August 2019

What Kelvin LED's should I Buy?

Choosing the right colour temperature when buying your LED lights is vital. Here is some useful information about colour temp which should help you decide which colour is best for you. Did you know that a higher colour temperature, such as 4000k(cool white) will appear to be brighter than 2700k(extra warm white), but this does necessarily mean greater detail is achieved as a result. This is because the human eye see detail by warmer sources, and therefore you need lower levels of light to see more detail.
To provide an example of this, consider street lighting. Where traditional sodium street lights give a dim orange light, you can easily see the potholes and details on a road. In contrast some new LED daylight street lighting at 6000k appears to be a bright light source, but in reality, we can see less details by it.

With this in mind, when approaching your lighting project, you need a balance of warmth and brightness. 2700k gives quite an orange light, similar to the colour from the traditional tungsten lamps. Here you are sacrificing light output for warmth. 4000k is too cool to be cosy. Whilst the light is brighter, colours in the home appear dull, and you lose the ability to easily see the detail.
In a residential setting, artificial light has two purposes, firstly to aid with tasks and secondly to provide ambient lighting to create atmosphere. If we consider that daylight will be present at the times of the day when you would want a higher colour temperature then 3000k is gives you more of both brightness and the warmth needed. In our experience in our bristol showroom our customers want their LED's to be like the older, now unavailable, tungsten lamps so the majority of the LED's we keep in stock are 2700k. Within these colour temperatures you can also get different colour rendering(see one of our previous blogs linked below on that), which affects how items look under the light. If you need anymore help with your lighting please contact us 01179425355

https://www.electricsandlighting.co.uk/blog/best-led-gu10-all-new-cri-95...

LUMENS
A lumen is a standard unit of light as it is perceived to the human eye. Essentially it will tell you how bright something is, unlike a watt, which is actually a measurement of energy consumption or output. Lumens are now the standard unit for measuring the amount of light produced by a light source. And the higher the lumens, the brighter the light.
A standard LED lamp will produce approx. 80 lumens per watt, compared to a standard incandescent lamp which only produces around 15 lumens per watt. This makes LED lighting much more energy efficient, producing the same output as traditional lighting with a fraction of the power.

LED Explained
https://www.electricsandlighting.co.uk/led/leds-explained

Below is a few links to our LED's for sale

https://www.electricsandlighting.co.uk/product-category/decorative-filam...
https://www.electricsandlighting.co.uk/product-category/gls-bces-led?f[0...
https://www.electricsandlighting.co.uk/product-category/gu10-dimmable-le...