Home office lighting - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Philfreeze
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 09:00:21 pm
content: I have a problem and you guys might be able to help me.I currently have one 3-Spot lamp in the middle of my room and I just don't like it.The light it gives of isn't uniform at all and if you stand in certain positions one of the spots shines in your face which isn't very comfortable.At work we just good some nice new LED panels and they are awesome! They are flat, they are bright and most important, the light is very uniform.Now the problem:I just cannot find any LED panels which you can mount onto a normal wall. All panels I can find are made for office spaces with their nice ceiling tiles and I can't just cut a huge hole in my ceiling to mount a LED panel in it. Do you guys now some panels which you can just screw to the ceiling but don't require to be mounted IN the ceiling? Or do you now a better solution for my problem?Description of my room so you know what I talk about:rough size: 3m x 3.5mbad sketch of the room drawn with a random internet service is attached.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 10:29:32 pm
content: I have color 950 fluorescent tubes from Philips in my office and shed. The tubes aren't cheap but with an armature equiped with an electronic ballast they can easely last a decade. Color 950 is pure white with a very good color spectrum (960 is blue-ish and 940 is yellow-ish).

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 07:24:55 am
content: If you're not totally set on an LED panel, have you considered LED downlights? They are likely to be far cheaper and more effective than a single light source.I have a mixture of 2.45m and 3.15m ceiling heights at my place (depending on which end of the house you're on) and have installed 4x 950 lumen LED downlights in each bedroom/office in a simple "square" arrangement. They have an 80 degree beam angle and even in the largest room (4.70m x 4.90m) they offer really good coverage with no noticable "hot spots" and hardly any shadows. It gives very even coverage to all corners and edges of the room.Although if you're even contemplating going down this path, do yourself a favour and put in a dimmer! I like my light subtle most of the time and the 15 watt LEDs are too bright for my liking most of the time. I usually use them with the dimmers almost all the way to minimum.If your place is a rental then I can understand the limitation of cutting holes in the roof. My only other suggestion would be to have a look at task lighting using desk or floor standing lamps (you can get some upward facing floor lamps which bounce the light off the roof). I remember at my old place, I had a 100w halogen floor lamp which fired upwards. It was enough to light the whole living room on its own and doubled as a heater ;-)

author: D3f1ant
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 07:30:59 am
content: Its easy to convert those office style inserts, build a simple wooden frame around it and hang the whole thing.

author: MikeW
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2016, 09:33:14 pm
content: Yep, they're called surface mount.A lot of manufacturers do the same recessed (for ceiling tiles) fittings in a surface mount version.