LEDs are bright, energy efficient, and provide additional capabilities that you may not find with a traditional light bulb. Whether you’re looking for maximum brightness in the dark rooms of your home or want a light source that can be programmed to dim on your schedule, we’ve found the best LED bulbs for long-term use, offering warm whites and cool whites. And even multiple colors.
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So how do you choose the right LED lights for the job, especially when there are so many of them out there? Energy saving LED lights Shelves lining? The answer depends on the amount of time you use the light in a given room. For example, if you are a foodie and spend most of your free time in the kitchen, you will need a brighter, more intense light. Or maybe you can calm down and relax in your bedroom, where there is more Intimate and warm lighting is the key. With these ideas in mind, you’ll be able to narrow down the options that best suit your lighting needs.
If you’re still not sure what to choose, here are some room-specific tips to help you zero in on the right LED lights for your living space. I’ve also included links so you can easily purchase light bulbs from our tests. I’ll keep them updated as I test new products.
If you have high ceilings, you will want spotlights that shine beautifully and brightly in one direction.
Too much height? Make it super bright
If you have rooms with high ceilings or recessed lighting — a hallway, for example, or perhaps a staircase with overhead lights or sconces above — you’ll need to prioritize brightness over softness in your light fixtures. After all, the louder your light bulbs are, the brighter they need to be to light up a room.
The most popular products for overhead lighting are BR30 shaped spotlights. The “BR” stands for “bulged reflector,” and means that the light inside the bulb falls above a reflective bowl, like a small satellite dish. Screw a bulb like this into your ceiling, and this receptacle will capture all the light cast upward, then reflect it down and out from below, which then bulges outward to produce the widest possible array of bright light across the room. It’s the same trick Your car’s headlights Use it to produce as much light in front of you as possible while driving.
You get a lot of energy savings in the form of the BR30 He drove Options in corridor lighting. The most popular option among them is 65-watt replacement bulbs which typically produce around 650 lumens of light each. This is a good, average number, good for medium-height ceilings with at least a few bright bulbs. Of the bulbs I tested, the 65-watt replacement floodlights from Cree and Philips are the two I recommend. They’re good values and very energy efficient for the money (each consumes less than 10 watts). These dimmable bulbs also work well with dimmer switches and – most importantly for overhead lighting – they’re nice and bright, each comfortably emitting over 700 lumens. As of this writing, Home Depot offers Cree bulbs for sale in A Two packages for less than $6 each — They’re the people I’d go with in my house if I were the one buying it.
Watch this: The coolest smart alternative lighting fixtures
Blackout means versatility for your living room and bedroom
Some rooms serve only one or two primary functions, but other rooms are used in different ways. For example, you can use your living room to watch TV, read books, play board games with the kids, or any other number of activities. Rooms like this can really benefit from high-quality lights that can adapt to whatever’s going on.
The old-fashioned way to do this is to use a mix of different lamps and fixtures that serve different purposes — a reading lamp next to your favorite chair, overhead lights at night for board games, everything off when you’re watching a movie, and soon. This is all well and good, but it limits you to a binary “on/off” lighting mentality.
The best approach? Give yourself a full range of lighting possibilities by making sure all of those lights are dimmable.
Upgrading your light switches to dimmer switches is one way to do this (and it’s not nearly as scary as you might think if you’ve never switched them before). There are also smart plugs from brands like Lutron that allow you to dim your fixtures and bulbs up and down. However, the easiest way is to simply replace your bulbs with dimmable bulbs Smart bulbs. that it A great time to do this – Costs have come down a lot in recent years, and the advent of voice controls has given people a quick and easy way to switch to whatever brighter setting they want, whenever they want.
Best of all, almost every smart bulb on the market is dimmable without flickering or buzzing, eliminating the common headache that comes with an in-wall dimmer switch. This also makes smart bulbs quality choices for bedrooms, with strong dimming performance and things like that Pre-scheduled wake-up fades out It can do wonders for your mood in the morning.
Philips Hue has a reputation for being expensive, but its dim white-light smart LED bulbs cost just $15 each, and you can get a kit with three bulbs and the Philips Hue bridge that acts as the brains of the system for about $60. From there, you can grab an additional bulb when it goes on sale, gradually building up your network of connected bulbs.
We love the Philips Hue smart light bulb because Advanced application For remote access, and Robust selection of lamps, fixtures and accessories You can add them to your setup, and Good record of support. With the Hue Bridge, your lights will work with Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant for quick, voice-activated lighting changes. Next time you’re watching a movie and want the lights to be dim, but not completely off, you can just ask the assistant of your choice to “dim the living room lights to 5%.”
On the left, a bowl of M&Ms is illuminated by standard GE bulbs. On the right, the same bowl is lit by a GE Reveal LED, which does a much better job of making the colors look vivid and true.
Think about the colors in your kitchen and cabinetry
I’m not talking about color-changing smart lights (although if you want to liven up your home with them, Don’t let me stop you). No, I’m talking about the colors you already have in your home — the artwork, the furniture, the clothes in your closet, the fruits and vegetables in your home. kitchenyou name it.
Whatever it is, if he’s colorful, he’ll benefit from light bulbs with high color rendering ratings — bulbs that boost the color temperature and help colors appear at their best. This isn’t always the easiest thing to shop for, as manufacturers aren’t required to list their color rendering scores on the packaging, as brightness and efficiency specifications are. Some bulbs that claim to emit brilliant colors are actually pretty ordinary.
My LED lighting advice: Just stick with GE Reveal bulbs, because after about six years of reviewing light bulbs for CNET, I’ve yet to test one that hasn’t lived up to its promise of better-looking colors. This includes standard 60-watt replacement LED bulbs, spotlights, oddball stick-shaped LEDs, dimmable LED bulbs and more. A set of 4 regular A-frame lights (linked below) currently costs $14 at Lowe’s.
They tend to cost a little more per bulb, and most are a little less bright than a regular LED light because they filter out some of the excess yellow light for a better color temperature — but these compromises are worth it if you’re using them for accent lighting or to illuminate areas in your home where they’ll appreciate Accurate colors that look better day after day.
And that’s really the point – despite regularly taking it for granted, we use light bulbs more than anything else in our homes. They’re often the first things we turn on in the morning and the last things we turn off before going to bed. So, don’t let the lighting aisle overwhelm you — whether you choose an energy-efficient light bulb, a CFL bulb, or Smart LED bulb Or even a regular incandescent bulb, finding the right light for every room in your home is worth it, and much easier than you might think.
More light bulb guides
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