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Keeping it light | Pad Patter 11.30.17

bellbird

bellbird

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The light globe aisle in stores these days is just crazy to me. So many options but what gets me most once you figure out the screw in or push in bit, how curly & frosty you want it and the wattage etc etc is the colour of light you get, and no two brands tend to be the same.

DH and I tend to disagree and go back and forth - he likes brighter, bluey tinged globes and I prefer dimmer, warmer colours but our house is a mix and most of the rooms have down lights where you still have to screw the bulb in and so even within the same room, we can have different coloured globes and 'bright spots' (like "beam me up, Scotty"), which can play havoc with my photos if I'm not using the external flash on the DSLR to override them for night shots but anyway. I use lamps on mostly at night unless in the kitchen. We put a skylight in recently so the dark even in daytime hall would be brighter and I love it but now at night the yellow light there bugs me.

I know it can get quite dark during snowy days in some places so I'm sure light matters more to some than others - Where do you fit on the cool - warm light scale and how do you literally keep it light?
 
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. My hubby buys these bulbs from costco that make our house look like an alien ship is landing -- so incredibly bright and blue. I hate it and, like you, we have a mishmash of lights. I am about to put my foot down and make sure he gets only soft, warm white and I may have to actually pick the specific range for him to look for. I think I prefer around 2500-2700. For photos, I actually prefer not to use flash because the flash tends to be cool as well and then I end up with different, competing light sources. I'd rather just use ambient light if possible and then fix the white balance in Lightroom. This used to be a bigger issue when all our lights were CFLs with their hideous greenish cast, so I'm glad at least that era is over!
 
I like soft white. Deftly prefer lights on the warm side.

Hubby just bought these weird ECO LED lights that have orange connectors/wires inside the clear glass bulb. ??? I think he may have bought them for the outdoor lights though. No matter what we do - those bulbs do not seem to last more than a few months. I don't even want to think what those new bulbs would like in one of our indoor lamps though.
 
We've been slowly replacing our bulbs with "smart bulbs" from Phillips. I can control the color with the Hue app. They are expensive so we only buy them when Amazon has them on sale and I hope they last a while. We can also put them in groups -- like Living Room and ask Alexa to turn on the Living Room! We are living in the future!
 
I am definitely on the side of bright cool light... but even I have my limits. We bought some new LED bulbs (I love that you call them globes Justine @bellbird ) and put them in the can lights in our kitchen and when you turn the lights on in there now it seems just about as bright as the sun. :giggle Like @dawnmarch said an alien ship might be landing. Lol!
 
Warm lights definitely. We had switched some lamps that were more ambiance rather than practical usage to various LED bulbs and I find that they are not strong enough for me to read by. He reads on his iPad so his reading is backlit. We also had a large lamp on our kitchen table and I finally got a smaller one with an LED built in light. Nope not enough wattage, and too cold for either of us to really want to see our dinner in that light. ugh.
 
@kimingvtx I think that's what my son got one of his daughter's for Christmas a few years back if it's the one you can change the bulb colors...and yes, control with your phone. What's the sale price usually if you can recall?
 
@cookingmylife I honestly don't know the price. My husband buys them and I make it a point to not look!! However, we have had the living room ones for about a year and they are still working! Yes, I can change the colors to anything including purple!
 
I'm on the warm side. DH likes the cooler ones, so he has those in his office and the rest of the house I control haha.
 
I have had icicle lights on the house for years. A few years back I got LED ones and I thought they looked really blue compared to the old ones. Then this year a strand quit working, so I went to replace them. The choices in LED (different brand of course) were warm yellow, cool blue, or clear white. I got cool blue, remembering how blue the existing ones looked. I was wrong. The older ones look yellow in comparison to the new ones which look blue. Sigh.

The bulbs in our house are a mish-mash. I do use LEDs for the downstairs bathroom as I found the Compact Florescent ones burn out really quickly in there (too much on/off). I still have several lights with incandescent bulbs after 18 years since we don't use those lights that much.
 
Lol it took me a minute to realize you were talking about lights! ;)

We just switched all ours to the 'daylight' led bulbs downstairs- we have a lot of Dark Wood (floor, trim, doors, cupboards) so we need all the brightness we can get! As the soft or more warm light bulbs burn out upstairs we've replaced with the daylight- but it is quite the difference when there is one of each in a room/hallway! ;)
 
LOL!! I know the feeling!! I am NOT a fan of the LED lights...they just aren't bright enough! We get the squiggly kind in bright white, because I cannot stand the yellow hue a lot bulbs have.
 
Now I must be getting my led lights from a different place, cause they are wicked bright. Lol
 
Because of all the photo editing I do, I get daylight balanced lights. For indoor photos (unless you are going for a tungsten ambient mood), I prefer the cooler tones rather than warmer tones.
 
I guess I never paid attention to the fact there were differences in light bulbs. So I started googling it. Apparently I have always been buying the "soft white" bulbs.

For reference: The three primary types of color temperature for light bulbs are: Soft White (2700K – 3000K), Bright White/Cool White (3500K – 4100K), and Daylight (5000K – 6500K). The higher the Degrees Kelvin, the whiter the color temperature.

Further googling led me to the question of which type of bulb is better for my eyes. This is where a light bulb turned on for me :giggle I have been diagnosed with chronic dry eye (and the start of cataracts) and have gone through terrible periods of my eyes constantly itching and being blurry. The eye doctor really wants me to start using Restasis or Xiidra both of which are very expensive for monthly doses. I have resisted and she gave me a sample of an OTC eye drop that is working quite nicely along with some other home remedies. Now for the interesting part. I retired the end of August after working 16 years in an office with fluorescent lighting and I was using the computer (number work) 8 hours a day. The times when my eyes were the worst were those times that I was working lots of OT.

Per my googling, soft white lights are much better for the eyes! Especially those with cataracts. For the last 6 weeks, I have not had any problems with my eyes itching at all. I've also been able to cut back on the number of drops used per day. Guess I'll stick with my soft white light bulbs!
 
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