Designing Efficient and Effective Kitchen Lighting

There’s a critical missing element in most American kitchens, and it’s not a $10,000 range or a stainless steel French door refrigerator. No, it’s simply good lighting.

Most kitchens not only do not have enough lighting, but the wrong kind of lighting. Photo: Digital Lumination Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge
 Effective, shadowless countertop task lighting designed by Digital Lumination.

Your kitchen is more than just a place to cook and eat. It usually serves as the administrative and the social hub of the home. Because it typically opens for business before dawn and closes long after sunset, a kitchen uses a lot of energy for lighting. That makes this room an important place to use efficient lighting. While remodeling your kitchen, you have the perfect opportunity to create an effective but also highly efficient lighting system.

Designing a lighting system that provides just the right light yet uses very little electricity is the goal of lighting design. It is not a trivial process. And it requires an intimate understanding of how light works.

More than You Ever Wanted to Know about Lighting
If you have ever seen a welder at work, you know that arc welding produces an amazingly bright light — so bright that special eye protection is required. This was the first electric lamp: the carbon arc lamp. The 1860 Republican convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president was held in a large wooden building in Chicago lit by carbon arc lamps. The fact that it did not burn down, eliminating the newly formed Republican Party, is a testament to careful and constant vigilance. Temperamental, dangerous, expensive and requiring constant adjustment, these lamps were not practical for everyday use.

A few years later Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp, the first relatively safe and practical source of electric lighting.

There have been huge improvements in lighting since the 19th century, but almost all the lamps we use are still of the two types: incandescent and electrical discharge (the new name for arc lamps). The only new kind of lamp developed in the past 100 years is the light emitting diode (LED) which works on an entirely new principal.

How Electricity is Converted to Light
Light is composed of photons — very small particles that our eye can see. Photons move very quickly. In fact they travel at, ahem, the speed of light. They also vibrate. The rate of vibration, or frequency, determines the type and color of light they produce. We see in only a small portion of the total light spectrum. We can see only "visible light". The rest of the spectrum including infrared and ultraviolet, is invisible to us, although other animals can see this light very well, which is why they appear to see in the dark. It's actually not dark to them.

Converting electricity into light requires adding energy to an atom until one of the electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom jumps to a higher orbit. It then starts losing energy, and when it loses enough energy, it drops back down to its former orbit, and in the process emits a photon. Then the cycle repeats itself. It all happens very fast — the entire cycle of electron movement to a higher orbit then back down to the lower one takes just a tiny fraction of a second — and to a lot of atoms at the same time. The result is the steady flow of photons that we see as a stream of light. Some materials do better at producing light than others. In incandescent lamps, the material most commonly used is tungsten.

Incandescent Lamps
Light is produced in an incandescent lamp by heating a thin tungsten wire to very high temperatures (around 2200°C), causing it to incandesce or glow. The wire is called a filament and the incandescence is a result of the filament's resistance to the flow of electrical current. Most of the energy produced is converted to heat. But some of the energy results in light. Photo: Wikipedia Commons Light Bulb The common Type A incandescent lamp. What we normally call a "light bulb" is actually a "lamp bulb".

Electrical Discharge (Arc) Lamps
Electrical discharge lamps create light by jumping a spark across two electrodes surrounded by inert gas.

The most common household incarnation of this type of lamp is the tubular fluorescent lamp common in almost all workshops, garages and basements.

Other types of electrical discharge lamps include sodium and mercury vapor lamps — used only for street lights and other outdoor applications and xenon-arc lamps used in special applications such as movie projectors, search lights and headlights for luxury cars. These collectively are sometimes referred to as High-Intensity Discharge — HID — lamps. The enclosure or glass envelope around the filament is called the bulb and serves two primary functions. First, it keeps oxygen away from the filament. When the filament is exposed to oxygen, it quickly "oxidizes" and breaks within seconds. Secondly, the enclosure maintains a constant environment for the filament to retard the evaporation of tungsten. As the tungsten evaporates, the light eventually "burns out" when a point is reached at which the filament does not have enough tungsten to incadesce. For the standard A-type incandescent lamp, that time is about 1,000 hours of steady use (flipping the light on and off — as we do in the real world — reduces that time to a few hundred hours). The enclosure is usually filled with an inert gas such as argon and nitrogen. Halogen and xenon (pronounced zeenon, not x-non) lamps are merely varieties of incandescent lamps filled with slightly different gas mixtures. Bulbs come in variety of shapes and sizes depending on their use and light output requirements.

Incandescent lamps are known for their warm color, resulting from the fact that they emit more lower frequency red and orange light than high frequency blue and violet. Cheaper than any other lighting option to install, incandescent lamps are more expensive than every other lighting option to run. They are justified if initial costs must be kept to a minimum and the annual hours of use are small or they are to be used intermittently with frequent switching. Incandescents should be used primarily for accent light, task light or in dimming circuits where fluorescents are too expensive.

The familiar, but inefficient, incandescent lamp is on its way out. After January 1, 2014 most incandescent lamps will be illegal to sell in the U.S. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires they be phased out starting in 2012. After 2014 only those special-use incandescents that cannot be replaced by a more efficient technology will be allowed. For example, small bulbs like appliance bulbs and Christmas tree lamps, colored bulbs, hard use lamps where vibration can destroy a CFL ballast in minutes, bug lamps and infrared heat lamps. But with these few exceptions, the standard household Type A incandescent bulb will be extinct in this country in 2014, although high efficiency incandescent (HEI) bulbs will sill be allowed. None of these are on the market yet, but manufacturers predict them by 2010 with a promise that they will be less expensive than CFLs. Since the price of CFLs is dropping like a stone, that may be a very tough promise to keep.

Fluorescent Lamps
The tubular fluorescent lamp is the common household version of the electrical discharge or arc lamp. Clearly the technology has come a long way since the Republican National Convention in 1860. The lamps are now very safe and very efficient. Understanding Light Quality
Adapted from "I Hate Fluorescent" by Eric Strandberg, LC, Lighting Design Laboratory, Seattle City Light.

Quality of light has two parts. The most obvious is color temperature, this is whether the light appears 'warm' (yellow) or 'cool' (blue).

Color temperature is usually stated in Kelvins in the U.S. and Canada. An incandescent lamp is about 3000K (yellow/warm). Sunlight is about 5000K (blue/cool). Fluorescent lamps come in these and other color temperatures. Which one you choose is subjective — like picking paint colors.

Today, the most used color temperature is 3500K, not too cool, not too warm. This color is often preferred for retail, office and high activity residential spaces. Natural "daylight" lamps are the preference for bath- and dressing rooms.

The other part of light quality is color rendering, this is the ability of a light source to reveal the "true" relationship between colors. Light sources with poor color rendering cloud the difference between similar colors. For example a slate green wall may appear to be the same color as a gray blue wall, or dark amber paint may look the same as light brick.

Color rendering is expressed numerically on the Color Rendering Index (CRI), which is a scale from 0 to 100, with higher values being better. Most old style fluorescent lamps had poor color rendering (50 - 60) which is not flattering to either colors or people (dull colors & gray complexions). The newer fluorescents have a very good CRI (from around 75 up to as high as the 90s), which reveal true colors very accurately.

Manufacturers are not required to disclose either the color temperature or color rendering of their lamps. Most do not, and such terms as "daylight" or "natural light" do not necessarily indicate a specific color temperature. Sylvania's daylight bulbs have a temperature of 3500K, while other "daylight" lamps range up to 5000K. However, any lamp rated as an Energy Star product now has to disclose its color temperature. The Energy Star is awarded to only fluorescent bulbs that meet strict efficiency, quality, and lifetime criteria. Energy Star qualified fluorescent lighting uses 75% less energy and lasts up to ten times longer than normal incandescent lights.

Some manufacturers now label their CFLs with a 3 digit "light quality" code to indicate the color rendering and color temperature of the lamp. The first digit represents the rounded off CRI, while the second two digits indicate the color temperature. For example, a CFL with a CRI of 83 and a color temperature of 2,700 K would be given a light quality code of 827 — a warm light that has good color rendering. Fluorescent bulbs are up to 20 times more efficient than the simpler incandescent lamps. A newer, more compact design with a screw base intended to replace incandescent lamps (compact fluorescent lamps or "CFL"s) are 2-10 times more efficient, although 2-5 is more common in household models. Some 35 watt CFLs have the same light output as 150 watt incandescents.

Photo: Osram Sylvania CFL lamps The common spiral compact fluorescent bulb used in place of standard incan­des­cents. It has all the elements of a fluorescent lamp, including the long tube, which is wrapped in a spiral. The white bulge at the base of the lamp is the ballast. A fluorescent is a more complicated device than an incandescent lamp. It is basically an arc lamp inside a glass tube. Electrical current jumps from one electrode to the other through a mixture of argon gas that contains a tiny spec of mercury. The electricity vaporizes the atoms in the mercury forcing it to emit photons. Unfortunately these are in the ultraviolet range, and we cannot see them. So one more step is needed. The ultraviolet photons strike a phosphorus coating applied to the inside of the glass tube. The phosphorus absorbs the ultraviolet photons and releases protons in the visible spectrum that we can see. This is the "fluorescence" in fluorescent bulbs. The color or quality of the light emitted is controlled by the particular composition of the phosphorus applied to the tube.

Fluorescent lamps need a device called a "ballast" to provide the proper electrical input. Unlike the incandescent bulb, the electrical input to a fluorescent bulb is not constant. Electrons at rest prefer to stay that way. It takes a strong jolt of electricity to get them moving enough to arc. But once they are moving, they need very little electricity to keep moving. So the ballast has to produce a strong initial current to get the process started, then cut back slowly as the conductivity inside the bulb increases. Nor do they apply constant current. They work in pulses, sending current for a brief while, then turning it off, then back on, and so on.

The old electro-magnetic ballasts operated at 60 cycles per second - meaning that the lamp turned of and back on 60 times each second. Some people could see the resulting "flickering" and hear the high-pitched hum. A few people got headaches and nausea from it. The new electronic ballasts are a tremendous improvement. They operate at 24,000 CPS or higher and use less energy. There is no discernible flicker and no hum.

Fluorescent lamps do not "burn out" like incandescents. Over time they merely get dimmer, eventually losing as much as 30% of their light. Most people don't notice the change. What eventually fails in most fluorescents is the ballast. Once this is gone, the light simply will not work and requires replacement.

The unattractive "blue-ish" light associated with fluorescent lamps is pretty much a thing of the past (See Sidebar). "Daylight" or "natural" light fluorescents emit more light in the red-yellow range, emulating the warm look of familiar incandescent light. For most uses a light somewhere between warm incandescent and cool fluorescent is about right. For bathrooms and dressing rooms where makeup is applied, a cooler, natural daylight, color is generally preferred.

Halogen/Xenon Lamps
A Halogen lamp is not a different kind of lamp, it is merely another form of incandescent lamp. It has a tungsten filament just like a regular incandescent, but because the lamp operates at a very high temperature, the bulb is more Xenon-halogen bulb Xenon-Halogen mini-bulb often used in under-counter kitchen task lighting. durable quartz instead of glass. Instead of containing argon and nitrogen like a regular incandescent lamp, the bulb is typically filled with argon with a trace amount of bromine or iodine vapor. Bromine and iodine are elements from the halogen group of elements; — hence "quartz-halogen".

As is the case with a regular incandescent, the tungsten evaporates slowly whenever the lamp is in use, eventually depleting the tungsten to the point where it will no longer emit light. But the argon-halogen gas in a halogen lamp carries the evaporated tungsten particles back to the filament and re-deposits them. This gives the lamp a longer life than regular A-line incandescent lamps and ensures a cleaner bulb wall for light to shine through. Halogen lamps are slightly more efficient than regular incandescent lamps, but not greatly so. Their real advantage is in there longer rated life before burn-out, not in their efficiency.

Incandescent lamps burn for only about 1,000 hours and halogens last between 2,000 and 3,000 hours. Compare that to CFLs, which last 8,000 to 10,000 hours and full-size fluorescent lamps at about 20,000 hours.

The newest incarnation of the quartz lamp for household use is the xenon lamp. The hype surrounding Xenon bulbs suggests that they are a radical innovation in lighting technology. In fact they are merely a halogen-type lamp filled with xenon rather than argon gas. Developed originally for automobile headlights, The bulb has migrated into household low-voltage systems. Its advantages are that is burns cooler and produces a more even "whiter" light than regular halogen lamps. It is also quite a bit more costly, although prices have started to decline recently and will probably reach par with regular halogen lamps in 2010.

Light Emitting Diodes
Unlike "innovations" such as halogen and xenon bulbs, light emitting diodes are truly something new. They don't have a filaments to burn out. Instead, they produce light from one of the simplest of electronic semiconductors: a diode. A diode is a semiconductor composed of two different materials bonded together. Electrons flow from one material to the other, producing a current. This current results in the release of photons. All semiconducting materials produce photons, but in most semiconductors the electron jump is so short that the photon produced are at a frequency higher than we can see. Special materials, usually modified aluminum-gallium-arsenide (AlGaAs) are used for LEDs because they force the electrons to jump a larger gap so that the photons produced are in the visible spectrum. The gap can be tuned to produce different frequencies, and thus different colors of visible light. LED bulbs Light emitting diodes.

But this is not yet all of the story. In an ordinary diode, the semiconductor material itself ends up absorbing a lot of the light energy. LEDs are specially constructed to release a large number of photons outward and usually housed in a bulb that directs most of the light out of the tip of the bulb. You can see this directional effect in traffic signals that use LEDs. From head on the light is bright and clear. As you move to the side, however, the light becomes dimmer until at some point it cannot be seen at all.

The service life of LEDs is somewhat difficult to measure since it, more than for any other lighting technology, depends on environmental factors and design. Recently, however, manufacturers have begun rating their LEDs at about 70,000 hours — or 3 1/2 times the lifespan of a fluorescent tube. About 10 years of normal use. But again, this estimate may be difficult to interpret. An LED "bulb" is actually a cluster of dozens to hundred of LEDs. Some of these can "burn out" without much decrease in overall lighting. And even the term "burn out" is not accurate in describing an LED. LEDs slowly decrease in light output, but rarely reach zero light. The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) currently recommends considering an LED "burnt out" when it reaches 30% of its original light output.

Until recently, LEDs were too expensive to use for most lighting applications because they're built around very advanced semiconductor technology. The price of semiconductor devices has plummeted over the past decade, however, making LEDs a more cost-effective lighting option for a wider range of situations. You can use them for task lights, reading lamps, and night lights; in closets and for path-marking outdoor lighting. At some point, probably very soon, we are going to reach the point at which LEDs become comparable in price with CFLs and high efficiency incandescents. Already available in undercabinet light bars and pucks and as recessed ceiling lighting, LED lamps with a standard, Type-A, light socket have recently come on the market. But at $60.00 and higher per bulb, these are not yet price competitive with CFLs

Efficient Lighting Requires Precise Design
Efficient lighting starts with good design. The principals are fairly obvious: Light Up Task Areas
A task area is any place in a kitchen where work is done. The cleanup area around the sink, the cooking area surrounding the range, the countertop where food is prepared: these are all task areas. Task areas are best lit with bright (but not glaring), shadowless light from two or more light sources. This is usually done with a combination of general room lighting combined with focused undercabinet lighting. Fluorescent tubes are particularly well suited for undercabinet lighting because of their large surface area and high lumens per watt. We typically recommend flat T8 fluorescent lamps with electronic ballasts (or the flatter T5 lamps if the light valance is very narrow). These lamps are hidden up under the wall cabinets they are attached to, so the don't have to be pretty (which is a good thing, because they're not). Photo: Brilliant Lighting Task Lighting
Good design floods every surface of this kitchen with multiple sources of soft, shadowless light.

You want to get the fixture close to the task area, so the underside of the wall cabinets is where most designers put the lights. Where there are no upper cabinets, then there are two choices: projecting light from a ceiling mounted fixture, or using pendant lamps that hanging on long cords from the ceiling. Island lighting and lighting over the sink is often done this way. The key is to use soft, shadowless light and to direct the light so your body does not cast a shadow on the work area, to use soft. Making sure there is enough light is also critical. Lighting experts use special meters to measure the amount of light falling on the work surface and from this information have produced tables that tell us how much light we need to provide in each situation.

If buying a new fixture, choose one made specifically for a CFL. Almost all lighting manufacturers how make their lamps adaptable to CFLs. And even in fixtures not specifically designed for CFLs, a fluorescent bulb can now be found that will work. There are even dimable CFLs now, something unheard of as little as three years ago.

Since CFLs produce little heat, they are especially suitable for recessed fixtures. incandescent lamps produced so much heat that special recessed fixtures were needed for contact with insulation in the ceiling to prevent fires. CFLs don't produce nearly ass much heat, but most electrical codes have not caught up yet, so these special fixtures are still required.

Incandescent lamps are also suitable for task lighting — just more expensive to operate. Recessed incandescent lights above counters, usually in the form of halogen or xenon low-voltage lights, can provide good task light — especially if limited "spot" lighting is required. Many manufacturers make a line of low-voltage halogen lamps especially designed for this application. But, unlike the softer fluorescent lamps, these lights cast very hard shadows which make their placement critical to avoid eye strain and even headaches in some people. Photo: Forte-Electric.
Indirect or Cove Lighting Well-placed cove and under-cabinet lighting in this kitchen lighting design by Long Island's Forte-Electric not only provides shadowless illumination, but also makes the wall cabinets seem to float in space.

Ambient Light
The term "ambient lighting" is just lighting-engineer-speak for general room lighting. It is the overall light that fills in shadows, reduces contrast, and lights vertical surfaces to give the space a brighter feel. This background light is what you need for casual activities in the kitchen. If the kitchen has light colored surfaces and lots of windows you should have plenty of natural ambient light during the day. But kitchens are used from before dawn until after midnight -- we can't rely on windows and skylights.

Fluorescent tubes are well suited to the job of providing general room illumination or "ambient" light. They provide broad, even illumination and their efficiency makes it possible to fill the space with light without turning it into an oven in the Summer.

You can put the tubes in a central fixture but you may want to try some other approaches, like placing them on top of the upper cabinets to reflect light off the ceiling. This technique is called "cove lighting". If you have at least 12 inches of space from the top of the upper cabinets to the ceiling, this is an inexpensive way to brighten up a kitchen. But it works best if the kitchen cabinets are especially designed for cove lighting, including placing a reflective surface on the top of the cabinet. Another nice thing about cove lighting is that you can buy the cheapest fixture that works — it will never be seen. A fluorescent fixture so ugly that you wouldn't install it in your garage is perfect for cove lighting and costs about $15.00. Photo: Merillat Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge

Accent lighting is used to highlight special features, create lighting effects and provide visual depth.

Accent Lighting
Accent lighting is used to illuminate a key feature of the kitchen. This lighting gives your room a sense of depth and dimension, adding to the quality of the space. It is used very sparingly to emphasize those special home objects that you want people to notice and admire. You may be lighting artwork, architectural details, collectibles, or a food presentation area. Lights in glass-front cabinets used to store fine china, or lights in display alcoves are examples of accent lighting. To be completely effective, accent lighting should be 3-5 times brighter than the surrounding ambient light.

Photo: Kitchens by Design. Click to Enlarge
Click for More
 Night lights under the toe-kick clearly define the perimeter of the walk path in this small bath created by Kitchens by Design. For accent or small area lighting, use CFLs where possible and halogen/xenon lamps in preference to incandescent bulbs. Although more efficient than other incandescents, halogen lamps are still much less efficient than fluorescents. Their main advantage is a crisper, white light and better control over the light beam.

Night Lights Kitchens and baths should have a low-voltage standing light — a light that is constantly on at night. In most kitchens, the standing light is the fixture over the sink. A new option is a string of perimeter toe-kick lights.

The toe-kick is that recess under the front of the cabinet where your feet go when you are working at the cabinet. Low-voltage linear lighting systems in the toe-kick walking aread in your kitchen as well as "floating" the cabinets in a pool of light.

The design effect is dramatic, and because the perimeters of the kitchen are outlined in light, it is easy to find your way around without stubbing a toe. Toe-kick lights are typically rope lights (small halogen lamps enclosed in a transparent tube) often controlled by a motion sensor that turns the lights on when someone enters the room — but only at night. Like all electronic devices, the price of this sophisticated switching has plummeted in recent years, making it an affordable option for most homeowners. Sources Referenced
Digital Lumination™, a division of New Edison LLC, has been introducing new, LED technology to the market since its founding in 2004, and continues, according to company literature, to offer the most efficient, high quality LED lighting products available.

Kitchens by Design is recognized throughout New England as a premiere designer of quality custom cabinetry, innovative design and exceptional customer service. Offering a wide variety of custom cabinetry, Kitchens By Design offers several architectural features, wood finishes, door styles, hardware options and styles.

Brilliant Lighting is the web's only dedicated resource for monorail, cable and track lighting.

Forte-Electric is a residential and commercial electrician serving Long Island, New York since 1987. Visit this web site for extensive information on residential lighting and design aimed at the homeowner and do-it-yourself lighting designer.

Controlling The Lights
Wireless switch Wireless switch set to convert a single switch to a three-way switch. Cost when installed by an electrician, about $150.00. The same three-way switch hard wired, about $300.00, assuming it's possible at all. Imagine that you had only one light switch for the whole house. That would force you to use too much light in the wrong places. Good lighting controls allow you to put the right amount of light in the right places and turn off unneeded lights without affecting lighting actually in use. Today there are central electronic control panels that allow you to switch lights on an off throughout the house base on time of day, the amount of sunlight, and how the rooms are being used at the moment. For most of us, this is a little too much switch, but they are available.

Lighting control is now easter than ever with new wireless switches. Wireless switches use technology similar to garage door openers. The switch sends a radio signal up to 50 feet to tell a specific light to turn off or on. Wireless switch central controls can be used in place of wired switches to handle all of the switches in a house — lights, fans, appliances, and security. In an age when copper wire is becoming a rare metal, wireless operation is becoming a more cost effective option — especially in remodels. Wireless switches can save money in remodeling because they require no wires to the switch, no demolition, no patching and no re-painting. Most remote switches are powered by batteries, but some use energy harvesting instead of batteries. The act of throwing the switch creates enough energy to send a radio signal to the receiver.

Dimmer switches reduce light output and energy use. Older CFLs did not dim, but there are now CFLs for use in dimming circuits. They are more expensive than standard CFLs, but they are available.

Simple on/off switches can help save energy if fixtures are divided into separately switched task areas. For example, the counter, island, range and sink should each have a separate switch.


Are you ready for your own dream kitchen?

We can build one just right for your budget. Contact usE-mail us at design@starcraftcustombuilders.com and let's get started.






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