LED Home Lighting and Kitchen Lighting Design

LED Home Lighting and Kitchen Lighting Design

All kitchens are to a great extent a triumph of illusion. Behind the nicely presented cabinet fronts and counter tops are the utilitarian aspects (pots and pans, tin and jars, etc) and behind those are usually bare plaster and concrete with cables and pipes running around. It’s what’s visible, what is on show and how it appears that counts for everything, and it should be obvious that how something looks has an awful lot to do with how it is lit.

Modern LED home lighting is well suited to most kitchen lighting applications. Kitchen lighting design typically requires clean, crisp light with good CRI (Color Rendering Index) characteristics – it is always a good idea when preparing food that you can clearly see what you are doing and what condition it is in.

Ideally, kitchen lighting design should aim to strike a balance: sufficiently bright and suitably positioned to provide good illumination especially around work spaces such as the hob, sink and food preparation areas; yet without appearing unduly harsh. In many, if not most, households, the kitchen is the heart of the home and should therefore be a warm and welcoming place, not stark and sterile. It’s a kitchen after all, not an operating theatre.

Key to getting kitchen lighting right is understanding the basic principles of lighting design and understanding how the space itself functions. Underpinning most contemporary interior light designs is the idea that there are different types of light, usually labelled decorative, accent, task and ambient. Using each of these appropriately and achieving an overall balance to the room results in an effective and pleasing arrangement.

Clearly, most kitchens map quite well to the concepts of functional (task) and aesthetic (decorative and accent) areas and so assigning the right kinds of light to the right space shouldn’t be terribly complicated. Where a lot of kitchen lighting ideas tend to fall apart though is through failing to either understand or implement decent ambient lighting. Too much and everything else gets bleached out, but not enough and the effect is gloomy with too much contrast where other lighting struggles to provide a level of background light it was never intended to do.

Some of the best kitchen lighting designs are achieved by using lots of lighting of different types, which doesn’t just mean adding a few more ceiling roses. Kitchen lighting design requires many different types of lighting fitted in different places. In fact, probably the worst way to light a kitchen is to hang a few bright fluorescent tubes from the ceiling. Sure, you’ll get bright light – but it will be flat and cold and almost guaranteed to give you a headache in short order.

One of the obvious problems with using central kitchen ceiling lighting is that you invariably end up with dark spots and find yourself perpetually standing in your own shadow. Until recently, a common solution to these problems with kitchen lighting was to install numerous halogen spotlights as downlights spread uniformly across the ceiling and supplement these with targeted lighting for work surfaces and cooking, using under cabinet lighting and hob lights.

If you can’t stand the heat, use LED Kitchen Lighting

This solution works reasonably well, but it is not without drawbacks. The main problems associated with halogen lamps are that they run very hot, they don’t last terribly well and they are a fiendishly expensive way to light a kitchen. Most of the cost (i.e. more than 90%) of incandescent lighting in general and halogen lamps in particular is to be found in the electricity they consume; as a rough guide, the more heat a light bulb throws out the more wasteful and thus expensive it is to run.

The same problem applies, albeit to a lesser extent, to low level kitchen cabinet lighting, where the proximity to the underside of a shelf means that items in the cupboard above are invariably exposed to some amount of heat.

However, these days there is a very good solution that is well suited to most kitchen lighting designs: LED kitchen lighting. Simply replace existing halogen spotlights and under-cabinet lighting with equivalent LED light fittings. This is pretty much a matter of replacing existing 12v transformers with one (or more, depending on the number of lights involved) constant voltage 12v LED driver and then swapping out the halogen lamps for LED equivalents. If using mains voltage lighting this is even easier as all that is required is to remove existing GU10 spotlights and replace them with GU10 LEDs.

Here’s a handy checklist for what to look for when buying low energy light bulbs.

How to Get the Best from LED Spotlights

When installing LED spotlights it is important to try and match the luminosity (brightness), color temperature (how cool/blue or warm/yellow) and beam angle of the type of halogen lamps you might otherwise have considered using. These three elements are key to defining how any particular LED lamp will perform and they also interact with each other quite significantly. The true brightness of an LED (as measured in lumens) can be quite at odds with human perception of brightness as the color temperature varies – so cooler lights seem brighter. Also, the beam angle affects how bright we think a light source is, regardless of how bright it objectively is. The easiest way through this maze is to try and find a compromise that approximates to your existing lamp specifications for each one of these three characteristics. Alternatively, be aware that when you alter one variable (say go for a warmer color) then you might need to consider adjusting another (i.e. luminosity) to compensate for the way the human eye percieves things.

You can find out more about choosing LEDs but as a rule, the wattage rating for an LED light bulb should not presently drop much below 10% that of the equivalent halogen lamp (or indeed, most any incandescent light bulb). So in order to replace a 35w halogen lamp look for an LED rated above 3w, to replace 50w then choose a 5w LED and so on. This ratio is certain to change over the coming months and years, with ever lower LED wattages able to deliver ever increasing levels of brightness, but for now 1:10 is about right.

The colour temperature affects how cool or warm a light source appears. It is a common myth that LEDs create a bluish light that is rather cold in appearance. LED lights come in a whole variety of color temperatures (and indeed, colors) but since it has always been easier to manufacture bluish LEDs, that is what many cheap LEDs are. If you look for what is termed “warm white” or a colour temperature below 3500K you should get a close approximation to the kind of crisp white light normally associated with halogens.

Finally beam angle should be considered. The narrower the angle (less than 45 degrees say) the more focused and spot-like the light will appear, whereas 120 degrees for example will give an evenly spread distribution of light without “hot-spots” or glare. At present, arguably the best LED spotlight to opt for as a direct replacement for halogen spots is the Zenigata LED from Sharp.

An issue many people have with LED lights is that they are high intensity and can be quite harsh especially if in direct line of sight, yet paradoxically they can also seem to struggle to fill a space with ambient light. An effective remedy to this is to deploy more lights than you might otherwise consider necessary based simply on luminosity, but to direct the light towards ceilings, floors, walls and key features within the room. This rather nicely kills two birds with one stone – sharp accent lighting and the reflected light more easily fills the space with soft, diffuse ambient light.

The determining factors for which brightness levels, color or beam angle to adopt in the end come down to how far from any surfaces the lights are to be placed, the nature of the surface(s) and personal taste. If you’re after a sharp, modern look and have a lot of reflective materials (such as steel) then many smaller, cool LEDs set close to reflective surfaces could look effective. Alternatively, wider angles using warm white LED lights would produce a slightly softer ambience and more flexibility as regards location.

Always remember that one of the biggest elements in how any artificial light appears is the nature of surface(s) it shines on. If you want to warm things up then direct your lighting at warm colored areas (terracotta tiles or natural wood or simply a creamy yellow painted surface). Conversely, to add dramatic effects try directing blue LEDs at predominantly dark surfaces (blue, green, gray and black for example). There’s nothing to stop you using lights with differing characteristics to match different textures and colors in order to achieve specific effects in separate areas of the kitchen.

New Possibilities With LED Kitchen Lighting Ideas

LED kitchen lighting ideas extend way beyond simply replacing expensive halogen downlights, offering a whole new set of possibilities unimaginable with regular incandescent lighting. As mentioned above, LEDs can provide zero-heat under cabinet lights to throw light onto worktops below. These come in the form of recessed and surface mount miniature spots and also as LED strip lights. As with all LED applications, these are low voltage 12v lights that have extremely low energy consumption, exhibit zero UV/IR radiation or heat and are thus inherently safe even in a demanding environment such as a kitchen.

LED strip lights are ideal for kitchen lighting. These come in connect-together 300mm lengths (the standard unit of measure for kitchen units) and are a series of closely packed LEDs inside a waterproof transparent plastic cover which both protects and creates an even and consistent light source. A single LED strip light typically consumes rather less than 1w of electrical power and emits up to 50 lumens light – in other words, accent lighting.

The versatile nature of LED strip lighting is such that it can be used to accent just about anything. They are available as fixed length or flexible strips and are lightweight, quick and easy to install, usually using little more than self adhesive backing. Use them as LED plinth lights, to pick out coving or simply to illuminate worktops.

LED plinth lights using either LED strip lighting or individual LED mini-spots lends a contemporary feel to any kitchen and looks especially good on polished floors. Essentially plinth lights flood the floor with light which both connects elements of the room together and makes the room appear larger. The same idea can of course be extended down to the kick board (or toe-kick) which being closer to the floor can seem even more dramatic.

Note: Flexible LED light strips are also often referred to as LED tape for the obvious reason that they share many characteristics of thin self adhesive tape. The picture some way above shows a band of colored LED strip lighting used to accent a kitchen island. This site has several good examples of what’s available and the costs of LED strip lights if you’re interested in buying LED tape.

It is possible these days to also buy plinths with lights pre-installed, but it’s easy enough to fit plinth lighting retrospectively to existing units. You might also want to consider similar options for kitchen island lighting.

Being water resistant also makes them ideal for lighting kitchen areas where water might splash (as a side note, this type of LED lighting application is also perfect for use in bathroom to again introduce a modern feel, as well as for use around ponds or decking outdoors).

Some of the more extravagant applications for LED kitchen lighting design include LED drawer lights – these are usually battery operated and attached to a sensor that detects when a drawer or cupboard has been opened or closed and switch an internal LED light on or off accordingly. Or how about illuminated shelf lighting, as in lit from actually within the shelf itself? Or LED wall wash effects bounced off ceramic tiles behind the hob? Or picking out edges below or at the back of worktops? The list of LED kitchen lighting ideas just seems to go on and on.

Of course, if you go overboard you run the risk of looking like Santa’s Grotto crashed into your kitchen, but as with all the best home lighting designs just pick one or two simple lighting ideas and you’ll be surprised how stunning even a small amount of LED Kitchen Lighting can look.