Garage lighting often gets little attention. An incandescent bulb or two, maybe a fluorescent fixture and it’s considered finished. But a garage can have many uses and lighting is often poorly designed for most of them. Even such a simple act as parking the car and walking into the house can be compromised by poor [...]

For many years the pros and cons of incandescent versus fluorescent lights have been described. With the addition of CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lights), LED and other technologies the debate has shifted somewhat. But, first, some elementary science… Incandescent bulbs acquired the name because what they do is, in essence, burn (i.e. incandesce, or glow with [...]

Dimmer switches are a great convenience. They help save electricity and allow you to adjust the atmosphere of a room. Sometimes you just don’t want to be blasted in a pool of light. But many people are intimidated away from installing one where a standard switch already resides. Others have fluorescents and worry the dimmer [...]

Want to install a dimmer switch, replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lights) or LEDs, or perform many other home lighting projects? If so, it’s helpful to know a little bit about what drives them all: electricity. Two of the most basic concepts needed are ‘voltage’ and ‘current’. Current moves down a wire, pushed [...]

Good bedroom lighting considers a careful mixture of practical and psychological factors. The average bedroom has so many different uses – relaxation, intimacy, study, morning preparation – that covering them all can be tricky. We associate the bedroom with, among other things, sleep. That usually means no lights at all. That suggests that turning them [...]

The three aspects of lighting – ambient, task and accent – apply to exterior lighting just as they do for interior illumination. But the way they’re implemented will be very different. Where an interior room angle is, say, 90 degrees the outside corner is also thought of as 90 degrees. But, measured the same way, [...]

So many people are used to thinking about wattage, they forget that word doesn’t measure brightness, but power consumption. They think of needing a brighter bulb, so they seek one that’s a higher number of watts. But that relationship only holds for incandescent bulbs (and, to a degree, halogens). When, as is more and more [...]

Lighting schemes should match the season, for reasons of cost, safety and optimal design. Everyone is familiar with stringing Christmas lights. Around December, displays of multi-colored lights decorate houses both inside and out, as well as many office buildings. But Christmas is only one of the many occasions when people use lights for decoration. And, [...]

Edison’s invention is about 100 years old. It’s about time we thought about using something a little more up to date. Actually Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He improved it, devising one in 1879 that burned for 40 hours, achieving 1,220 hours a year later (a number a little better than modern incandescent bulbs, [...]

For a time, track lighting was a fairly cheesy choice. But that was never inherent in the design. Any form of lighting can look poor when the lighting scheme and fixture design are weak. It’s also true that overuse of any one style will get old when it becomes overwhelmingly common. But new styles have [...]