LED lights make me look bad.

This article was first published in print and online in the Skaha Matters Newsletter.

During a bad phase in energy efficiency, I would walk into a low budget hotel and flick the switch This resulted in a flicker of weird florescent light from a compact florescent (CF) bulb. The colour of the light actually made the room feel unwelcoming. Today we are much better off. We have LED bulbs that use 75% less energy than CF and last 25 times longer.

However, sometimes I come home with my new LED, screw it in, and don’t like the light. It reminds me of the florescent fixtures in classrooms in my childhood. It isn’t as bad as the hotel CF zombie illumination, but I’m still not happy with it.

There are LED bulbs that would make me happy, by giving me that warm glow. How did I get the wrong one? I was misled by the label on the box. Faced with a larger number of choices I saw one that said “Daylight” and thought of the warm summer sun and grabbed it.

Why did I get the wrong colour?

When it comes to interior decorating, “warm” colours have a red-yellow tint. Blue is a “cool” colour. Anyone who has ever cooked with gas knows that this is backwards – the red-yellow flames on a gas stove are for cooking slowly. If you want “blackened” you turn the gas higher, for a hotter blue-white flame. So colour (marked on the box with a K) is backwards from interior decorating.

The second problem is that Daylight is much more blue than we expect. We like candles, we like lots of window, but when your light bulb matches the window light it the wrong colour for the living room. “Bluer “ bulbs actually produce a more accurate light. Think of putting a red-tinted bulb in an overhead fixture. Everything in the room will look red and you won’t be able to detect the difference between green and blue socks.

So how to come home with the correct bulb? Colour temperatures of 2000-3000 K are the candle and campfire “warm” that interior decorators are looking for. Colour temperature in the 4000K range are “bright light/cool white” – good for bathrooms, kitchens and workspaces. Colour temperatures 5000 and above, “Daylight”, are only used for shop floors and jewelry display cases.


This article by Kristy Dyer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License You can reprint it for free, as-is.