Our 5 Top Tips for Lighting your Home Through Every Season

Lighting your home through every season, is an important consideration often overlooked.  Depending on the season, natural light will vary in how many hours it is present within a day, in it’s strength, and in the hours that it is at it’s brightest.  And so, it’s important to ensure your lighting is up to the task of adapting to these seasonal changes in natural light.

Ensuring your lighting remains practical, inviting, and energy efficient throughout the year, doesn’t have to mean changing out your lighting with each new season.  There are some things you can do, both inside and outside, to ensure that you are lighting your home through every season.

Lighting your Home Through Every Season

1. Layer Your Lighting

This is our top tip!  So, what is layered lighting?

Layering your lighting is all about creating spaces that are beautiful and inviting, but most importantly functional.  This is done by layering the basic lighting types – ambient lighting, task lighting, accent lighting, and decorative lighting, within a space.

Ambient lighting is light that fills a room without focus on anything in particular.  It can also be that background lighting that helps create that warm cosy feel you get from a space.  Ambient lighting is usually achieved from wall lights, pendant lights, downlights, or that lamp that provides a soft background light.

Task lighting is, as it’s name suggests, lighting designed specifically to help you perform a task.  In the kitchen, this may be cooking, and in the bedroom or living room, may be reading.  Pendant lights, desk lamps, or floor lamps are classic task lighting pieces.

Accent lighting is used to highlight features of your home, such as beautiful detailing or artwork.  Track lights, spotlights or uplights are great examples of accent lighting that add drama to your space by creating a visual interest.

Decorative lighting, well it is pretty self explanatory, and with innovations in technology and design, it is usually a component of all three of the above lighting types.

By blending or layering the different types of lighting within a space, you can create a mood, but also create a space that meets the lighting needs of each changing season.  And keep in mind, this doesn’t need to be four sets of lights in each room.  Your track lights, for instance, particularly if they swivel, may serve as accent lighting as well as task lighting.  In just the same way, your floor lamp may serve as ambient and task lighting.

2. Install Dimming Options

Dimming options are an easy way of adjusting your lighting to suit the changing natural light of the seasons. 

3. Use Colour Changing Technology (CCT)

Colour plays an important role in setting the mood of any room, and this is no less the case for your lighting.  LED technology has allowed us to change the colour temperature of the light emitted to suit our own preferences, needs, and even the changing light of different seasons.

Most CCT has three colour options to select – warm white, cool white, and daylight, and we refer to this as tri-colour.  Refer our article about the differences in light colour temperature, and their most appropriate applications.

4. Install Sensor Lights

Sensor lights are a great solution to meeting your outdoor lighting needs through the changing seasons.  As their name suggests, sensor lights illuminate as required.  Your sensor lights may switch on once the natural lighting levels dip below a certain level, or they may be set to light up only when they “sense” the need for light.

5. Consider Smart Lighting Technology

Advances in smart lighting technology allow us to more precisely control the lighting in our home, and all at our fingertips.   Turn lights on, or off, or change the brightness, or the colour temperature of the light emitted, and do it all from an app on your phone!

Not only are smart lighting options easy, they can also save you energy costs, as you are in complete control of the amount of light, when it comes on and how long it is needed.  No more waiting to the next ad break to switch off lights that have been left on unnecessarily!

Talk to the lighting experts at Rovert Lighting & Electrical about the options for lighting your home through every season!