Warm white 2700-3000k is fine for bedrooms Soft white 3500k is better for awake spaces that aren’t task spaces White/Daylight 5000k+ is for getting things done, I use them in the garage, the basement, and for some of the kitchen lights
I used to hate integrated LED fixtures, but I put in under-cabinet lighting that can switch color temp so that is nice because I can set it to daylight during meal prep and warm during eating.
I don’t mind a daylight bid for overhead lights, but they have to be supplemented with warmer lights elsewhere around the room
Gimme 5k temperature light bulbs
I dunno why, but warm lighting at night just makes me feel depressed. I need daylight bulbs across my house. Adjustable brightness preferred though, so I’m not blinding myself at night.
I live my smart lights for this. I can change them at my whim. By default they’re brighter and whiter during the day, slowly moving dimmer and yellow after sunset. Or I can make them whatever other color but I do that pretty rarely.
It’s also fully offline and no WiFi used. But it seems almost everything you see in the stores are WiFi bulbs you have to get an app for, where one day they might go bankrupt and suddenly your lights dont work. Or the internet goes out. Yuck.
You can’t just sell me on your smart lights and not name the brand/model
Blue lights suck. Yellow lights suck. White lights (6000K full-spectrum) are good, but more expensive and harder to find.
We accidentally installed a white light bulb in the hallway outside my bedroom. It made me feel so pissed off and on edge every time my door was open and someone turned that light on.
Once we swapped it to a warm bulb I was much more chill.
I do keep a tunable light bulb in a task lamp, but the rest of the lighting in the house is warm.
Just buy every K value in an even distribution to get all the benefits
Don’t forget to take your ketamine first
thats why I eat Special K every morning, so I can have a heavenly glow right out of my rectum
As a side note, one of the reasons why cold white LED light bulbs are a thing is because they’re a bit more efficient than warmer light colors.
The reason is because they all just have 2 kinds of light emiting diode (LED) junctions inside - red and blue - plus a phosphorus layer on top that smooths those two perfect lightwave color peaks in the wavelength domain into a broader light spectrum, and the blue is more efficient than the red, so lamps with a higher proportion of blue emitters to red emitters - and which hence emit more light towards the blue end of the spectrum (i.e. a colder white) - will emit more light for the same power consuption than those with more red emitters and hence whose light is more towards the red side of the spectrum (i.e. a warmer white).
There’s practically no chance this knowledge will ever benefit me, but I’m happy to learn something new regardless. Thanks for sharing!
I have an actual full-spectrum daylight bulb and it’s pretty good. I use it when the days get really short, seems modestly effective. It’s not the typical “warm” lighting, it’s much more actual daylight. I can’t stand those hard white almost blueish light bulbs. Makes things feel industrial and cold. No idea why anyone calls them “daylight”.
can you name the model? am interested in fielding the winter blues away
Warm in living room, bedroom, and hallway.
Cold everywhere else. So, bathroom, kitchen, garage, and closet.
Warm where you want cozy. Cold where you want honesty.
lack of honesty in the bedroom sounds bad, yet the opposite also sounds terrible
I’m surprised to see pretty much all the comments stating that they prefer the warm lights. It hurts my eyes and feels very awkward to have light coming in through windows into a room with warm lighting, so I mostly use daylight bulbs.
Do warm lighting people just keep the lights off when their curtains are open, or am I alone in this issue?
When my curtains are open, I’m getting ample sunlight and don’t need lighting. When it’s night time, I don’t want light which emulates daylight in my home.
Yes, we only turn the lights on after the sun’s color temperature matches our 2700K lights. During the cloudy winter days we spend the entire day in darkness to avoid mismatched temperature.
Sometimes I really want to get adjustable LEDs for winter, but it is hard enough to find warm ones with a high enough CRI. I once ordered and returned about 8 different bulbs which had price points from €2 to €100, before going to Ikea and buying bulbs there.
I am going to be redoing the lighting in a house I just bought. I went down the rabbit hole of learning about all the options. It’s hard to find but it is possible to find dimmable, tunable LEDs with a high cri and have matter support so I could use them with Home Assistant. I haven’t actually purchased any though so I can’t report my experience.
Please share your experience when you get to it! I try to avoid iot stuff though and thought of something simpler like dimmable lights that get warmer when dimmed - like the Ikea ones, but with 2700k as the highest point it does not really work.
I thought that maybe the ideal solution would be to wire DC lightning with relays controlling groups of different temperature LEDs. Maybe glueing LED strips to the ceiling and a translucent film under them to diffuse it a bit? I feel like ordering a giant bin of random LEDs should lead to the best possible CRI.
Also each of the 8 bulbs I ordered had Ra>95 written on the box and they just lie because I can instantly tell that the light is wrong. Bad CRI is so prevalent that friends come to my house and think my lights are incandescent.
I did buy a super expensive dimmable tunable led strip from Yuji LEDs. It was expensive even before the tariff situation, so really bad now probably. But the LED was top notch. I followed a guide someone had posted to reddit to make a SAD lamp, and used ESP Home to make it so it made a sunrise effect starting all the way as far yellow as it went and ending at the brightest point. It is just a strip with 2 different temperature LEDs on it and it combines them with directions from ESPHome (oh I had to get a controller for the ESPHome connection. It’s just a “dumb” strip that you have to control the voltage to change).
Since programming it was rough for me, I had some fun experiences where it would just randomly go from super dim to full bright while I was sleeping and hoping for a gentle wake up from a nap. My half asleep brain really thought someone had opened the curtain to the sunny outside. I started thinking of my project as “sunlight in a can”.
Anyways I happily shipped that expensive project off to my brother who suffers from SAD and he never used it even once.
Warm white is usually 1800 K to 3000 K. What you showed is less Kelvin than the color temperature of fire (1500 K). We don’t have a color temperature word for that, but “red” works. Of course, such light has no blue component (helps control the cicardian cycle) and is pretty much monochromatic with CRI of <5.
This is why I don’t use them.
The paint in my living room looks diarrhea brown and corpse gray under warm light. It’s purple and blue, and there are a lot of windows so I can’t plan for warm light as a default like I can in bedrooms. Daylight bulbs keep the color what it should be.
Por que los dos?
For my bedroom I have the ceiling light with two 13W(100W equiv.) for when I need the light and a 6W(6W equiv.) GE ‘vintage’ LED in a nightstand lamp for the rest of the time.
Why not just buy a dimmer switch?
Part of my job is selling lighting.
The following conversation takes place at least once a day without falter:
X: I’d like one light like this please (puts some form of light on the table)
ME: ok (goes through the script to make sure they know what they want/it’s compatible/…yaddayadda).
X: oh and it needs to be warm in colour.
ME: 2700k got it.
X: yes, but like warm right? Because it’s led.
(Variant: the rando looking for something small for his toilet. “Oh you know, something like 18000 lumens and 60000k”
You value your eyes at all?)
Take them up on their offer of lumen output and show off one of these bad boys.
“You want cold white or warm white?”
“I need a cold light source, like an LED. I’m afraid the fixture would melt if I put incandescent in there.” (Yes, some E14 fixtures in cheap plastic bathroom mirrors etc. only take up to 10-20 W and have a warning sticker)
“What, higher temperature is colder?” (It’s not their fault though that in nature, white and blue things 🧊 are generally colder than yellow and orange things 🔥)
Do people actually confuse color temperature with operating temperature? I wouldn’t want any lights in my house if their operating temperature was ≥2700 K. I want the room to be bright, but not if that means melting the steel beams in the ceiling.
The colour temperature of an incandescent lamp is, exactly and by definition, its operating temperature.
A 2700K lightbulb will not melt steel. The glass is not that hot (you can tell because it’s not glowing itself). In any case, it’s really power that matters - a small object at 2700K will not damage steel if it’s not being continuously heated; it needs to be heated at a rate which brings the steel above its melting point before the heat can dissipate.
Yes, for incandescent lights that’s true. Are they still being sold?
Probably in some places, but that’s not my point. People remember that lightbulbs are hot, and it’s literally called colour temperature (for good reason).
“Your fixture won’t work with led for dimming”
confusion
nervous laughter
disbelief
“You’ll have to replace the driver”
same cycle but even more intense
head explodes
