Buying a lightbulb? Here are some terms you should know: 💡 Watts refer to energy consumed 💡 Lumens refer to brightness 💡 Kelvin refers to color temperature (how warm or cool the light will be) NPRLifeKit breaks it down in its latest episode.
Assuming you're sold on LEDs, Shakoor says it's really important to think about how you want a lighted space to feel. Think about what happens in that room. That can affect what lightbulbs, or even what light fixtures, you buy.
"When you're sitting on a sofa sectional or watching the game, you're not interested in high glaring lights right on your face," says Shakoor. So in that space, you'll want recessed fixtures that are dimmable. But in a kitchen, she says, you want to flood the space with light. It's a work area where you want to see things clearly.come with LED bulbs that never need to be replaced. So you want to make sure you're going to be happy with the light that those fixtures put out. To do that, we'll have to get familiar with some lighting industry lingo. Kelvin is a scale that measures a light's color. Lights lower on the scale will look more gold, while higher numbers mean the bulb will emit a light that looks more blue.Kelvin is a scale that measures a light's color. Lights lower on the scale will look more gold, while higher numbers mean the bulb will emit a light that looks more blue.In the past, most people picked lightbulbs based on watts — usually 40, 60 or 100 watts. Many think of watts as how bright the bulb is, but watts actually refer to the energy the bulb consumes. Since LEDs need less energy to produce the same amount of light, those bulbs have really low wattage numbers. Shakoor has a simple formula for converting LED watts to the incandescent watts many people are used to,"Multiply that number times five to understand what kind of light output you're going to be getting in a lamp, [or] a fixture in the room. If [the LED watts say] 12, you're going to be getting 60 watts of light." That said, the real measure for light output is lumens. The higher the number, the brighter the light. You can find bulbs in storesThese days, manufacturers often use both terms on their boxes. They'll say something like"this is equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent bulb," and they might also say"800 lumens".Don't see the graphic above? Click here. Shakoor says 2700 Kelvin is about the same color as a typical incandescent bulb – warm and yellow. Lower on the scale, say 2000 Kelvin, looks more gold and higher, like 5000 Kelvin, looks more blue. Shakoor's favorite color is 3000 Kelvin because it"reads as daylight, and everything is crystal clear and perfect color in daylight." So, to recap: Watts measure energy consumption, lumens measure light output, and Kelvin measures color.Shakoor loves to have dimmers on most lights."It's just because I'm a control freak. So if I walk in space, it's like, 'Oh, it's so bright. Let me turn to the dimmer,' and I don't see one, and I scream," she says . So, while Shakoor says dimming is fundamental, it can be a little trickier with LED lights because they are a different technology than incandescent bulbs. She says you should buy"dimmable" LED bulbs or you may end up with lights that flicker, creating a subtle strobelike effect when you try to dim. This is mostly a problem with cheaper bulbs, and Shakoor says there's a simple solution. Look on the box she says,"And it just needs to say that it's dimmable ... They're all marked. If it says dimmable, it's dimmable. If it doesn't say that, it is not."Having more control over lighting in your space is one of the benefits of LED lights.at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., Professor Mariana Figueiro researches circadian rhythms. "So you have a clock in the brain that ticks, however it ticks with a period slightly longer than 24 hours. So if you didn't have light, you would be, every day, out of sync with your watch," says Figueiro. Light in the morning resets your biological clock and tells your body it's time to be awake. Dimmer light in the evening sends signals that it's getting close to time to sleep.Recently, her research focused on people with Alzheimer's disease. In her lab, there's a light table — light shines up through the surface. These were built to deliver light to Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes. "They tend to sit around tables and they look down. So it was an ideal way to deliver that light at the eye, because for the light to be effective, they have to reach the back of the eye," she says.Mariana Figueiro of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sits at a light table made for Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes. She says it delivers bright light into patients' eyes during the day to help them sleep better at night, reducing depression and agitation.Mariana Figueiro of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sits at a light table made for Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes. She says it delivers bright light into patients' eyes during the day to help them sleep better at night, reducing depression and agitation.The light tables are turned on in the day and off in the evening. Figueiro says that helps reduce depression and agitation because patients sleep better when their biological clock is synchronized to the local time. And they're not awake at night wandering around. Figueiro says this can work for most of us, too."I can tell you it won't help if you're staying awake because you can't pay your bills, but it will help if you are desynchronized or your biological clock is not synchronized with your local time on earth," she says. This is where the Kelvin color scale and lumens come back into play. Figueiro says that if you want to have light that will help you sleep better, the key is brighter and bluer lights in the morning and then dimmer and golder light closer to bedtime. You don't need a light table, you can just go outside in the morning or the afternoon without sunglasses on. And now you can buy bulbs that will provide some of these benefits indoors. "You can buy the bulbs that you can, with your phone, change the color of it over the course of the day. So that's a feature that we have right now that we didn't have, say, with the incandescent lamp," says Figueiro.
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