• Electrical India
  • Dec 29, 2015

 Lighting in homes consumes 8 to15% of the average household electricity budget although the makeup of the installed lighting technologies, lighting design and user behaviour can make a difference. Efficient and well-designed lighting can yield household energy savings. Effective lighting design means putting light where it’s wanted or needed, and reducing or eliminating light elsewhere.

1. Design a house to not need lights turned on during daylight hours
2. Consider the orientation and layout of rooms to best use available daylight
3. Use surface reflectance of light coloured surfaces, and well positioned pendant and wall lights, for good light distribution in a room
4. Decide the type or types (e.g., general lighting, mood/background lighting, task lighting) of ambience you wish to create in each room during night-time use
5. For more than one type of ambience, adjust light levels (dim lights) or turn different lights on or off through different switching circuits
6. Create task or accent lighting with directional lighting
7. Create general lighting with non-directional lighting
8. Use warm coloured lamps for the home, except possibly for bathrooms and laundries where the cooler coloured lamps present an appearance of a clean, sterile space
9. Before selecting a lamp, identify relevant attributes for illuminating each room (e.g., quick start-up, long life lamp, dimmable, multi-way switching)
10. For getting the ‘right amount of light’ to create the ambience you want, think about lumens, which measure the total amount of visible light emitted by a source, not wattage (power).

(Source: Energy Efficient Home Lighting Design, an article by Jay B. Thakar in Lighting India magazine, Nov-Dec 2015 issue...)