The eye distinguishes visual information in the following order: form, contrast, color. Without the proper levels of illumination and color rendition your eyes simply can not do their job.

The consequences of poor lighting can be amusing ; such as trying to find your car in a parking lot lit by yellowish-mercury-vapor-lights which dulls the color of your car… or troubling when the lack of light finds the viewer using the figure “8” mistakenly for a “3”. Headaches, squinting, eye soreness and fatigue are frequent symptoms of inadequate lighting.

One intuitively knows you require different levels of lighting for fine, detailed work like sewing as opposed to walking the dog. The levels of light are measured in footcandles. Sewing would be a task usually requiring about 100 footcandles, while walking the dog on the street typically needing about 2 footcandles.

Add to these issues, new energy codes that dictate more restrictive power consumption- and one can have a real “situation”. Fortunately, advances in lamp technology have had an enormous impact on energy use and cost savings. While some lower wattage incandescent lamps are still being manufactured, they are in fact being phased out in the next 2 years. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) and Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps have a higher initial cost, but over the long run save significant money (in energy saving) and inconvenience (shopping and re-lamping the fixtures)

cfl incandescent led