produced by our sun. We can certainly say that the light from these lamps is of better quality than that produced by bulb lamps.

With regard to the service life of the two instruments, we can say that bulb lamps have a service life of around 1000 hours, while halogen lamps last twice as long. The colour rendering index of the two lamps is always 100, while in terms of efficiency, bulb lamps have an efficiency of around 10 to 12 lm/W, while halogen lamps have an efficiency of around 20 lm/W.

Gas lamps, what they are

Gas lamps are instruments that produce light on an electric arc that is produced inside a bulb: the latter contains a particular gas mixture. The electrical discharge produced by the arc stimulates the gas mixture which reacts with the walls of the bulb (coated with fluorescent products), emitting light.

In order to produce the arc, it is necessary to obtain a high potential difference. For this reason, these instruments require a ballast that is able to increase the voltage, producing an intermittent rather than a continuous discharge.

In older, older gas lamps, the presence of the ballast is detected by a small buzzing sound emitted by the instrument. Depending on the different gas mixtures inside the bulb, these lamps can emit different types of light: regardless of the different types of light beams emitted by a gas lamp, these are always inferior in quality to those emitted by an incandescent lamp (especially as regards colour rendering). The family of gas lamps is very diverse and wide-ranging, including neon lights, fluorescent tubes, metal halide lamps, mercury lamps, sodium lamps and other types of lamps less commonly used in the home.

The main advantage of gas or discharge lamps is that they have a longer life and higher average efficiency than incandescent lamps. Modern gas lamps fall into the category of energy-saving lamps.

Their lifetime ranges from around 6,000 hours for compact fluorescent lamps to up to 15,000 hours for some metal halide lamps. The efficiency of gas lamps is always between 80 and 100 lm/W. Compact fluorescent lamps have an efficiency of around 60 lm/W.

Finally, the colour rendering of gas lamps is generally between 80 and 90. However, it should be noted that some gas lamps used for special applications do not reach 20.

LED lamps, what they are

LED lighting for home and interiors seems to be the trend of recent years: there are in fact many examples we could give of LED lighting for interiors. Until a few decades ago, these instruments were only used for specific applications in the field of lighting technology. For some years now, thanks to technological innovation, LED lights have also been used in the home.

An LED instrument emits light using the principle of spontaneous emission: certain types of semiconductors coated with the aid of certain impurities are able to produce a light source of the desired colour. With regard to the semiconductor coating of an LED light, the term impurities refers to components that absorb part of the radiation in a differentiated manner. For this reason, red LED lights are always characterised by a higher energy efficiency than blue LED lights.

In order to create a white LED light, it will be necessary to combine the effects of multiple impurities, adding the different light emissions. For this reason, white LED lights are the least efficient of all.

It is also true that today, thanks to the development of the most modern technologies, optimal impurities have been developed that are able to significantly optimise their efficiency: for this reason, in terms of efficiency, the most modern LED lights are now able to compete with gas lights.

However, one of the greatest advantages of LED lights is not the efficiency of these instruments, but the following characteristics:

• LED lights have a significantly longer lifetime than gas lights and obviously than incandescent lights: the great durability of LED lights is due to the fact that these instruments actually operate as transistors.
• Since the light source of an LED light is very small, it is possible to free the design of the luminaire from the classic patterns that characterise other instruments.
• Due to the fact that an LED light is not white by nature, it is possible to open up a wide range of scenarios for the design of coloured light.

It is also true that today there is still a lot of misinformation about LED lights: there are also many different LED technologies available on the market today, characterised by different technological ages.

Probably the reason why the LED market has not yet broken through, becoming a global trend, is the still significant and important costs that characterise the production chain of these instruments. Suffice it to say that for the same amount of light emitted, an LED light still costs 2 to 5 times more than a traditional light.

If, in spite of the costs, you still intend to purchase LED devices for lighting your home, our advice is to opt for light models with energy efficiency levels at least above 50 lm/W. In addition, it would be better to opt for lights that have a low energy consumption. In addition, it would be better to opt for lights with high colour rendering (ideally above 90).

One of the reasons for this is that many manufacturers do not specify the characteristics and properties of the product they sell. For this reason it will be convenient to make a prior selection of LED lights producers, even before examining the product you are interested in.

Before buying LED lights it is also good to think about another important aspect that should not be underestimated: we are talking about the durability of these devices. Until the advent of this technology we have been used to a certain approach to breakage and replacement: common bulbs are in fact separated from the body of the instrument and can be replaced as a component. With LEDs this concept changes decisively: we will have to deal with a product with a very long lifespan (the lifespan of the light source will probably exceed that of the product itself). This is why we are moving towards a world in which the new generation of lighting instruments will not have a replaceable light source.

Finally, we come to the characteristics and peculiarities of the most modern LED lights:

With regard to the duration of these lighting instruments, we can say with certainty that they will never last less than 20,000 hours: the duration of an LED light tends to be between 50,000 and 100,000 hours. It should be noted that LEDs tend to be able to exceed the above-mentioned duration: after this time, however, the intensity of light may fall below standard levels.

In terms of efficiency, we can say that we start with white LEDs, generally characterised by a minimum of 20 lm/W, up to the most evolved products, capable of reaching up to 100 lm/W.

Finally, the colour rendering index for white LEDs is hardly higher than 90. Monochromatic LEDs obviously cannot be considered according to the colour rendering scale.