The past 15 years have seen the biggest advancements in lighting since Thomas Edison brought his incandescent bulb to the market. Light bulbs are now smart enough to listen to our voices and promote a better night’s sleep. Perhaps the most helpful advancement in lighting is the improved quality of LEDs. Today’s high-quality LEDs deliver impressive energy savings – close to 90 percent compared with incandescent bulbs – but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

LEDs are also driving a lighting revolution with smaller sizes, improved brightness and wide-ranging colours. Each of these improvements creates opportunities to illuminate your home in innovative new ways.

1. Smaller Sizes

LEDs can be as small as the head of a pin, and this allows us to light our homes more discreetly and with more precision than ever. LED Strips can be hidden inside cabinets, drawers, hanging rods in wardrobes, shelves and just about any place you can imagine. This means we can now position light where it is needed instead of attempting to fill a room with a broad wash of light that often causes glare.The small size of today’s LEDs also makes it easy to add statement lighting to our homes. A few strips of LED lights tucked into a ceiling cove can make a classic ceiling feature even more dramatic, or it can make a statement by illuminating once-humble shelving.

Smaller recessed downlights are another result. It is now possible to illuminate your room with a series of three-centimetre downlights instead of the larger models of past decades. Many homeowners love the less-cluttered ceiling that results.

2. Brighter Light

While LEDs have become smaller in size, they have grown in brightness. The combination of small size and high brightness allows them to deliver functional light in new ways. Brighter LEDs allow us to provide all the light we need inside cabinetry or on benchtops when placed discreetly underneath upper cabinets. This can reduce shadows on the benchtop to almost nothing – a much better and safer approach. Most LED light bulbs available to consumers are labelled with an equivalent incandescent bulb wattage, such as ‘60-watt equivalent’. This can be quite helpful, as you simply need a higher or lower number for the wattage equivalent if you want more or less light. As a basic guide, one LED bulb equivalent to 60 watts should produce about 800 lumens, a technical measurement of the amount of light leaving a bulb.

3. Wider Range Of Colours

With a simple push of a button, LEDs can be mixed together to change into nearly any colour imaginable. Red, green, blue and white LEDs combine to create a rainbow of colours that can set the perfect scene for a romantic dinner (then even change into your favourite team’s colours for watching the big game, if you so desire). While coloured LED lights have a certain novelty factor, selecting the right colour ‘temperature’ can make a dramatic difference for everyday lighting. A bulb’s lighting facts will use the term ‘colour appearance’ or ‘colour temperature’. This helpful metric is measured in degrees Kelvin, with lower colour temperatures being warmer or amber (and more closely resembling candlelight), and higher colour temperatures being cooler or blue-based (which is recommended for daytime lighting, rather than for illuminating your home at night).

There are endless opportunities to your electrical that can often be overlooked. Here at Hurst Homes we take the time to help you create the perfect elements to your home. With an in-house electrical consult to plan the lighting and power to your entire home. From NBN and foxtel, to wall mounted entertainment systems and security systems, we ensure the necessary provisions are where they will be needed. Just another reason why we are considered Waggas best builder. To get started building your dream home, click here to contact us today! 

For more tips from the Houzz experts visit Houzz.com.au